THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS

These are a few of my favourite things….

In the UK there is a great deal of confusion and rubbish talked about High Definition television. This is one of those areas of technology where Asia and America are ahead and seem not to suffer the same kind of pain and anguish.

In the States, where you know I spend a great deal of time, they have programming made available by broadcasters, free of charge, to those users who have sets ready for HD.

Not so in the UK. The first broadcasters about to launch this service is Sky, part owned and controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s mighty News Corporation, that also owns some other little bits and pieces like Fox TV, and Twentieth Century Fox etc. Sky are about to launch a set top box to enable “HD Ready” sets to show their broadcasts in HD, well sort of HD, which I shall explain later.

The point is that they seem intent on charging £10 per month (about $17) per set up in the UK for this service, yes, the same service that in America our cousins across the pond get for free!

To make matters even worse this is not even full High Definition television. The sets on sale in the UK are HD ready, and this apparently means that they are able to show about one million pixels on the screen. This is a whole lot better than they are presently, but actually about half of what true HD is, which is about two million pixels. Do you think Sky might decide to charge us just £5?

While I am having a gripe I want to add that Skype, the best voice over internet protocol that I have experienced is not understood by many people. A couple of facts I want to help spread around whilst promising you I have no shares in that company.

Anyone can download Skype onto either their PC or Mac for free.

You can then make free calls to other Skype users, and there are many millions of them.

You can “ring” non Skype users on any phone anywhere in the World for the price of a local call.

Why aren’t you already on Skype?