At noon on Wednesday, Eurosport 2 will make its tentative steps into the world of eSports coverage, showing ahalf-hour programme about the Intel Extreme Masters tournament.

Or, more accurately, it will continue it as it will be the third time it's getting an airing.

The programme is part of a six episode series, and Wednesday's will either be the first or second episode to air- the information available to me is a little ambiguous, the EPG and the IEM site say it will be the second episode, centreing on Quake Live players at this year's Gamescom, while the schedule on the Eurosport website implies that it will be the first, covering Starcraft players in Shanghai.

Whichever episode it is, if you miss it on Wednesday, there may be another chance to see it on Eurosport 1 on the 28th at 1AM, which will also air in Glorious High Definition™, and it will also be available on the channel's video on demand service for a few days.

Digital Spy reports that the broadcaster's on demand service will be coming to the Sony console.

This news comes shortly after Channel 4 announce their plans to join the system.

German viewers can look forward to anime station Animax, Finns get the more generalist YLE Areena, and TV3, Yahoo and NOS are to be made available for "other regions".

Looks like we're getting a new, free to play entry into the popular RTS series as Microsoft announces Age of Empires Online.

The game looks to be much the same as the Age of Empires of Old, albeit with a new, cartoony graphical style.


There's a website up for the game, which happily confirms that Robot Entertainment, the studio formed from the remnants of original AoE developer Ensemble, are on development duties, although the beta sign-up page worrisomely asks if you're played Farmville or Mafia Wars, amongst a handful of RTS titles.

The press release says the game will feature "A persistent online capitol city" and "Cooperative multiplayer quests", although doesn't confirm the inclusion of the most memorable feature from when I used to play multiplayer AoE, where everyone else has to chase my solitary villager around the map for six hours.