You've seen the adverts on TV and on the Internet we are in the middle of a home entertainment revolution. Games consoles are at the forefront of how we are going to consume movies and TV shows in our living rooms, no longer will we have to watch digitally available content in front of our PC screens. Multi media consoles such as the Xbox 360 and the PS3 will revolutionise this experience they are  marketed as being the centre of your entertainment universe.

Are they? Well lets take my Friday night experience into account. Having survived the week, treated ourselves to takeaway and and collapsing on the sofa in front of our TV talking about how exhausting the week had been. We decided it would be nice to watch a film, I pick up the Sky Plus remote control and press the box office button 2 minutes before 8pm. The laboriously slow menu system on the Sky Plus box isn't very forthcoming on the entertainment it has to offer me tonight as it sluggishly provides very poor information on each film. We as usual look up the films available on www.imdb.com to see if they are any good using one of our laptops, and as usual there's not much that grabs us. Next I decide to fire up the PS3 as I've heard someone mention there are some new entertainment features available and I might be able to start downloading or streaming films. On firing up the PS3 I realise I need to plug the HDMI cable in as it was used earlier for my PC. I'm then presented with a hard disk corruption message and told the system will attempt to restore the hard disk corrupted sectors. The task succeeds but I'm presented with a message telling me that I will need to run a System update. I ignore the message click on the Playstation store icon and am told before I can proceed I must do a system update. Fine I'll do the system update, I set the PS3 to do a system update and decide while I am waiting I may as well fire up the Xbox 360 to see if there is anything in Zune or Sky Player.

I log into my Xbox 360 and enter the Zune store. But there's not that much new content in the Zune store, the majority of the content is old films and there are not many of them. The newer films that have been released such as the new Star Trek film and Moon are not available. I like the idea of Zune because it enables me to stream content instead of having to wait for a large movie to download. Having not found anything I want to watch there I checkout Sky Player. There's a lot of movies here but unfortunately I need to subscribe to the movie channels on my Sky Movie package before I can get any of these movies on demand. I already have a multi room subscription and I have a package that includes the entertainment and documentary channels. Having multi room enables me to use the Sky Player on my Xbox 360, I had kept multi-room because I had been locked in a contract on it from my previous home and had planned on cancelling it and taking the movie channels but this means I couldn't use Sky Player on my Xbox 360. What a dilemma! I can't even watch Sky Movies on the Xbox 360 on Pay per view because its on my Sky account. I shake my head and wonder how the PS3 is doing, it looks as though the update failed something about a server connection problem. So I decide to fire up the Mac Mini connected to my TV and look at the iTunes movie store. It also requires an update so I get that running and am eventually able to browse the store and find the film I wanted to watch Star Trek! I set the Mac up to download it. Apparently its going to take an hour.great. We decide to play Rockband on the Xbox 360 while we wait. After 40 minutes the film has download and I get it to play on the Mac through the RGB cable on my TV. The quality I must say wasn't stunning, for some reason films still have the "letterbox" view even on wide screen TV's. Why? The letterbox view is a lot narrower than usual and you can tell by the full screen mode that pixels are slightly stretched every now and again the action scenes give this away. I probably wouldn't have noticed this if I had watched it on my laptop screen, which I kind of feel seems to have been he target of this format. What family watches films on their laptop or PC screens together?

So what's the problem? Well there is no doubt that services are now available for watching shows on demand through your TV. I have a Sky Plus box, Xbox 360, Wii, PS3 and Mac all connected to my TV. The problem is the Xbox 360 may provide a streaming high quality service which is brilliant for watching content on demand when you want it, but it lacks the content in Zune. The iTunes store has the content but it can't be streamed you have to download it and that's just as bad as having to wait for a film to come on at the right time on Sky Box Office. Besides the quality of the content on the iTunes store isn't as good, maybe I would have a better experience if I had bought the Apple TV box? (more money to spend and yet another box). The Sky Player service on the Xbox is prohibitively expensive, Sky appear to treat Sky Player content as though you were a completely new Sky TV subscriber. It doesn't work on the idea that you are a Sky TV subscriber already and just want another way of watching the same content on demand. It basically gives you that ability but it charges you for it in the way of multi room subscriptions.

What about the PS3? Well I eventually got the PS3 update to work and discovered it had a movie section which seemed to have the same content as the iTunes store. Great news I suppose, but it appears this content is not streamed content but has to be downloaded. Not so good..

