iP3K

Illico is the brand name of the digital TV service offered by Vidéotron. This company is located in Québec and is a pretty serious cable provider that offers television, Internet, phone and even cellular service. Two years ago I took their service for regular phone and have been pleased by it ever since. I don’t talk much on the phone myself but my parents don’t seem to complain at all. The transition was seamless to them. I also had their Internet service for a long time but got sick of the bandwidth cap and paying extra charges for those.

When it comes to television I decided to try it out and see what’s on TV. To my surprise there is not much out there. I got used to have my shows over the Internet, in a way I could pause and check them whenever I wanted. For that I should of purchased a PVR (personal video recorder) from them… I don’t see the point of paying some extra for a functionality I could get elsewhere. Until now, what I truly enjoy is their On demand service, where you can rent shows or movies and play them as a DVD. Then again I have no interest in paying each time I want to watch something. I guess I’ve been spoiled a bit. All that taken in consideration, the only reason that motivated me to pay cable is to get a foot inside to see what’s on television. Hopefully the day I’ll buy and HDTV the transition shouldn’t be too hard.

Vidéotron gives you a wide variety of channels and on the pricing they let you customize the programming so you could pay a minimal price and still get the channels you really watch. Overall, even someone with all the channels will find a few moments where there is nothing interesting. When it comes down to it I watch a bit of G4techTV, and a lot of shows over the web.

Last week was the long awaited return of Heroes on NBC. This week’s episode was highly anticipated as it was advertised as a chance to see the five years into the future. What would happen if the heroes would fail?

The episode starts with Ando and Hiro inside Isaac loft, in a devastated New York and rather post-apocalyptic New York. The bomb did explode and destroy half the city. People with special abilities are now being hunted down out of fear. Sylar appears to be publicly held responsible for the disaster but Hiro (present and future) are determined to change time. Strange twist is that many characters are absent, dead or killed during the episode. Mr Bennet, with the help of Hana are helping people with special abilities get new identities and go underground. Matt is now head of Home Land security and answers directly to Nathan, now President of the United States of America.

From early trailers his attitude seemed very strange, especially towards Claire and how condescending his view of the others was. Present Hiro is taken captive and under wraps by Matt and the Haitian. I was looking forward Peter using his abilities and we got to see a little bit of his potential, but we’re still far from a show-down. The show wouldn’t be that great if Nathan turned into a bad guy, instead it turns out that Sylar had found Candice and was able to impersonate Nathan. No better position to round up people with special abilities and pick all the abilities he wants. His painting of the future that he drawn in last week episode was foreshadowing a mean looking Nathan, for myself I saw it looking as Sylar himself in the White House.

No need to be too sad about that episode, everything can still change. Just like future Hiro was able to tell Peter to save the cheerleader altered his reality (perhaps). Hiro has tried to kill Sylar but he could regenerate then. He can’t do that in our time line, so during the last few seconds of the episode Hiro and Ando manage to return to their time line in hopes to prevent this horrible future to happen. There was a quick scene where Peter and Sylar meet, fire versus ice and a Mohinder trying to block a door about to explode. I can imagine the budget for a show down has to be saved for the two hours finale. Only three episodes left! The pace is kicking and the show still sends out that vibe: it’s a dark world we live in, people will do good and evil. I loved the episode. I’ll make sure to watch it again.

I don’t know how many people like myself don’t have cable at home, nor satellite TV. I’ve been living off over the air program which gives you a fair selection of shows. None the less it’s not like there are a lot of interesting things on TV and that I wouldn’t have the time to watch it much. A while back I touted the great Open Source program called Democracy, it let’s you subscribe to downloadable shows that are completely free. There is something for every taste but here are a few that I like (as a tech savvy person) it’s mostly technology shows and game shows.

DL.TV, Diggnation, IGN Weekly, The Totally Rad Show, Lab Rats, On the Spot, inDigital, CNet TV, and X-Play. These shows are weekly editions for the most but to get a better idea of their schedule you should follow the links to their website. The best way to enjoy videos on the web is to aggregate them in one place. This way you don’t have to jump from a website to an other. In my case I use these shows RSS feeds that give a link for the download as well as information about the episode. Democracy can be set up to automatically download the shows. This way you have a free TV on Demand on your computer (if you have the right set up you can send the image to a nearby TV, like I do). The shows are usually free but they are sponsored which is a good bargain for free.

One thing I found to be unexpected is how you quickly have those models take over the Internet, just like your huge TV stations like FOX, NBC or Global, many video cast affiliate themselves to a larger brand to create the equivalent of a channel. Big networks like CNet, Revision3 or Ziff Davis are a few owners of several IPTV shows I watch. So any day you’re bored with what you have on the small screen, head over to a smaller one (relative) to get your fix.

When stumbled upon the news yesterday I did not know what Sanctuary was all about. All I needed to know to grab my attention was to see that this Internet based TV series starred Amanda Tapping. The show seems to be centered around a web community where you can get involved in creating the series that uses “stunning visual effects, video game technology and cutting edge web design”. Their website lauched at SanctuaryForAll.com and it was advertised to have an all new trailer available. If you want to see it in it’s full HD glory you’ll need to signup for a account to download or view the trailer but thanks to YouTube you can get a quick glimpse of the trailer right here, right now. First up a bunch of screenshots, then the trailer. What to look for; more Stargate cast member, a few monsters here and there, gun fire and a lot of fighting. Imagine a mix of Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Torchwood all at once. Enjoy!

