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Category: TV

  • Premier League Football Rights – Addendum

    Four months after the winners of the main TV packages for the 2019-2022 Premier League domestic football rights were announced, the final two packages have now finally been sold with Amazon and BT picking up the “remnants.” First a reminder that previously Sky and BT essentially maintained the status quo in this rights period, while…

  • Bulletproof

    Oh dear. Sky One’s big new glossy action drama is pretty awful. Before I explain why, I will admit that I’m not the target audience for this show. But nevertheless, this show is just all over the place. Bulletproof is trying to be a 2018-vintage action cop show set in London. Imagine The Sweeney or…

  • Winding Down Local TV

    In the dim and distant past of 2011, Jeremy Hunt, then Culture Secretary, kicked off “Local TV.” “For consumers, what this will mean is a new channel dedicated to the provision of local news and content,” he said. In due course, he saw through the legislation to create a series of local TV services. This…

  • Netflix: $8 Billion and 700 NEW Shows?

    How much programming is Netflix actually making? The answer is a lot, but I think that the widely reported numbers are a little misleading. Heavily retweeted earlier today was this: Wow. Fact of the day: Netflix plans to spend $8bn on content this year. That’s roughly 700 (!) new series and 80 films. Shows how…

  • On Sky Q, Netflix and BARB

    Note: This is a subject likely to be of even more niche interest than many of my other blogs here. You have been warned! Yesterday Sky announced that it had reached agreement with Netflix to add Netflix to their Sky Q platform. What this means is that Netflix programmes will appear within the wider Sky…

  • Premier League Rights Update

    Yesterday evening came news that the bulk of the Premier League packages for 2019-2022 have been sold to the incumbents, Sky and BT. But revenues are actually down this time around. Sky is paying less than it was previously for a package of 128 matches across the year, both in overall terms, and in the…

  • No Sense of an Ending

    Warning: This piece contains spoilers for the 2014 series Amber, 2014 series The Missing and 2018 series Kiri. There has been a trend in recent years for drama series to give is slightly more nuanced endings than we have sometimes expected. Perhaps all the questions haven’t been answered. Perhaps its unclear by the end, which…

  • Programmes I Know I Should Have Seen But Haven’t – Stuck in Draft #6

    Here’s a slightly enlarged piece I wrote back in 2015 or so, but never got around to finishing. So I’ve had a bit more of a bash at it, but still feel it makes the grade as part of my Stuck in Draft series. In David Lodge’s Changing Places, the English faculty play a game…

  • The Olympics: Celebrating Success or Jingoism? – Stuck in Draft #2

    I wrote this over a year ago, and never quite got around to publishing it. Hence it now forms part of my Stuck in Draft series. And so another Olympics have concluded and from where I sit it has been a success. Let me clarify that a little. Team GB has undoubtedly been successful. But…

  • TV News Channels – Political Pawns

    In the last few days, both Sky News and CNN have become tangentially embroiled in ongoing media takeovers. In both cases, there could be an impact on their longterm futures to a greater or lesser extent. In the UK, 21st Century Fox is trying to takeover complete ownership of BSkyB. In a response to the…

  • Facebook, Amazon and the Premier League

    It’s nearly time for the money-go-round… sorry, merry-go-round, that is the Premier League rights auction for seasons 2019/20-2021/22. We’ve just started the second season of the current deal where Sky and BT between them have spent £5.1bn for the current round of rights. Recall that last time around, this represented a colossal 71% increase in…

  • Diversity in Media – Measuring Social Class

    On Sunday I wrote a piece on Ofcom’s Diversity in Television report, and in particular, noted my disappointment that it didn’t measure social class. The feedback I got can basically be summed up with the question: “Yes, but how do you measure class?” So I thought it was worth exploring the issue a bit further.…

  • Diversity in UK Media – Ofcom’s Report Doesn’t Go Far Enough

    Last week Ofcom published the first in what it says will be a regular series of reports into diversity and equal opportunities in television. It focuses on the biggest UK television broadcasters: BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Sky and Viacom (owner of Channel 5 amongst others). Diversity remains a key concern in the media industry, from…