Gresham Bradley from eTV emailed me this information. He will talk about it all at Wednesday’s presentation:

We are in the middle of a major investment programme for eTV that has several steps:

First: All the recording technology being replaced. This work is underway now. You will get 24/7 recordings of all channels held for 7 days. This means that we will not miss any programmes which is what is currently happening due to machine failure, and staff will be able to ask us to keep programmes for a week after it was broadcast, so solving the inevitable “did not know I wanted it till I saw it” problem.

Second: More Live Channels, a Noticeboard system (MySchoolTV), a Live Events interactive page, a fully online Shop for content purchases into a Library Catalogue.

Third: A completely new User Interface to make all these new features work.

Fourth: The eTV code is being totally updated to enable many many more important features to be offered. Just one of these is online clipping of videos (think editing), another is vastly improved searches, much better metadata tied when available to the Closed Captions of programmes. There is lots more but I won’t go into it all here.

This means that all remedial work on the current eTV code is on hold. Including email alerts.

Max