Category: Media
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Four Months In – Many Politicians are Still ‘Zooming’ Badly
I posted a Twitter thread on this subject earlier, but I thought it was worth exploring a little more here. This morning I was watching BBC Breakfast, and Louise Minchen was interviewing Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds from his home constituency in Torfaen. What I couldn’t get over was the poor resolution of Thomas-Symonds’…
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Micropayments and Transaction Fees
Yesterday I wrote about my frustration that every news outlet that doesn’t want to – or more likely can’t – rely on advertising alone, wants to push me down a subscription route. I said that I am basically maxed out as far as news subscriptions go right now. I’d like a pay-as-you-go offering, much as…
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News Subscriptions – and the Lack of Alternatives
I’m a bit of a news junkie. I always have been. I read a newspaper each day – and spend a lot of time online reading lots and lots of stories from lots and lots of sites. I might regularly have 60+ Chrome tabs open on my browser full of long reads that I’m planning…
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HBO Max in the UK… Or Not
Yesterday AT&T held an event called WarnerMedia Day that largely detailed the launch plans for their new streaming service HBO Max, which builds off the successful HBO. So lots of announcements of how you’ll be able to see Friends episodes and watch the new Game of Thrones sequel on their platform. From a UK perspective…
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Further Apple TV+ Thoughts
This Friday Apple TV+ launches globally. In the UK, the PR launch is already well underway. Stars from some of the first tranche of Apple shows have been made available to various media outlets – Jason Malmoa was on Graham Norton for example. And there has been an absolute blitz of outdoor advertising for the…
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RIP Flixster
At the start of this year I noted that buying a digital movie or TV series in the UK was an absolute mess. You can buy movies or TV series from a number of sites including: iTunes, Google Play Movies, Amazon, Sky Store and Rakuten. But if you buy something in one of those places,…
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BritBox
ITV plc has just reported its annual results, and it was for that reason that we got the announcement of BritBox pretty much simultaneously. Because, from the careful phrasing the in the press release, you can tell that the deal hasn’t quite been done and that there is a final bit of finessing to do:…
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The Desperate Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is not doing well right now. It only sells 363,000 paid copies of the printed paper, having long since been overtaken by The Times. Despite being one of the earliest news providers in the UK to have a web presence – eTelegraph anyone? – it feels somehow left behind now. Titles like…
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Digital Movie Libraries in the UK
Buying a digital movie or TV series in the UK is an utter mess. You can buy movies or TV series from a number of sites including: iTunes, Google Play Movies, Amazon, Sky Store and Rakuten. But if you buy something in one of those places, you can only watch it via that company’s app…
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Netflix Viewing Figures
Bird Box is Susanne Bier’s Netflix film the streaming service released just before Christmas. It stars Sandra Bullock as a mother who has to protect her children from an unseen entity. Furthermore, if she (or others) see it themselves, they are done for. Think of it as a visual companion to A Quiet Place. I enjoyed it well enough,…
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The Death of MoviePass?
A few months ago, I tried to work out what the business model of MoviePass (and putative UK equivalent cPass) might be. I concluded that the operators were going to need very deep pockets, and there was absolutely no certainty that the model works. And that seems to have been an accurate prediction. The service…
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Is IP TV Really Ready for Primetime?
Last night YouTube TV went down for an hour. That’s not YouTube the platform, but the premium TV service that YouTube offers customers in the US a range of broadcast TV channels in exchange for a monthly fee. The service went down right in the middle of the England v Croatia World Cup semi-final in…
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Marketing TV
If you’re a TV channel and you’ve got a new show you want to tell people about, it should be relatively simple. You make a trailer or two for it, and then you run that trailer around programmes that the audience for the new show are already watching. You might want to be a bit…