Sky TV have gone all festive and are in bountiful spirits, giving their UK high definition customers a complimentary ticket to watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Angels & Demons and The Hangover on Sky Box Office HD in their homes the same week that the films are being released on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK.

As part of the Sky+HD Party campaign, Sky hope for customers to share the Sky+HD experience with friends and family. To help the party give customers the best experience, Sky are offering a complimentary Sky Box Office HD movie (worth £3.91) and a £10 Marks & Spencer’s voucher. Now that’s just not any voucher, that’s an M&S voucher (said with a seductive commercial voice).

Sky+HD Party

So are we all ‘HD Ready’?

HD services are already on-air in some parts of the world and they are about to be launched across the UK. To view HD you need a high definition display with HDMI or DVI connectivity, and there is an industry ‘kite mark’ to show whether a particular display is ready for high definition broadcasts.

High Definition TV (HD) is part of the latest digital revolution. HD television brings cinema quality into the home with greater picture quality and sharper images. Like 3D promises (look to the 30^th Oct blog entry), there is the hope that such advancements produce a more colourful, exciting and immersive experience when watching television and films.

Sky HD

Standard definition digital TV displays a picture consisting of 720 by 576 pixels. This means the screen is made up of slightly less than half a million points of light.

High definition can display a picture of 1920 by 1080 pixels - well over 2 million - which adds clarity to scenes never before possible with either the old analogue system or standard definition digital.

Large television companies such as the BBC, Virgin, FX, ESPN and the National Geographic Channel have already launched themselves in high definition, magnifying the vibrant colour and quality of such events as the NFL, NHL, NBA, and many more American acronyms that are too tiresome to type. The National Geographic Channel - or NGC - has aired it’s HD content to great success: Alien Worlds, Earth Shocks, Alaska’s Fishing Wars and Inside Nature’s Giants - where a team of experts examine the nauseating anatomy - in full - of an elephant, crocodile and a giraffe, there’s even a 55-tonne whale.

Pixel Value Comparison

ESPN HD soon launches on Sky+HD, with the service now offering customer’s access to up to 35 HD channels. That’s a lot of high definition sport! You can see them sweat, up close and in detail.

The Sky+HD Party offer (http://sky.com/hdparty/) is subject to availability and limited to the first 10,000 parties.

Tags: 3D, BBC, Blu Ray, DVD, DVI, ESPN, FX, HDMI, National Geographic Channel, Sky, Sky HD, Virgin Media

This entry was posted on Friday, November 13th, 2009 at 3:56 pm and is filed under The Weekly Wizard. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.