Was anyone a little bit miffed with last Sunday’s double bill of 24? The Skyone show, which has been showing a double bill on Sundays for the last two weeks (and this week too), threw me off guard with the number of dramatic moments it had to offer. Some were appreciated whilst others i thought were a tad “off”.

Firstly (and this is the big spoiler) the terrorists managed to set off a Suitcase nuke. I thought this worked well. The terrorists rarely have such a dramatic “win” before. Its normally a small about of people who die, perhaps in the low hundreds, this time they’ve upped the ante to a few thousand. It made for good drama which will hopefully push the series along.

The second rather big event of the episodes was the death of agent Curtis at the hands of Jack. Now i can understand why Jack had to shoot Curtis but to me it seemed a little unbeliveable that Curtis would put himself in that position. What i didn’t like is how the character had to die in the way he did (being shot to save a valuable source). I did not like it one bit. It may have been sudden and dramatic but it didn’t feel right.

So the thousands that died from the nuke seemed “alright” whilst the death of one man just felt wrong as though the writers just did it to shock the viewers. Some TV deaths work, some clearly don’t…

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, LG have announced their answer to the Blue-Ray/HD-DVD war. The LG Super Multi Blue Player is expected to retail for $1200 and can play both Blue-Ray and HD DVD discs allowing you to take advantage of both High Definition formats.

When the player launches in the US in the first quarter of 2007 it will be the first of its kind. As well as playing the HD discs the player has a number of useful features such as offering HDMI, component and composite outputs as well as optical, coaxial, and discrete 5.1 audio outputs.

Reference for posting: PRNewswire

consumer electronics show, hdmi, hd dvd

Sky has rolled out an update to it’s high definition set top boxes. The idea of the upgrade to the existing software, is to provide a fix for some of the current bugs in the software. Some of the updates include the following (taken form Digital Spy UK).

Fast Forward & Rewind: We have made improvements to the way that FFWD and REW work and you will now find: - that the box is more responsive to the FFWD and REW buttons - that x30 is now faster however this may mean that when you press play the programme being fast forwarded starts 15 seconds later than expected.

Tags: Sky HD

avinfo.co.uk writes on the subscription base SKY has for his HD service, they note "the satellite broadcaster said that 38,000 people had HD installed by the end of June, and that it expects to have the 90,000 bookings equipped by this coming September. Sky currently claims to have the broadest range of HD programming, including high definition versions of Sky Sports, Sky One, Sky Box Office, Sky Movies, National Geographic, Discovery and Artsworld." (more…)

SKY HD is now available in Ireland, so here is what you need to know!
WHAT DOES SKY HD DO?

• HD gets you closer to what’s going on. The quality of the picture is much clearer. A TV picture is made up of pixels, the more pixels, the better quality of the on screen image, with HD you can see what a normal TV picture would miss.
• SKY+ : SKY HD has built in sky plus features
• Most HD channels also broadcast in Dolby 5.1 sound.

HOW MUCH?

• A Sky HD box will set you back 499 euro
• Subscription: A Sky HD subcription costs 15 euro per month
• You will also need a SKY+ subcription, which is an additional 15 euro per month, but free if you have two or more premium channels i.e Movies 1 & 2 or Sports 1 & 2 or one from each (one from movies and one form sports)
• A HD Television, otherwise the system is pretty pointless.

HD CHANNELS

• Channel 405
• Channel 311/312
• Channel 197
• Channel 168
• Channel 525
• Channel 756/757

dolby 5 1, hd television