I have to say that the finale for season two of Prison Break, breaks my heart. I’ll get on with some of the things I’ve been looking at for the past few weeks. I don’t feel the same vibe there was in the first season, I saw the show going into a very strange direction. I like the way Michael handle things, how he planned everything and how his plan to escape slowly unfolded. I also thought he was pretty good to react to new situations where he had nothing planned. All this is very good until now, but I’ve been annoyed by the jumps and hoops they need to go through all the time, he’s free, but she’s guilty, he’s got proof but the proof dies or is not valid. What I though to be brilliant at first, a conspiracy theory is just starting to get in the way of the story.

I’ll go ahead and say that Sona is the worse cliff hanger I could of imagined for a series like Prison Break. There has been some rumors over the Internet that the series might get a new name for the third season but as the final episode unfolded you started to see that the characters are all being stacked in a Panamanian prison. The good thing, the only thing that saved the episode for me is when I saw the name of the prison Mahone and Scofield where sent to: Sona. It’s been mentioned earlier in the episode by the “mute” man, the one who seems to be giving orders concerning “the company’s” business. I should be happy the season came to an end but I really don’t see how they can crank back the show to what made it great in the first place. For the love of God, how can you end a season with your main character walking in the unknown bathed in a white light! You don’t know what’s happening and you have little room to speculate on theories…

In the end, season is no where as good as the first season was and I never expected the show to even last this long. I really thought they would escape at episode 13 of season 1, they got this far and for this I salute them!

It’s like it’s been only yesterday that we were set in a New Caprica occupied by the Cylons. The third season of Battlestar Galactica arrived to an end last Sunday. I haven’t got to write about the series in a long time but it’s still very close to my heart, along side the Stargate and Heroes. This series has always been a roller coaster ride of emotions, action and scifi goodness. The finale met my expectations for the series to return to it’s root and surprise us at every turn. The promos leading to the conclusion of Baltar’s trial and the reveal of the final five Cylons. Oh yes! You heard right, there are even more Cylons that even the models we know now don’t know about! I have to say this cliff hanger is much more soothing than the end of first season where the life of one of our protagonist was at sake.

Now for the one liners recaps, Baltar is freed for his accusations as Lee pleads that the trial is built on emotion and that many in the fleet made mistakes before and were all forgiven but him. Gaeta is really turning it to be bitter as he lied on the stance about Gaius signing a death warrant. The really good part is when they make a jump to a new system where they are to find yet an other clue to get to Earth.

What’s that? Florida you say? No way they can’t get to Earth so fast, hopefully it’s just a shot and it doesn’t mean what you think. At best we can say that it does exist and it’s not just one big joke. All I can say that you are surprised and shock by who end up being the final five Cylons and how they react to it. Remember after Boomer realized she was a Cylon? Kinda of assasain waiting to be unleashed. It’s going to take 10 months before we get more answers, if you haven’t seen the finale yet you better find a way to see it, it was brilliant.

A new exciting chapters of NBC’s new hit show Heroes was unveiled. There is some cheating involved in my review because as a Canadian viewer I got to see the show last night at 9PM (Global) and it will air on NBC only tonight for US residents. The past few weeks of the show have been the most intense of the bunch and I wondered for how long they could keep pumping the adrenaline like thins. Reading my previous posts concerning the show will let you know that I’ve been swept off my feet every week since this story was unfolded. Beware of some spoilers in the following of this post.

This episode, formerly known as “Like Any Parasite” was advertised as the one where we would finally see the face of Mr. Linderman, a name associated with the mystery since the very first episode, and unveiling his identity did not help simplify the story because they didn’t loose any time introducing new elements. Let’s take for example Claire that decides running away and hiding is not her piece of cake, she decides to part with the Haitian and try to find Peter Petrelli. But little she knows that Peter and Isaac are in over their head with the incident with a certain gun that left one of the story’s main character for dead. HRG’s story line takes a bad twist as he is left with no memories of where Claire could be, but “the company” keeps a very close eye on him and his family. In addition, Hiro gets to find the sword (not a replica this time) and he meets back with Ando in the most surprising television magic twist I’ve seen!

Mohinder, Zane aka Sylar and Peter get together for some tea and everyone gets their share of revenge over past events. Yet again, the previews spoke true words. “An other one of those incredible endings”. We’re getting closer to a Winter Finale as the season will take a second break before concluding the first season, also called Volume One by Tim Kring, creator of the series. Chapter 18 was not the most heart pumping episode, but the story keeps drawing you back in.

One last note; in show advertisement is so funny. Micah and Jessica are playing a video game and it happens to be Heavenly Sword on the PS3, and yes; you get a good look at the game console!

What best then a major deal to break the news to the world. It’s been a few days now that I’ve added a promo banner at the bottom left of the blog and it’s going to be there for a little while. Now joining the ranks of Opera, Skype and Ubuntu; Joost is the new name given to the formerly known The Venice Project. At first it was about sharing, then about talking for free, now you can watch for free. The new Joost platform allows content to be watched on PC or Mac with Linux coming soon. There is not much to say about it just yet, they’ve got a lot of nice programming to entertain you. Thanks to the recent buzz Joost signed a deal with Viacom, meaning there will be ties with Paramount, MTV, BET and Comedy Central. They boast themselves as providers of premium content and they are definitely delivering. Keep your eyes on the blog for invites as soon as I get some, or even more details as soon as I read back that non-disclosure agreement you have to accept each time you load the beta program. They’ve reached version 0.8 and we could expect a final version not too far out. Visit Joost.com for some more info on the program.