Do you like how my titles never make any sense?

Received an invite to Hulu the other day. Hulu is NBC/Universals answer to iTunes TV Shows service, which brings obvious questions such as did NBC pull out of iTunes because of a pricing dispute with Apple or because they already had their own service planned (because you sure as hell don’t code up a video platform this quick.)

Any poop, there were hints abound that this service wasn’t going to be US only, but hey guess what? It IS!

Which is an absolute insult and I’ll tell you why. Apple offered NBC and the like a way to get a global distribution. A little while before they pulled out, Apple had gotten TV Shows into Europe, so shows like Heroes and The Office could be downloaded in the UK. But now they can’t in any way shape or form because NBC want to go it alone but can’t be arsed to negotiate distribution and rights in Europe.

So due to greed the world (except US… the world is always except US) misses out.

Also, good luck finding a legal way to watch the office on a portable device now.

I kinda hate patriotism…

I look forward to a time when we are a global village. But I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of pride when playing with the Everybody Hurts… I mean Votes channel on the ol’ Wii tonight.  The results have come in for “Is the TV you are watching now a wide screen TV?” and heading the Yes’s by region is the UK by quite a margin!  Crazy.  Lord knows how that happened.  The US is quite a bit down the list.  Dunno why I singled them out…

Trouble with losing access to your blog for a week is that you completely lose the will to live.  Um, i mean the will to blog.

So i’ve neglected to mention the fun with the TV and the 360, i’ll probably talk about that next and describe it as if I’ve only just unpacked them.

Whilst it’s just happened i’ll skip forward and berate a cable i’ve just received.  It’s this XCM component cable introduced to me by gizmodo. I want something like this because my TV only has 1 set of component connections, and I have both a 360 and a wii wanting to get at them.  I was originally going to connect the 360 to the VGA port to leave the component for the Wii, but that ended up a no go, I found the VGA picture less viberent, and it turned out that my TV doesn’t treat the VGA input to its image “enhancement ” filters.  So as seen as giz had mentioned this component switch i figured it would be OK, but sadly the picture from the 360 through it just doesn’t look as sharp as with the original microsoft one.  You can see some ghosting and if you look really close at the image you can even make out a little static buzzing around.

With the 360 being more deserving of the component connector than the Wii I really don’t want to stifle it’s image quality for the sake of only a minor improvement Wii wise.  So I guess it’s back to composite for the Wii, poor thing.

There are other, more pro looking switches for component, but they can cost upwards of 70 quid.  And then there are other cheapo ones that look a little on the unbranded side, i wager they will looks just as bad as this one.

Hmm, hope i can get a refund on this cable.  Damn, maybe I should have waited for the xbox 360 elite and the next version of my TV which will have 2 HDMI’s.

Susan has gone crazy, she’s now jumping up and down, screaming at the TV for being all tied to silly content providers.

Unlike a lot of people in the UK we get our TV via cable. I stress unlike, because from what i’ve always gathered, cable TV is a lot more prevalent in the US than it is here. Over here the 1 satellite carrier (sky, owned by rupert murdoch) is by far the biggest provider of “pay tv”.

But yeah, many years ago our pavements around here in sheffield were dug up and cables strewn underneath them and we ended up signing up to “Yorkshire Cable”, mainly I think, because my folks didn’t like the idea of having a satellite dish on the side of the house.. Some time afterwards Yorkshire Cable became Telewest. And now, just this month has become “Virgin Media”. It’s a merger of NTL and Telewest, who between them took over Virgin Mobile, for no other reason than to be able to market themselves under the Virgin brand. We’ve ended up with a TV service with one heck of an identity crisis.

Actually there’s more than just TV, we get from cable both phone and broadband too. Virgin have overhauled their tarrifs, naming them all after clothes sizes. ‘Cept, the actual meat of these tarrifs are sod all different from what we were getting from Telewest. They’ve been going around shouting about how its a brand new company with bold new ideas. Yeah right.

Today the funniest thing happened. Carreige rights for Virgin Media to show Sky’s general entertainment and news channels are due to expire next month so they have been in negotiation. Sky have been asking Virgin Media for double the price per customer for their channels and Virgin have declined. This now means that come next month we as virgin media customers will no longer be able to watch “Sky One”, once the hallmark of the multi-channel age.

But sheesh, soooo freaking what!! It’s one of the laziest waste of space TV channels around! Not a single piece of original programming, just american imports, which us with broadband can watch at will anyway.

So I say, good on you Virgin Media. You may not be offering us anything new, but out with bad rubbish is a good start.

This is their statement about the whole ordeal. Quite an oddity, because earlier today it was a standard texture page, now all the text is a bitmap for god knows what reason.

What has happened to Shameless? For the last few years it has been by far my favourite show on TV, including those of other countries. The first season was genius, in fact it could even be said to be pioneering, certainly daring and innovative. It was the first comedy/drama for many years to have a real feeling of life to it. The second series wasn’t in the first class as the original and they seemed to be stretching things a little too thinly, but i didn’t mind too much because it was still fantastic and pissed on anything else. But we’re 3 episodes in the 3rd season and it’s all just gone horribly horribly wrong. First thing that was whaaa? was the fact that they’ve done a coronation street on us, they’ve changed the actor who plays the youngest of the family, Liam expecting us not to notice. I just hate it so much when they do that, I would prefer them to kill the character off than change actors, what do they say? Suspension of dis-belief? Secondly, as the first extended episode played out I started to get worried, I had forgotten that fiona had left at the end of the second season, but then I just figured she’d gone for a holiday or something but as the episode’s have gone by it seems as though she’s left for good. Her character was the glue that bound the characters and the plots together and without her it feels like the whole thing is falling apart. In fact all 3 episodes so far have seemed like a random mess, with plots flying off in all directions and with no point to them. Plus the show’s creator, Paul Abbot hasn’t written any of the episodes that have aired so far. Are channel 4 not paying ppl enough? Stop messing with my favourite show! Ugh, I don’t think i’ve ever felt this upset about a show before.