Sport & Fitness

High Definition TV

So, you save up and buy an HD-ready TV, plug it in and you’ve got HD, right? Not quite, but it’s an easy mistake to make – HD is complicated. You and your TV may be HD-ready, but the signal going into it needs to be as well, so you need an HD box, available from Sky or ntl Telewest. HD channels include BBC HD, currently showing ‘Bleak House’ and ‘Planet Earth’ in awesome detail. Every World Cup game shown by the BBC and all Wimbledon Centre Court matches will be in HD here. Feature continues

Sky HD For non-football fans, Sky already has National Geographic HD and Discovery HD, plus movies in HD and arts shows on Artsworld. It all looks astonishingly good, but comes at a price: a Sky HD box costs £299 to buy and, along with your regular TV subscription, you need to add £10 a month for the HD channels. Plus, the HD channels only go with the relevant standard-definition packages – so you only get Sky Sports HD if you subscribe to the sports channels, and so on. The box also includes a hard drive so you can pause and rewind live TV. Take-up has been impressive – 40,000 households have already signed up, but it’s now too late to get a Sky HD box in time for any of the World Cup.
www.sky.com/hd

ntl Telewest The recently merged company’s TV Drive box is free (but adds between £10 and £15 to your monthly subscription) and includes BBC HD and ITV HD along with its own movie channel. There’s no backlog so you could be installed in time to watch most of the World Cup, but it’s currently only available to Telewest customers.
www.telewest.co.uk /0845 1420220

Humax Electronics firm Humax makes an HD box which receives free-to-air HD satellite channels. You need a satellite dish and, providing it’s pointed at Astra 28.2 (as a Sky dish would be), you should be able to watch BBC HD, though you do the installation. The box costs £299. Humax: 0870 247 8800

See, we said it was complicated, but the results – pin-sharp images of rain splashing off players’ faces and concerts where you feel you’re in the room – are definitely worth the trouble.

BBCi

This will be the World Cup when interactive TV comes into its own, especially on the BBC. By pressing the red button during the BBC’s games, you’ll be able, for example, to switch to Five Live’s commentary ,or watch what’s already happened in the match while still watching it live. Outside of live coverage you can enter the BBCi World Cup Zone, where there’ll be up-to-date features on England and highlights of every single match.

Broadband

For the first time UK users will be able to watch all of the BBC’s live matches and short highlights of the other games online. www.bbc.co.uk/worldcup