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Owners of the Humax Foxsat HD and the Foxsat HDR Freesat set top boxes will be able to access the highly desirable BBC iPlayer through the red button on the remote control.

However before the viewer can use this service a little bit of planning will be needed, as the set top box needs to be connected to the home broadband router via an Ethernet connection.

This is easy if the router is near the TV and set top box.

When a network connection is made the viewer simply has to press the red button and select the BBC iPlayer from the menu.

This is good feature, allowing the viewer to access the BBC iPlayer without the need for a computer and allowing them to watch the catch up TV service in the main television screen.

Sharp will be releasing the first versions of its new Freeview HD set top boxes towards the end of April.

Naturally, one of these machines will be a personal video recorder (PVR) but unusually it will offer a USB port as an additional storage connection.

The Sharp TU T1UR, which comes with three USB ports, allows the consumer to connect external hard drives, flash drives and SD card adapters into the unit.

However, it seems that it will not playback content that has been loaded from a computer, making movie downloads slightly awkward to watch.

The set top boxes connect to either HD Ready or standard definition television via the HDMI or SCART ports.

The PVR unit comes with an eight day electronic programme guide (EPG), allowing the user the record, pause and rewind live TV.

There is no word on pricing so far.

Households in the West TV region that are still watching television via an analogue signal have only two weeks to switchover to a digital TV service or face missing out initially on BBC 2 and, after BBC 2 is switched off, the entire analogue signal will soon be switched off.

This will affect any home that has not made provision to switchover to a digital television service from the Freeview, Freesat, satellite or cable services available in the area.

According to the latest research, around ninety per cent of households are already receiving their television through a digital TV service, but that still leaves ten per cent of all homes in the area that have not made arrangements for a digital TV service.

Even those households with a digital service like Freeview will need to retune, after which they may find additional channels from other regions are available.

With the prospect of a General Election brewing the leaders of the main political parties have to get themselves in front of as many people as possible.

This can make a lot of difference to how the voters see these leaders and ultimately could affect the outcome of the election.

So what better place to start for the PM than the BBC’s Match of the Day football highlights show.

The PM is a football fan, even if his team is Raith Rovers, so getting on the couch with Adrian Chiles on a Sunday evening would do his election bid no harm at all.

Unfortunately for the PM his plans were “Red Carded” by the show’s producers because it was considered to be unfair in the run up to an election.

Microsoft officially launched the MSN Video Player today.

This is a service said to rival that of the BBC iPlayer but in reality these are two different services altogether.

The BBC iPlayer offers the user a catch up service of programmes that have been shown during the previous week, but the MSN Video Player offers thousands of hours of popular TV shows from different producers.

The service has been tested for around six months and appears to be aimed at a younger audience with shows such as Skins, Peep Show and Wife Swap heading up the service.

One difference that is clear with the MSN Video Player is that the viewer will be able to watch an entire series of a particular show, even though the choice is slightly limited at the moment.

Music on YouTube has been a big hit in the US, with viewings for the month of January increasing by fifty per cent according to the US-based tracker service comScore.

The figures throw up some interesting facts about the market, with 173.3 million internet user watching a staggering 32.4 billion videos.

YouTube is the top provider of this service, while it is closely followed by Hulu with Microsoft and Yahoo coming in at third and fourth place respectively.

The YouTube figure shows that, on average, each user watched ninety four videos over the month, which just goes to show the extent of the online video coverage.

These stats are very impressive by anybody’s standards.