Playr's still on: It's just moved to a channel called Film24, which is only available on Satellite (Channel 157), with new episodes at the much more sensible time of 6PM on a Saturday.

If you can't get at the channel, then they put the episodes up on their YouTube channel here.

That doesn't take into account the advertising spend on the BBC's commercial arm, which owns a major stake in UKTV, advertising purchased during BBC programmes on other channels they don't own (eg Comedy Central), as well as the numerous commercial stations the BBC owns internationally ( http://www.bbcworldwide.com/channels.aspx ) and their other, non-broadcast commercial ventures such as websites and magazines, which are both massively advertising funded- all of which have to turn a profit and return funding back up to the corporation, in order to offset the cost of the licence fee- suddenly it's all a lot less 'clear and more honest'.

The licence fee offers nothing that 'proper' subscription television would not- and subscriptions would be, if anything, much fairer, since you would at least have the option of opting out of one network while still contributing to the next, something you can't currently do with the BBC.

I have no specific qualms with the bulk of the BBC, certainly none that can't be waved away as 'personal preference', but it's not the shining, exempt-from-criticism awesomeclump people claim the licence fee makes it.

[Double post]

A lot of people tend to focus too much on the Wiimote when it comes to casual-friendly controllers, which I think is a bit short sighted- Wii may be the noisy poster child for Casual Gaming, that TV likes to point at as a fun new world and the hardcore like to point at as ruining games forever, but it's the quiet success of the DS, which despite higher unit sales sees neither the mainstream attention or the niche derision of its wagglier brother, that we should be looking at.

What has made DS truly successful is its range of software- and I'm of the opinion that this has come about by being, for want of a better term, 'core first'. The DS comes complete with not only the same buttons its predecessor, the GBA, did but also two more, so is able to support games lifted directly from GBA designs, with added stylus-work. (For example: Advance Wars: Dual Strike) which introduces button veterans to stylus control, and more importantly, introduces developers to designing and programming for the stylus- this has allowed not only a core market to build up, (distracting from the casual selection, unlike on Wii) but also devcos to take this experience and use it to build their pure-stylus casual output- something that hasn't been available for Wii, everyone having being thrown straight into the motion control deep end.

With that in mind, we can also expect it to work backwards- if, let's say Spirit Tracks (stylus-led hybrid controls) can capture only a portion of the Layton (pure stylus) brigade then the ball is starting to roll.

Bringing it back to home consoles, Microsoft has gone to a number of lengths, probably not to alienate the lucrative Halo crowd, to point out that using Natal doesn't mean that a traditional controller can't be used in tandem- if developers play it smart and take the DS route, then there's a good chance that it's Natal, and not the Wiimote, that will be host to the real 'gateway' games.

That's a valid point, and I think it also solves the issue of a lack of interesting formats- Games Night, which was a discussion programme, performed better than Playr (review show) does now, despite being in a much more (for want of a better word) hostile environment- Playr's current channel has a much more full and diverse schedule than Games Night's ever did, and only had a new episode every fortnight, where Playr is weekly.