Steve Litchfield

From 2013 until, arguably, today (2025), Google had a solution for every home without a fancy Internet-connected TV. So that's most people.  The idea was that you could 'cast' a video streaming app from your smartphone - Netflix, YouTube, BBC iPlayer, Prime Video, and so on, and Google's Chromecast gadget, plugged into an HDMI port on your otherwise 'dumb' TV, would handle the content and let you watch things on your much larger screen. On the face of it, users would think that it was their phone's app directly streaming the video content to the TV, and it's here that the misunderstanding occurred. You see, Chromecast was in fact a tiny Internet-connected and media-savvy computer in its own right and all the user phone/app was doing was passing a specific playback/streaming URL to the Chromecast, for it to handle playback from then on. So the user could then do other things on the phone, or even wander off for a walk and leave someone else watching, eve...

Well, maybe not . But certainly too old for The Gadget Show. You see, people keep saying that with my phone/smartphone expertise and style, I'd be a natural for The Gadget Show . And, content-wise they're absolutely right. But have you seen what they expect their presenters to do? Snow-boarding, hang-gliding, let's-see-how-dangerous-and-exciting we-can-make-this for each feature. Good example: they were testing multimedia smartphones. So was I. I did it in my home, in painstaking detail, every expense spared. They did it by shooting photos and video from aerobatic planes, no expense spared. Then there are the times when Jason and Suzi end up falling from bikes, rolling down hills or bungee-jumping off bridges. I'm sorry, but The Gadget Show is not for me. I'm 46 now, I'm starting to feel frailer than when I was Jason and Suzi's age (mid thirties?) and I have a feeling that if I started on The Gadget Show I'd end up with a broken hip...

I've had a (kind of) epiphany. Having used a PVR (Personal Video Recorder, a.k.a. a Hard Disk Recorder) for the last few years for my time shifting of TV, the PVR in question died a death and it was time to look for a replacement. Yet nothing of any reasonable price seemed to fit the bill and I was umming and ahhing for a while. And then my wife said 'Have you tried the new BBC iPlayer?' I hadn't, but I was fairly blown away. Any decent BBC programme (and let's face it, well over half the decent original new programmes are from the BBC) from the last seven days, available on demand? And all for free. Stunning. Was this the end of my search for a way to timeshift TV? Not quite, I didn't really want to sit in front of a computer to watch TV every time. But then came the news today that the BBC had introduced a version of iPlayer optimised for the Nintendo Wii. You'll recall that it has a reasonably up to date version of Opera (almost) built-in . So I tried it...