Here's our regular look at what's coming up under the red button...
Weekend Wogan*
Sir Terry Wogan recently made a triumphant return
to the Radio 2 airwaves with a brand new show. Coming live from ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Broadcasting
House's Radio Theatre every Sunday, Weekend Wogan showcases a lively mix
of celebrity interviews, music with star guests and performances from Elio
Pace's house band.
For the first time, the infamous 'Janet and John' stories are told in front
of a live audience, in the presence of John 'Boggy' Marsh - their hero and
inspiration.
Each Sunday the show is filmed, and highlights and special backstage footage
are shown on the Radio 2 website from Monday morning.
As a television treat digital viewers will have an opportunity to see TWO
of the great man's shows on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Red Button.
For the week beginning Monday 5th April we'll show the best of Sunday 4th's
show.
A joyous new Wogan show will land on your red button the following Monday.
Your April will be absolutely lovely.
Sky:
Monday 5th April, 6am - Sunday 11th April, 11am
Monday 12th April, 6am - Sunday 18th April, 6am
Virgin:
Monday 5th April, 6am - Thursday 8th April, 9.25pm
Friday 9th April, 4.30am - 9.25pm
Saturday 10th April, 12.30am - 8.30am, 11.30am - 6.30pm & 8.40pm - Sunday
11th April, 11am
Monday 12th April, 6am - 11pm
Tuesday 13th April, 12.45am - Thursday 15th April, 8.55pm
Friday 16th April, 6am - 9.25pm
Saturday 17th April, 12.30am - 8.30am, 11.30am - 6.50pm & 9pm - Sunday 18th April, 6am
Freeview:
Monday 5th April, 6am - 2.50pm & 7.25pm - Tuesday 6th April, 7.20pm
Tuesday 6th April, 10.10pm - 11.50pm
Wednesday 7th April, 8am - 2pm & 3pm - 7.50pm & 10.10pm - 11.50pm
Thursday 8th April, 8.10am - 3.35pm
Friday 9th April, 8.10am - 3pm & 1pm - 3.35pm
Saturday 10th April, 8.10am - 8.50am & 11.10am - 2.20pm
Monday 12th April, 7.40am - 6.50pm
Tuesday 13th April, 7.40am - 7.20pm
Wednesday 14th April, 7.40am - 2pm & 3pm - 7.20pm
Thursday 15th April, 7.40am - 7pm
Friday 16th April, 8.45am - 12pm & 1pm - 6.50pm
Saturday 17th April, 8.40am - 9.50am
(not available on Freesat)
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A couple of weeks ago we had some fantastic news from Nintendo. We reached the one million mark. That's one million ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer Wii channels downloaded, by you, the audience. This is a phenomenal achievement considering we only launched in November!
Since January the Wii has accounted for 4% of all TV viewing on ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer across all platforms. This has now grown to 5% for February. To put these figure into perspective, we had 116 million requests in February.
So to commemorate all this, we have released an update that enables some long awaited features. One of the features that we are most proud of and one that a lot of viewers wanted was the Resume Playback function.
You can now resume watching partially viewed programmes from the point you were watching previously, like you can on the web version of ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer. Plus we have added a list of your previously watched programmes. You can see that in action within the improved home page.
That's not all we've improved, Search was one of the areas that you all like. But some viewers expected to be able to search using alphanumeric search. So we created a nice keypad toggle to switch between numbers and letters.
Other subtle improvements have been made, as well as some changes to the underlying code, which will improve the overall service.
The feedback we have received from you has helped to shape this release, we really appreciate your continued feedback. We had a number of viewers express their thoughts on the service via and comments to the original blog posts in November.
We hope you continue to use and enjoy ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ iPlayer on Wii, if you have any comments or suggestions about the new features please feel free to comment.
One of the questions we occasionally get asked is why our red button services aren't built in widescreen.
As it's now very hard to buy a traditionally shaped television, and widescreen has become the new standard, it's a fair question to ask.
The answer boils down to the fact that most digital devices still only allow us to build services in a traditional 4:3 format - even if the device is HD.
We build our services in 720x576 - the size of a standard definition television picture, and resolutely 4:3. When viewed on a widescreen TV, the picture is simply stretched out to fill the whole screen and it's not possible to find out how someone's TV is set up - there are no flags available to us to tell us whether someone is viewing in 4:3 or widescreen, so we can't do any detection and arrange the service appropriately.
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Here's our regular look at what's coming up under the red button...
The UK Asian Music Awards*
The UK Asian Music Awards are the British Asian
equivalent of the Brits, and for this year's event ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Red Button will be
on hand to bring you the very best of the awards.
Front of house, ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Asian Network's Bobby Friction will be hosting the star-filled
ceremony from London's Royal Festival Hall with Murtz reigning backstage
granting viewers exclusive access to all the stars and antics.
Press red for performances from Imran Khan, Jaz Dhami, Mumzy and Talvin
Singh.
The awards to be presented include Best Album, Female, Male, Producer, Urban
and International Acts - and the overall Outstanding Achievement gong.
Full details of the nominees and photo highlights can be seen on the Asian
Network website.
Sky & Virgin:
Wednesday 17th March, 6pm - Wednesday 24th March, 4am
Freeview:
Wednesday 17th March, 6pm - Friday 19th March, 12pm
Friday 19th March, 1pm - 6.45pm & 9.10pm - 8.50am (20th)
Saturday 20th March, 11.10am - 2.20pm & 6.10pm - 9.50pm
Sunday 21st March, 1.10am - 1.35pm & 4.15pm - Wednesday 24th March,
4am
(not available on Freesat)
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