Posts by Ben

Microsoft: New Live Search 'as good as Google'

Browser Tests

As a quick test I searched for "firefox", "opera", "safari" and "internet explorer" in Windows Live Search, Google, Yahoo and Ask. Ignoring the sponsored results, Google and Yahoo brought up the browsers as the first result for all four and Ask had all but Opera as the first result, understandably putting it second behind the Royal Opera House. Live Search didn't put any as the first non-sponsored result, with "firefox" returning several suspicious non-Mozilla downloads. The "internet explorer" search in Live brought up the Firefox-directing www.ie7.com site.

It doesn't seem like Live is deliberately promoting IE over other browsers, it just isn't very good.

Catherine Tate to accompany Doctor Who

The Mighty Moffat

"Blink was excellent, but who wrote the Madam de Pompidou episode, my all time favorite?"

That was Girl in the Fireplace, another Moffat episode. He is the same Moffat from Press Gang, too.

BBC, ITV, Channel 4 plot single broadband TV player

Surely...

...as long as ISPs are capping download speeds in the evenings (when people actually have the time to watch TV) there's a limit to how effective VoD over broadband can be. That's before you take into account family homes, where people could actually be using the internet for multiple things at the same time. If you have VoD bogging down somebody else's MMO or other online gaming (both increasingly popular activities) or interfering with another person's web access because of limiting fair usage policies (or even simply because of a bandwidth-hungry VoD service) then this kind of thing won't ever take off.

Ultimately you would end up scheduling to download TV overnight or while out at work (when the connection isn't in use), essentially rendering it as little different to timeshift devices like Sky+ and its Anytime service.

Broadcasters might want people downloading lots over broadband, but ISPs sure don't.