For more than a decade it has lavished good, smart product on its viewers, and in the process raised the entire industry’s creative game. In the late 1990s HBO pioneered an intelligent, patient style of storytelling that gloried in loose ends and morally ambiguous characters, a style “The Sopranos” came to epitomise. It lost its way around the middle of the last decade, when ambitious dramas like “Deadwood” and “Rome” failed to stick. But it is now back on form. It has three popular, admired dramas in “Boardwalk Empire” (pictured, right) “True Blood” (a vampire series set in Louisiana) and “Game of Thrones” (a fantasy set in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros). This year HBO received 104 nominations for Emmys (the television Oscars, which will be dished out next month). That’s far more than anyone else.

Dominic Ludlam writes, "Promise.TV has launched the world's first Promiscuous TV recorder! Working on the UK's Freeview platform, it records every programme on every TV and radio channel and stores them for a whole week. And for all Boing Boing readers who visit the site, we have a daily draw running this week to get a new Promise recorder half price!"

This was originally commissioned as an internal BBC project, and the Ludlams and their partners have been productizing it ever since. It really does what it says on the tin: records the whole Freeview multiplex for a week at a time, which means that you don't have to program your PVR with the shows you like: you always have the last week's TV on tap (this'd be especially cool for when scandalous material is broadcast from Parliament -- if you find out about it after the fact you can go back and check). The Promise.tv folks have worked out several ingenious ways of navigating all this stored material as well.

I've written about this before, and I'm awfully glad to see it finally come to market.

The Promise Home is a recorder that connects four additional televisions in other rooms around the home. All connected TVs can play any of the stored or saved programmes independently, and in they can also share bookmarks. This lets you start watching a programme in one room, set a bookmark and carry on watching from the same point in another room.

The latest TV technology buzzword is "4K." This magical alphanumeric represents a quadrupling of the now-standard 1080p resolution found on Blu-ray and most HDTVs.
Have no doubt, manufacturers are going to start pushing 4K (some already are).
The thing is, though, you don't need 4K, because in the home, 4K is stupid.
Check out Ty Pendlebury's 4K primer for more details about what 4K actually is, because I'm going to spend the bulk of this article describing why you don't need it.

I’m wrong a lot whenever I speak in absolutes about Apple’s future plans, but I don’t think they’ll ever release a TV.

En lång artikel hos Vanity Fair om fenomenet The Simpsons. Läsvärd med massor av intervjuer.

HD Beat går igenom de viktigaste och vanligaste begreppen kring HDTV. Till exempel 720p, 1080i, HDCP, HDMI och många andra.

Att Apple numera säljer avsnitt av tv-serier på iTMS är en revolution inom tv-världen. Enligt Blog Maverik kan detta vara räddningen för kabel-tv ("Network TV").

En svensk sida som sammanfattar det aktuella teknologierna för TV (LCD, DVD, HDTV, Plasma, upplösningar, HD-inspelningar mm) anno 2005.

En LCD-TV från Philips som fungerar som en spegel när den är avstängd, vill ha!

Ett lexikon med uttryck myntade i Seinfeld som "Mimbo", "Sidler" och naturligtvis "Soup Nazi".