Buying content to own is also another dilemma, what format do you purchase the content for? If I purchase the film on my PS3 I won't be able to play it on my Mac or my Xbox 360. I'm not a pirate all I want is the ability to play the media I bought on what ever platform I choose. Unfortunately content providers don't really understand or are unwilling to let their content be available on multiple channels even if it is watched by the same person who purchased it to begin with. Rights for content is distributed by channel not by who purchased the content to begin with. I believe we are going to face a big issue unless just like DVD and Blu-Ray, the industry comes up with a standard for the delivery of the same content across multiple platforms digitally.

The reason I signed up for the Xbox 360 version of Sky Player, was mainly because I was annoyed having to plug a laptop into my TV to watch missed episodes of shows from Sky One. I had naturally thought that any content that was available on the PC version of Sky Player would be available on the Xbox version of Sky Player right? No!

It looks as though Sky has to obtain separate broadcasting rights to broadcast most of the Sky One content on the Xbox version of their Sky Player service. It kind of makes you realise just how much production companies tie down their content. To me using Sky Player from an Xbox compared to a PC makes absolutely no difference its just a question of convenience to me. The only difference to me is one is mainly connected to my TV and the other isn't. To production companies it makes a big difference to them, there appears to be a distinction between providing the same content on a TV set as apposed to on a device that is not connected to a TV. Apparently this distinction is very important to production companies when it comes to revenues they can sell the online rights to one company for a region and the TV rights to another. In my case it looks as though Sky hasn't yet obtained those rights for the Xbox Sky Player. Its a shame there is such a distinction between the two, it can at times be infuriating when all you want to do is watch a show you missed on your TV screen instead of your PC screen.

 

Email from Sky below

 

Dear Mr Street Thank you for contacting Sky Help Centre. Unfortunately at this moment in time you will be unable to access Sky 1 content on the Xbox. The reason behind this is that we do not have the broadcasting rights to show this content on the Xbox as yet. We will be able to broadcast this sometime in the future however we cannot put a timescale as to when this will be. I apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause you. Kind regards [name censored] Sky Help Centre

I finally managed to get onto Skyplayer for the Xbox 360 today after a few hiccups with the service yesterday was keen to see how good it was. Having used the Skyplayer service from my PC for many months now I was expecting Skyplayer for Xbox 360 to be almost identical when it came to content. Being an existing Sky Subscriber and Xbox gold member I was able to get access without to much problem, however I did start adding up the costs in my head as I used the service (more about this later).

Anyone who is not a SkyPlayer user or a Sky Subscriber will instantly fall in love with the service if you are a regular Sky subscriber its basically a limited Sky box with on demand content. It gives you 24 channels to watch live however none of these channels are any of the channels I would normally watch on Sky and was a bit disappointed they didn't stream Sky 1 and Sky 2 on there. If you are not a Sky subscriber the service will cost you £38 a year for an Xbox gold membership and then for the basic Sky package £15 a month or £32 a month for the full package. Its a bit expensive in my book, because getting a traditional Sky box with satellite dish for a £32 a month subscription gives you a hell of lot more including channels such as FX, Sky 1, Sky 2, Virgin 1 etc. If you are a Sky Subscriber but don't have Sky Broadband or a multi room subscription it appears you won't get much of the live content. Luckily for me I have a Sky Multi room subscription.

My main usage for the SkyPlayer Xbox 360 service was to catch-up on shows I missed on Sky, such as Lie to me and NCIS: Los Angeles because my Sky+ box is very selective on what it actually chooses to record these days. So I scrolled through the menus using my Xbox controller to the Sky 1 on demand section only to find it only had two categories "Reality TV" and "Chat Shows" what!? Maybe they had removed them? So I logged into the PC version of Sky Player to see if I got anything different. Sure enough I got all of the other categories under Sky 1 on demand "Reality TV", "Chat Shows", Action, SC-FI and Drama. Why hadn't Sky made these available on the Xbox version of Sky Player? Maybe it was something to do with what machine was considered the master? But there was no way to make the Xbox master.

Then after a while the service started to fail on the Xbox, I decided to check it on the PC and I got the following error in my browser.

 

Service Unavailable - DNS failure

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.

 

Had Sky miscalculated how much bandwidth they would need? Surely not? The BBC iPlayer is incredibly popular and I have never seen it suffer such performance issues before how could Sky? I am sure they would have taken all of this into account. I must say its quite disappointing In the states services like Hulu seem to run okay and they are served via the Xbox, what could possibly have gone wrong?

