So last week the DCMNR annouced a Pilot Digital Terrestrial Television service from Three Rock and Clermont Carn in Co Louth and according to media reports there will be approx 1000 Set Top Boxes given to test users during this two year pilot.

This is the kind of thing that gets me somewhat agitated about this country. The time for pilot schemes is past. Freeview is the deployed DTT solution across the UK. We should just deploy it here. The reasons are many but the most important are:

• Time to Market

  A two year pilot will run until 2008 and only then will we start trying to deploy a nationwide transmission infrastructure. Given the usual delays for procurment etc it will be 2010 before this gets anywhere. With a proposed switchoff date of 2012 for analogue services this is leaving things a little tight.

  Oh and the public don’t get the benifits of Digital TV until this is done.

• Intergration

  Most of the main channels besides RTE have already intergrated their interactive services with the freeview system. RTE would be able to utilise the BBCs experience in deploying interactive services on the freeview system.

• Consumer Cost

  There is a vibrant market for freeview set top boxes in the UK which has driven the cost of these units down to approx €50. Why pick a different platform where the benifits of volume are lost.

As someone who was involved in the early DTT work in RTE back in 1999 it is somewhat disapointing that it will have taken 10 years or more to deploy services to the public and this delay is due to the various ministers who always manage to messup even the simple things.

Caught this on TV a few weeks ago. The Best Worst Movie Ever.

While filming a advertisment, some extreme sports enthusiasts unwittingly stop a group of terrorists.

It has everything, the misunderstood blonde olympic skier who is trying to find her passion, the tomboy, the misfit secretly in love with the tomboy, central european war criminals, dramatic chase sequences, the director who resents the olympic skier but who will come to respect her and help her find her passion, silly pranks, avalanches & helicopters.

Currently watching BMX Bandits at the minute and man is it bad. Nicole Kidman’s hair in particular.

So I have decided I need to start writing more stuff here following some gentle prodding from the Lady Friend and others.
Due to a recent spate of comment spam and a security issue in wordpress I also decided to upgrade to wordpress 2.0 to get access to features like akismet and some new plugins for doing tagging. The upgrade was painless and took only a few minutes.
So the current plan is to write two or three significant posts per week. I have a bunch of have written posts laying about which I will finish off and I am sure work will provide some inspiration.

The photo above was taken on the first day of the expedition during PEAK and is part of my experimentation with depth of field. I am impressed at how sharp the leaves are when the branch is out of focus. The photo is of a rhododendron, a plant which is slowly choking the native forest in killarney national park. If I could only get my hands on the person(s) who brought them into the country.