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The FrequencyCast podcast boys are divided on this one… Sky One’s announced that they’ve just given the go-ahead to a 21st Century remake of the 1970’s BBC TV classic, Blake’s Seven.

We’ve recently seen revivals of Battlestar Galactica and Knight Rider, and the cult sci-fi series with Blake, Avon, Cally, Jenna, Gan, Orac and Zen is set to make a return.

Sky’s approved creation of 2 x 1 hour scripts, working with B7 Productions, who recently re-imagined Blake’s 7 as the Blake’s 7 Audio Adventures, broadcast on BBC7 and now out on CD.

No idea when we can expect to see this on-screen… but at least 50%of the team here don;t think it can happen fast enough. Got any comments?

Happy St George’s Day from all at FrequencyCast, the UK TV and Tech podcast.

Think England’s National Day should be a public holiday? There’s a petition at www.bombardier.co.uk/bombardier/promotions/petition

We’ve today launched a special Listener’s Forum, where our show listeners can meet to discuss shows, pass on suggestions, point out cool new things for us to review, and pass on feedback on how our online radio shows are shaping up.

If you’d like to sign up, the forum is now live at http://frequencycast.co.uk/cgi-bin/forum/YaBB.pl

We’ll be adding new features to the forum soon, but we’d appreciate it if you could sign up and get chatting!

Phorm is a US company that has a commerical offering called Webwise. They’ve done deals with broadband providers BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk about collecting information about sites that consumers are viewing, and serve up adverts based on browsing habits, back to consumers.

Phorm claims that no personal information is extracted, and that this type of activity is the right side of the law, but privacy and data protection campaigners aren’t convinced, and neither is creator of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who wants ISPs to keep their hands off his data.

Many are now referring to this practice as “Data pimping” - your ISP selling your browsing history off to a third party for advertsing purposes.

An Online petition to Downing Street collected over 9,000 signatures in its first month from users concerned about their privacy - http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ispphorm/ . More on the Phormwatch blog

The latest two reviews on iTunes say we’re rubbish! Here are the headlines:

Are our shows tedious? Tired of our ham-fished attempts at humour? Catch our latest reviews here on iTunes

First Star Trek, then Battlestar Galactica… Now Knight Rider.

In February, a “next generation” version of Knight Rider took to the air in the US. An impressive 10 million US viewers tuned in, but the critics were scathing.

We’ve had a quick preview of the new series, that’s set 25 years after the days of Michael, Devon and Bonnie. All’s chaned with KITT, Knight Industries 3000. He’s now voiced by Val Kilmer, and he’s a Ford Mustang. No sign of a Turbo Boost yet, but there are some new gadgets. There are now two red swooshy lights, and KITT has “self regeneration” and “nanotech enhanced camouflage”, which means that the car can change colour, seems indestructable, and can self-repair. We’re not convinced.

More on the US remake at http://www.nbc.com/Knight_Rider/

It’s official. The HD formats wars are over… and the winner is [drumroll] Blu-Ray. In February, Toshiba finally announced that HD-DVD is dead. From their press release: “This was a very difficult decision to make … but when we thought about the trouble we would cause to consumers and our partners, we decided it was not right for us to keep going with such a small presence.”

If you’ve got an HD-DVD player, it’ll still be supported for a while, but you’ve now got yourself the HD equivalent of Betamax. Blu-Ray players cost from £250.

More bad news for DAB digital radio this month - theJazz and Planet Rock, two of the national DAB stations, are due to fall silent soon. Owners gCap recently switched off digital station Core, and are now axing two more stations. With OneWord going too, this will leave just three national commercial DAB stations, Virgin Radio, Classic fm and TalkSport.

gCap’s reason for getting rid of Planet Rock and theJazz? Cost-saving and the slow takeup of digital radio in the UK making their ongoing funding of DAB “economically unviable”.

We’re planning to run a feature on the future of DAB in the UK on an upcoming podcast. Sign up to our newsletter to be notified.