It seems as though today's highly anticipated Sky Player service for the Xbox 360 got off to a bit of a shaky start. It launched at 10am this morning with some good early indications, but by time I had got home to try the service on my Xbox it was displaying an advert on Xbox Live stating it was coming later today, the advert eventually disappeared. So what happened?

Well it appears according to Neowin some users were suffering issues streaming content. Microsoft have taken down the service because of "an unforeseen technical issue"  and it appears the decision was made to protect the quality of service for all customers. According to an article on Digital Spy it was a problem caused by the streaming coming from the Sky Servers which was affecting the whole Sky Player platform.

Unless you've been living under a rock somewhere, you've probably heard of Google Sidewiki already. The latest add-on to Googles' toolbar that enables you to comment on any webpage you visit. Any comments you make are shared with the rest of the world and that's probably where the problem begins, Google's toolbar is probably one of the most popular toolbars in the world. Almost everyone I know has it installed so they can see the Google Page Rank of pages or to use some of the other features it gives such as enhanced in page searching. Naturally everyone who uses the Page Rank is now able to see the Sidewiki as though it was a part of every website you visit. A part of a website that the website owner has no direct control over.creepy?

My first example of this was going onto CNN's website and seeing a comment on Google Sidewiki saying they preferred the BBC. The comment has now been removed, which seemed to happen quite swiftly after I tweeted about it. Google provide a content policy guide on Swidewiki, however I have been unable to find anything on on what to do about inappropriate content posted about your site on Sidewiki if you are the website owner. Take this one step further imagine an online retailer who has comments posted by one disgruntled customer on how they would never use them again. That one entry would probably cost that business heavily in income, even if there was truth to what was being said all online retailers have bad experiences every now and again where they were unable to help the customer or one fell through their customer service web. But saying that Sidewiki could also be a force for good, imagine someone being conned by a fake website setup to sell fake goods? What would be a better way of informing people, than by writing a note on Google Sidewiki?

Those were the harrowing words I read in today's Evening Standard in an article about the French police clearing the "Jungle" camp near Calais. Those words hammered home just how desperate migrants are to get into the UK. This immediately got me thinking why don't they want to stay in France instead of the UK? Or any of the other countries on their way to the UK?

Having watched UK Borderforce a show on Sky 1 that follows immigration offices catching illegal immigrants or stopping them before they come into the UK at Calais. The reasons they give for coming to the UK are quite interesting, some of them are

• Coming to the UK for free education
• Some believe they will get free housing
• Free health care
• To marry someone in the UK and raise a family
• To join family (sometimes distant) already in the UK

But why don't they do these thing in France? Well some of the reasons range from France not being as soft a touch as the UK, the immigrants speak English and therefore naturally want to settle in the UK. Another interesting fact is that the French do have a problem with immigration but these are from ex French colonies where people generally speak French as a second language, they know how the systems work in France and take advantage of it as people who know the system in the UK.

Deporting illegal immigrants is difficult many of them know that as long as they don't carry a passport its practically impossible for them to be deported, however they are not allowed to work. Its a catch situation which the government sought to solve with biometric id cards. The idea is to receive the benefits of "Club Britain" you need a membership card that entitles you to all the club has to offer. Because of wide spread outrage at the id card scheme the government decided to reverse the trend giving immigrants biometric id cards. Even if they did lose the cards their biometric information makes them identifiable to the system once again, hence making them deportable once they had over stayed their welcome.

It seems a vast majority of illegal immigrant based on the above appear to be economic migrants, they are after the ideal life, a better standard of living and a shield against poverty. Reducing this trend can only be done by not making services in the UK as accessible but most importantly helping to improve conditions in countries most illegal immigrants come from. You now start entering a fight against world poverty and we know just how successful that has been in the developing world. What if the old colonial powers started colonising parts of Africa again taking over war torn countries without governments and started making safe haven countries for immigrants, with economic havens, well conditioned and more free from corruption, building these countries up again and then calling elections for them to be handed to a locally formed government. Could it work?

Just seen an article in the Evening Standard where Organic food was considered no healthier than normally grown food by the Foods standards agency. I thought the whole point of organic food was not to have food riddled with potential pesticides and free of being GM. Surely that is healtheir than food that has been grown using pesticides?

Dear blog I am so sorry I have neglected to post anything. I have been rather busy moving home but now that thing are settling down. I promise to post more frequently. Rory