Sky and Simplifydigital Reveal Benefits of Entertainment Bundles
Isleworth, London (PRWEB) August 4, 2010
Sky and Simplifydigital – the UK’s only Ofcom accredited retailer of digital TV, broadband and home phone deals – have released new data on the savings available by “bundling” digital TV, broadband and home phone services with a single provider. The latest data shows that a staggering £760 per year can be saved by choosing the best digital bundle deal.
The data comes from a sample of 400 customers between January and May 2010. The average customer saving was £262, while 20% of customers saved more than £577 and 10% more than £760 per year.
Charlie Ponsonby, CEO of Simplifydigital, said: “The digital TV, broadband and home phone market is cut-throat and there has never been a better time to take advantage of the savings on offer. Bundle deals now start from as little as £18 per month for all three services (broadband, digital TV and home phone) – plus there are some amazing introductory offers to be had on top. There really is no excuse for customers to keep wasting big money with overpriced legacy tariffs.”
Earlier in the year, Sky was named winner of the ‘Best digital TV, broadband and home phone bundle’ award in the Simplifydigital Customer Choice Awards 2010.
The Simplifydigital Customer Choice Awards for digital TV, broadband and home telephony services are based on the UK’s only large scale qualitative review of customer experience, compiled using the unique Feefo feedback service, which pulls together people’s opinions, likes and dislikes 60 days into the service.
About Sky
Sky operates the most comprehensive multichannel, multi-platform television service in the UK and Ireland. More than 9.7 million homes enjoy an unprecedented choice of movies, news, entertainment and sports channels with Sky packages (http://www.sky.com/shop/bundles-offers/ ). Sky continues to break new ground with its own portfolio of channels: Sky1 combines its commitment to UK production with the best of the US; Sky Arts continues to embrace new audiences as the UK’s only dedicated arts channel brand; Sky Sports is still raising the bar in sports broadcasting; and Sky News remains a pioneer in multiplatform television news.
Almost 6.5 million Sky homes now enjoy the control and flexibility of Sky+HD (http://www.sky.com/shop/supertelly/home/ ) and 2.1 million homes have already installed a Sky+HD box (http://www.sky.com/shop/boxes/sky-hd-box/ ), which provides access to 37 dedicated HD channels (http://www.sky.com/shop/supertelly/home/super-channels/ ) and future innovative services like broadband-enabled video-on-demand and 3D TV.
Sky has also been the UK’s fastest growing broadband and fixed-telephony provider for the last two years.
About Simplifydigital
Simplifydigital (http://www.simplifydigital.co.uk/ ) is the UK’s only Ofcom accredited retailer of digital TV, broadband and home phone services. The Simplifydigital impartial experts take thousands of calls every week, from UK consumers looking to find the very best digital TV, broadband and home phone deals.
Each customer receives a free “consultation”, during which the experts match their unique needs to one of over 10,000 deals from all the top UK providers.
Each customer who buys through Simplifydigital then receives a qualitative feedback form from Feefo within which express their views of the Simplifydigital service and the quality of the service provider to which they have signed up.
Sky+HD PR contact:
Victoria Etaghene
BSkyB
Grant Way
Isleworth
London
TW7 5QD
020 7805 3000
www.sky.com
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3D TV Features and Benefits
3D TV will change the way you watch television. With the star power of hip-hop group The Black Eyed Peas and Avatar director James Cameron, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics giant unveiled the world’s first 3D TV technology aimed at revolutionizing the home viewing experience. A 3D television is a television that employs techniques of 3D presentation, such as stereoscopic capture, multi-view capture, or 2D plus depth, and 3D display—a special viewing device to project a television program into a realistic three-dimensional field. 3D episodes became moderately popular in the late 1990s when several shows in the USA used the technique to attract viewers and increase ratings.
3DTV sets are those that can operate in 3D mode, in conjunction with LCD shutter glasses, where the TV tells the glasses which eye should see the image being exhibited at the moment, creating a stereoscopic image. These TV sets usually support HDMI 1.4 and a minimum (input and output) refresh rate of 120Hz; glasses may be sold separately.
Mitsubishi and Samsung utilize DLP technology from Texas Instruments. As of January 2010, Toshiba, Samsung, Sony, Panasonic, and LG all had plans to introduce 3D capabilities (mostly in higher-end models) in TVs available sometime in 2010. 3D Blue-Ray players and DirecTV broadcasts are also expected in 2010.
The Chinese manufacturer TCL has developed a 42-inch LCD 3D TV called the TD-42F, which is currently available in China. This model uses a lenticular system and does not require any special glasses. It currently sells for approximately $20,000.
LG, Samsung, Sony & Phillips intend to increase their 3D TV offering with plans to make 3D TV sales account for over 50% of their respective TV distribution offering by 2012. It is expected that the screens will use a mixture of technologies until there is standardization across the industry.
3D imaging dates to the beginning of photography. In 1844, David Brewster introduced the Stereoscope, a device that could take photographic pictures in 3D. It was then improved by Louis Jules Duboscq and a famous picture of Queen Victoria was displayed at The Great Exhibition in 1851. By the Second World War, stereoscopic (3D) cameras for personal use were already fairly common.
3D movie development was parallel to that of 3D pictures and images. Already in 1855 the Kinematoscope was invented, i.e. the Stereo Animation Camera. The first anaglyph movie was produced in 1915 and in 1922 the first public 3D movie was displayed – The Power of Love. In 1935 the first 3D color movie was produced.
In the fifties, when TV became popular in the United States, many 3D movies were produced. The first such movie was Bwana Devil from United Artists that could be seen all across the US in 1952. One year later, in 1953, came the 3D movie House of Wax which also featured 2D sound. Alfred Hitchcock originally made his film Dial M for Murder in 3D, but for the purpose of maximizing profits the movie was released in 2D because not all cinemas were able to display 3D films. The Soviet Union also developed 3D films.
There are several techniques to produce and display 3D moving pictures.
Common 3D display technology for projecting stereoscopic image pairs to the viewer include:
- Anaglyphic 3D (with passive red-cyan glasses)
- Polarization 3D (with passive polarized glasses)
- Alternate-frame sequencing (with active shutter glasses/headgear)
- Auto stereoscopic displays (without glasses/headgear)
Single-view displays project only one stereo pair at a time. Multi-view displays either use head-tracking to change the view depending of the viewing angle, or simultaneously project multiple independent views of a scene for multiple viewers (automultiscopic); such multiple views can be created on-the-fly using the 2D plus depth format.
Various other display techniques have been described, such as holography, volumetric display and the Pulfrich effect that was used by Doctor Who for Dimensions in Time in 1993 by 3rd Rock from the Sun in 1997 and by the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week in 2000, among others. Real-Time 3D TV is essentially a form of auto stereoscopic display.
Stereoscopy is most widely accepted method for capturing and delivering 3D video. It involves capturing stereo pairs in a two-view setup, with cameras mounted side by side, separated by the same distance as between a person’s pupils. If we imagine projecting an object point in a scene along the line-of-sight (for each eye, in turn) to a flat background screen, we may describe the location of this point mathematically using simple algebra. In rectangular coordinates with the screen lying in the Y-Z plane (the Z axis upward and the Y axis to the right) and the viewer centered along the X axis, we find that the screen coordinates are simply the sum of two terms, one accounting for perspective and the other for binocular shift.
