Category: TV
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Is Bandersnatch the Future of Television?
No. No, it’s not. Bandersnatch is the recently released episode of Black Mirror from Charlie Brooker available on Netflix. It takes the form of a choose your own adventure book/game and I loved it! In many respects, this episode ticked just about every box for me. It was set in the eighties, in and around writing…
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Eleven Sports in the UK Reported to be in Trouble
I wrote something on Twitter about this, but thought I’d elaborate a little here too. There was something of a shake-up in rights prior to the start of this football season when newcomer Eleven Sports entered the UK market and snapped up rights from Sky (La Liga) and BT Sport (Serie A and UFC) amongst…
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Sporting Value
The new Premier League season is well under way, and it’s at this time of year that the big sports TV players tend to gather up their marketing spends and splash the cash around, trying to persuade those of us who don’t subscribe that we really should be. BT Sport has an entertaining video of…
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Succession
I’ve been keenly awaiting Succession for a while. It comes from Jesse Armstrong who created Peep Show and more recently has done a lot of work with Armando Ianucci on things like The Thick of It and Veep, the latter being from HBO as this is. What’s interesting is that, simplistically, this is a fictionalised…
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Virgin Media and UKTV (And ITV) – Continuation
On my commute to work this morning, I saw a digital outdoor sign advertising a programme on Yesterday. I can’t recall the programme, but I can tell you that at the bottom, a large blue strap had added “Not available on Virgin Media.” Things are ramping up in Virgin Media and UKTV’s dispute. The Guardian…
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Virgin Media and UKTV
We seem to be in the middle of a real old-school rights agreement brouhaha at the moment. Virgin Media has just removed all UKTV’s channels from its platform after what we must assume was a lengthy period where the two parties failed to meet terms. UKTV is 50% owned by the BBC, and 50% owned…
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Radio is Fastest
If you wanted to know what was happening in Moscow as fast as possible last night, your best bet was the radio. I’ve mentioned before that when a big fixture goes to penalties, I always listen on the radio, because I get the news first. More regularly, if there’s a match that’s both being covered…
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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…
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Sexist Coverage of the World Cup
No, I am not talking about Patrice Evra’s applauding of fellow ITV pundit and England footballer Eniola Aluko (nor his muttered “no clapping” moan in a subsequent match). Nor am I talking about the various people who are upset that women deign to commentate on a football match. (Incidentally, “Remote Controller” in the new issue…
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Televising The World Cup Around the World
Two media stories which have interested me a lot about the World Cup so far. In the UK, we’re fortunate to still have Ofcom’s Listed Events. This is a list of sports events that are considered national events, and must be available to audiences free-to-air. Despite various attempts to either redefine the list, or scrap…
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The Complications of Streaming
I was as disappointed as many fans were when SF series, The Expanse, was cancelled by SyFy in the US a couple of months ago. Outside the US, the show airs on Netflix (on a six month delay), but it was Amazon that revived the series. Non-US viewers like me were left wondering whether Netflix…
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World Cup 2018 TV Coverage – A Few Early Thoughts
We’re only a short period into the third day of this World Cup, and we’ve already been lucky enough to see a World Cup classic in the Portugal v Spain fixture. That had it all, and although I really don’t like Diego Costa, and I really really don’t like Cristiano Ronaldo, I do recognise class…