Children’s TV is rather boring these days, what happened to all the really weird, creepy stuff they used to feed us? Chocky anyone? The Owl Service? The Adventure Game (angry plants, backwards speaking man and the VORTEX!). Ah those were the days…

Yes an engineer has been here all afternoon fitting fugly black boxes to all my beautiful sleek TVs, for I am now a member of the mysterious TV viewing panel. Seriously they really could make them a bit smaller and less like a 1970’s clock radio and they do take a ludicrous amount of time to install.

They claim our viewing habits will determine what programmes the TV channels will decide to broadcast. So it’s up to you all really, either you send me wheelbarrows full of your finest cash, or I continuously watch re-runs of TV Valium snore-a-thon Heartbeat for the next year…let’s see what that does for the future of TV….bwahahahahhahaahhaha!

I hear it’s even possible to watch Miss Marple all day if you know which channels to watch, think about it people.

These episodes form a prequel to a larger story the people behind it would obviously like to produce but no doubt dependent on the success and interest drummed up by the web episodes. It’s nice to see any kind of scifi/horror/fantasy TV being made so go and watch it…maybe they will make some more!

Must be some genre fans lurking in Endemol with this and the recent Dead Set which I believe was produced by another company owned by Endemol though I may be wrong.

There isn’t much yet to go on apart from a little bit here:

Three scientists have vanished.
Two bloggers are under siege.
One man has an urgent message to deliver.
None of them are safe.

In a nightmarish hideaway, a desperate fugitive is risking his life to get a warning through to the outside world…

… And on the streets of London, a journalist and a college drop-out try to find out why research labs are being invaded by soldiers, before they become this sinister army’s next victims.

Meanwhile, a faceless and growing enemy is determined to hunt down all three and stop them finding each other, and getting the answers they need.

The longer the hunt takes, the hungrier the hunters become.

I’ve watched the first couple of episodes and it has that whole ‘LOST’ WTF is going on kind of feel to it. Hopefully it’ll make some sense soon as they haven’t too much time to play with. It looks interesting though, so I’ll keep watching for now.

And now for episode one:

I’ll post new episodes as they appear. Let me know what you think.

Not entirely convinced by the domain name (read up on John Locke) but I love the site which indexes loads of good educational and documentary type programmes from a wide variety of sources.

JohnLocker.com was started in April of 2008 to help students, teachers, educators, and the public get educated on a variety of topics. As the first user powered online learning network, you can expect to come away with knowledge that both challenges and empowers you.

By harnessing the power of social communities, JohnLocker.com is able to provide the best documentaries and educational videos found on the web. It is our goal to make the process of watching, adding, rating, and dicussing the individual videos as simple as possible.

Every video on JohnLocker.com was added by people just like you. By clicking “Quick Video Add”, you can instantly import any video from YouTube, Google Video, Veoh, MegaVideo, and DailyMotion by simply copying and pasting the URL of the video.

Please help JohnLocker.com grow by telling all your friends and relatives where they can educate themselves online for free. Without all of you, JohnLocker couldn’t provide the videos and documenataries you see today.

I can’t tell what others will receive but as a UK resident there are 29 channels available many of which appear to be the channels available on Freeview including all the main BBC channels:

ABC News, Al Jazeera Arabic, AutoMoto TV, BBC Four, BBC News, BBC One, BBC Parliament, BBC Three, BBC Two, Bloomberg UK, CBBC, CBeebies, Channel 4, Channel 5, Community Channel, Deutsche Welle, EuroNews, France 24 English, France 24 French, HTV, Information TV, ITV1, Russia Today, SF info, STV, sumo.tv, TeleZuri, The Poker Channel, Ulster TV.

I’ve always thought Freeview via broadband is a complete no-brainer and am surprised that there is no official offering but this at least is a start and hopefully they will gain more and more channels.

It’s based on a p2p system and whilst the image quality doesn’t seem as good as some other IPTV systems I’ve seen, it does at least have one thing that most of them don’t have in content from decent sources….rather than dodgy channels showing public domain films and TV series nobody watched the first time round.

The software is easy to use and there is a EPG type thing built in to see what is showing. Would be great if it did recording but I imagine that is a huge legal stumbling block and they have done well to get the channels they have and keep it legal.

All in all very useful if you have a conflict of TV tastes with whomever you share your home with.

Zattoo has developed a software program that allows you to watch TV on your computer. All you need is a broadband connection and a current operating system (Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux). The service is legal and free of charge.

To watch live TV on your PC, simply download the Zattoo Player, register, and get channel-surfing! If you run into any problems, take a look at our FAQ section.

