June, 2009 Archive

This evening, ESPN America has started broadcastoing on Freeview channel 34, the slot taken by Setanta Sports until its collapse yesterday. It seems that ESPN America is being transmitted by Top Up TV, and anyone with a Top Up TV subscription can view ESPN for free though it’s not clear how long for). Users with [...]

We’ve been reporting on the ongoing financial problems at Setanta for weeks. Today at 6pm, the plug was finally pulled and the Setanta channels in the UK went dark. The company formally went into administration at 2:30pm on Tuesday 23rd June, leaving an estimated 1.2 million UK customers without their sports service. We’ll be covering [...]

News just in on the Setanta saga. Setanta has today failed to make the required £30 million payment to the English Premier League, and accordingly, the Premier League has terminated the agreement This means that Setanta’s 1.2million UK customer won’t be able to watch the 46 Premier League matches planned for the upcoming 2009/2010 football [...]

Woo-hoo! This has been a great week for those that like their phones shiny with a picture of an apple on. Two days ago, the new version of operating system OS 3 came out offering cut-and-paste, MMS and a lot of under-the-hood tweaks. Today, Friday the 19th of June 2009, the iPhone 3GS went on [...]

The Digital Britain report is finally out. On the 16th of June, Lord Carter’s long-awaited report into plans for our digital future were revealed. There’s been lots of media chat about this already, but in case you’ve missed it, what we think are the three headlines are as follows: 1. Analogue Radio off by 2015: [...]

The US digital TV switchover is now complete, and the transition seemed to be a smooth one. The switch was delayed from the original February 2009 date, but finally went ahead on Friday the 12th of June, and 900 TV stations turned off analogue. There are still a few rural services running on analogue. According [...]

This month, Ofcom announced details of the fourth service to be offering free-to-view HD content, when the new Freeview HD service goes live. Bids are in and the fourth slot has provisionally been awarded to Five. That makes the lineup unsurprisingly BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five. Five will be offering some of their fdaytime [...]

There’s been lots of breaking news since the last full-length show at the start of June, so we’ve just released a short audio update. In the update, Carl and Pete cover the following: Setanta close to collapse, changes to DAB, the new iPhone 3GS, iPhone OS 3.0, Sky on the X-Box, and rise of the [...]

FrequencyCast Update - 10th June 2009 [ 14:28 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

An update on the ongoing Setanta Sports story.. The Daily Mail is running with the story Setanta on the brink of collapse. Setanta needs to pay £30m to the Premier League by the end of the week as part of its contract before the end of the week, but appears to have been unsuccessful in [...]

It’s been in the press over the last few days, so we thought we’d give this a mention. When you use your mobile to call a mobile on a different network, you’re charged an MTR (Mobile Termination rate) for the priviledge. This is typically 4.7p a minute. The same is true when you call a [...]

In San Francisco at Apple’s Worldwide Developer conference within the last hour, Apple’s been presenting all that’s new iPhone-wise: First off, we can expect a new iPhone later this month in the UK. Launch date on o2 is 19th June for the iPhone 3GS. The “S” stands for Speed – the phone has a faster [...]

We’ve had an amazing response to one of the products we covered in Show 40 of our podcast… the Pulse Smartpen. Thanks to all those who’ve been in touch asking questions about the pen, or who tried our first Pen Cast. Yes – the Pulse pen appears to be our hit gadget of the year [...]

Pulse Smartpen Review in Show 40 [ 30:36 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Tired of your slow old “up to 8 meg” download? BT’s about to ramp this up to “up to 20 meg” at no extra cost. As part of their roll-out of ADSL2+, around 40% of properties are about to get the speed ramp-up, with this number rising to 55% by March 2010. The bad news [...]

As we reported in our podcast, Tiscali users are about to find themselves getting their broadband from the Carphone Warehouse, after CPW stepped in to bail out floundering Tiscali. BT’s been quick to leap in with a deal to tempt people from Tiscali. On offer is £50 off your first bill, a new 802.11n high [...]

In 2008, a number of national DAB radio stations vanished, due to cost cutting measures. To fill the void left by speech station Oneword, a 20 minute loop of birdsong took to the air, delighting many and being a welcome and relaxing breath of fresh air. Yesterday, the 1st of June – Radio Birdsong was [...]

Sky has announced that it will be offering Sky TV, Sport and Film content over the Internet for Microsoft X-Box users. This deal will mean that it’s possible to watch Sky content on your TV without the need for a Sky dish or set-top decoder, although some kind of Sky subscription, plus a broadband account, [...]

Show 40 of FrequencyCast, the UK’s TV and Tech podcast, has just been released. In our regular online radio show, we discuss all that’s new with digital TV and technology. Here’s what we cover in this show: News Updates: Plans for Freeview HD in doubt, all change for the charts, new content for Top Up, [...]

FrequencyCast UK Show 40 [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download