Update 13 Feb: Audio show discussing developments now online

Users of the low-cost home security system “Homesight” from will be pleased to know that manufacturer Motorola has now released drivers for the Windows Vista operating system.

The updated software is available from It’s available for download from Motorola Support and from the downloads section at MyHome247.

There’s more on Homesight on our Homesight page, or you can listen to Show 12 for our review.

Now here’s a question… why isn’t there a decent UK Podcast Chart, or an accepted list of the Top Ten UK podcasts?

As our regulars will know, we run a UK Tech podcast, and we’ve been increasingly curious about podcast listening habits.

Sure, there’s a published iTunes top ten podcast list, and a couple of the podcast directories offer listeners the chance to vote for their favourite podcasts, but if podcasting’s going to enter the mainstream, something like a podcast chart, best podcast list, or a decent UK-only ‘Best Podcast’ Guide. Anyone know of a decent resource?

As a podcast listener - how do you decide which podcasts to listen to? How do you find out about podcastsWhat directories or search tools do you use?

We’d welcome your comments…

FrequencyCast has been featured in the August 2007 issue of Radio Journal, the German magazine for radio and new media. It’s all in German, but we can promise you it’s a great article, looking at Carl and Pete’s background, and our views on podcasting.

Guten Tag to all of our German listeners!

FrequencyCast is now broadcasting 24 hours a day. We’ve set up a streaming radio station for those that prefer to listen to a stream of our shows, as opposed to a podcast. Please give us a try. The feed is at:

www.live365.com/stations/frequencycast

Looking for a free trial of the excellent DVD rental service from LoveFilm? They’ve got every UK DVD available to rent, they deliver direct to your door and there are no late fees. Go to www.lovefilm.com/ffytn936r

Always on the cutting edge, we now have a Facebook Group - if you’re on Facebook, please sign up to our book at www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=3852730290

Prices for the BT Vision Sports service, due to start in August 2007, have been announced. Here’s what we know…

For the 2007/08 football season, there’ll be 46 live Barclays Premier League games carried on BT Vision. There’ll also be access to 242 same-day Premier League matches, which will be available hours after kick-off (from 10pm). In addition, there will be 60 live Clydesdale Bank Premier League games, 125 games from the Football League and Carling Cup, live US PGA Tour golf and access to BT Vision’s library of classic sport.

There are four pricing options, as follows:

BT Vision Standard Sports (£4 a month): 242 Premier League games shown a few hours after kick off (from 10pm). 125 matches from the Coca-Cola Football League and Carling Cup. Plus access to a library of classic sport

Setanta Sports (£9.99 a month): Setanta Sports. Including 46 live Premier League games and live US PGA Tour golf

Total Sports (£12 a month): Both Standard and Setanta packages

Pay Per View: You can watch individual Premier League games for £1.99 per game

With BT Vision Sport, there’s no annual subscription fee. Pay on-demand per game, or subscribe on a monthly basis.

BT Vision combines Freeview with TV, movies and sport on your TV via a BT Broadband connection and a BT Home Hub.

The BT Vision set-top box is currently free, as long as you’re a BT Total Broadband subscriber

More details at http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/btvision.html

If you’ve got any interest in putting together your own podcast, the FrequencyCast podcast team has taken a look at a new kit, the podcastudio, that makes podcasting easy. The kit contains a mixer, microphone, headphones, software and a USB interface to your PC or Mac
Take a look at our review at
www.frequencycast.co.uk/podcastudio.html - we also have a brief audio overview you can listen to.

Spare use 3 minutes? We’re really keen to find out what our listeners have to say. Please take our short listener survey

We’ve found a couple of online stocks with stock of the Wii (reviewed in
Show 10). Go to frequencycast.co.uk/wii.html.

June 21st… The FrequencyCast podcast has become a victim of its own success. Our webhosting fees have just increased by 500%. To help us to cover these new higher costs, we need your help.

We’re not after your money - we’re asking you to take up a special offer (that also gets you 5,000 free Nectar points). We make a small commission, and that’ll help us to pay our increased hosting costs. Please show your support - Offer details here.