Sorry for the lack of updates but normal service will resume shortly, until then please enjoy the following balanced, non-sensational video.

However it was noticed by pretty much the entire internet that you the BBC provide an iPlayer service for the iPhone which has the same content but providing the video as DRM free mp4. It was also noticed that you can fairly easily pretend to be an iPhone and thus download these videos to keep and watch on any device.

So it was only a matter of time before the clever bunch of python coders who create scripts and plugins for XBMC came up with a solution for downloading these watching these videos on Xbox Media Center. The script works superbly, it can take a little while to grab the list of shows available but once done you can select anything and it’ll download it and start playing. The added bonus is that since these files are DRM free, they won’t expire after seven days like the normal iPlayer interface.

It’s a great way to catch up with BBC shows from the comfort of your sofa and I’ve used it recently to watch the episodes of Doctor Who I’ve missed on saturday night. Actually it works so well it makes you wonder why the TV companies don’t just provide something like this rather than trying to make it difficult and then failing when some technically minded person works out how to get round the protection. Maybe the ad supported channels could do something similar with ad support rather than DRM…

Just a further note to say that iPlayer is UK only so this script won’t change that fact and allow users from other countries to watch the videos…..*cough*…..proxy….*cough*

Since my dabble with reading some Manga I’ve also been looking at good places to watch some free Anime online and the best place by far has to be crunchyroll.com.

Containing more videos than you could possibly watch, some english dubbed and plenty of subtitled and fan-subbed and lots of them complete or ongoing series there is enough here to keep you busy for most of your spare time.

They used to charge for the higher quality videos but these are now available to watch for free by using bit torrent based streaming. It is all flash based and works much like a youtube for anime but with the added bonus of a dedicated community and helpful forum.

It’s also not just limited to Anime, you’ll find loads of drama including some great horror and martial arts movies plus music videos and even car videos but I haven’t really looked at those yet.

For those of you with Xbox Media Center you can find a nice plugin here to stream all the anime you want from crunchyroll direct to XBMC for relaxing viewing on your TV.

TVCatchup.com is a fairly new service which allows users to watch content from 23 free-to-air UK TV channels which includes all the major channels, BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, etc.

Once you have signed up you can use the TV schedule to set things to ‘record’ in your own private space which once recorded and encoded as flash video can be streamed directly from the site. It does the series link thing so you can get it to record a whole series and never miss an episode.

You can also watch loads of other archived shows which basically means you can watch anything, anyone has marked to ‘record’ as far as I can tell. It seems the only content not available is stuff that nobody wanted to watch in the first place.

TVCatchup claim that the site is legal but I’m not entirely sure how long they will last against the lawyers once things really kick off. It seems they are positioning themselves as a personal online recording service to comply with the time-shifting exemption of the Copyright Act yet I’m not sure how well this would stand up to scrutiny.

Never mind, it works, it’s pretty slick and it actually puts the efforts of the TV companies to shame in terms of ease of use, quality and scope of content. If you want to catch up on a few shows you missed then this is a pretty good option. I believe they are IP filtering so only for UK residents unless someone tells me otherwise.

This service allows you to watch a selection of BBC programmes from the last 7 days much like the BBC Radio Listen Again service which has been around for some time.

I signed up for the original beta in its former incarnation as a Windows only DRM based download and streaming service and whilst it worked and I liked the idea, I found the service slow and clunky. The Flash based redesign may have come about for a different reason but I think the new website is a huge improvement. OK the video quality is not as good but this is a limitation of the flash video format and that may improve in time but the system now simply requires a web browser with the Flash player rather than downloading some bloated software which runs a service which eats up system resources.

I’ve just watched something I missed last night and I can definitely see me using it more often. It is a shame the Wii browser does not support the latest version of Flash or this could be the ideal application to showcase the Wii’s online capabilities.

It’s a very interesting documentary even if you don’t agree or accept all the points that are made here it will still give you some pause for thought or at least widen your view on the subject.

From Wikipedia:

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. The series consists of three one-hour films, consisting mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis’s narration, which were first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and have been subsequently aired in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

The films compare the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and noting strong similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is in fact a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.

The Power of Nightmares has been praised by film critics in both Britain and the United States. Its message and content have also been the subject of various critiques and criticisms from conservatives and progressives.

Joost is a system for distributing video content via p2p technology. The upshot of this is you get free TV channels/shows to watch on your PC. The image quality is actually very good and streaming seems fairly stable. The content however is a bit hit and miss particularly if you live outside of the US which seems to have most of the best channels.

Its worth a try if you are bored and fancy something to watch, if only to see where things are heading. Joost may be one of the first big players in this market (aside from the commercial channel offerings) but it definitly won’t be the last.