James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

Okay, Freeview (the group that represents all of the major Free to Air Networks, including commercial and government owned) has announced that it's going to be launching a new Electronic Programme Guide service in June, complete with new hardware and something they are calling an Online Catchup Service.

Apart from the Online Catchup Service (which I will be talking about shortly) the biggest selling point that Freeview seems to be pushing for this new service is the ability to record based not only on time blocks, but by genre and programme as well.

This is what 250 million dollars buys you these days?

From the article and the reading around that I've done, it appears that the Free To Air Television industry (somewhat bizzarley aided by the ABC, an organisation that has proven time and again that it knows where the future lies) has decided that the best way to tackle the threat of extinction is to re-arrange the deck chairs on the titanic. People have had the ability to record programmes based on genre and programme titles, episode titles and so on for a few years now. If they haven't been building their own PVR's via projects like MythTV (my personal favourite), they've been using off the shelf solutions such as TiVO. It's not new people, it's old and people have been doing it for a long time now.

Hell I was there when digital came to a certain regional television network, I helped setup their first EPG generator and I can tell you that the Standard of the day, derived from the European DVB-T EPG stuff required genre information to be sent out.

Oh yes, there is something new about this particular EPG service. It's not going to be standard. In order for you to take advantage of it and the attached "Online Catchup Service", you are going to need to buy new hardware. Your set top box isn't going to be able to use any of the new features, and certainly your plasma/led/lcd tv with built in HD tuner isn't going to be able to utilise the new features being offered. Nope, you're going to have to go out and spend another couple of hundred bucks so that you can make sure you don't miss that 6 month old episode of Big Bang Theory or which ever is your Television poison.

Re the "Online Catchup Service" that appears to be a service that allows you to catchup with programmes that you've missed, online. Though I'm not quite sure if you're going to need to "catchup" given that you're going to have teh cool new "recording by genre and programme" features of the new EPG Service.

Sigh.