Category: TV
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Discovery and Sky Do a Deal
[A follow-up/continuation of the piece I wrote the other day about the fallout between Sky and Discovery in the UK and Germany.] On Sunday morning there was an epic final at the Australian Open. Somehow the top 8 men’s players in the world conspired not to make the final, and we got a “throwback” final…
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Sky/Discovery Carriage Dispute
Channel carriage disputes are relatively rare in the UK, but we’re in for a sizeable one right now, with Discovery publicly stepping forward and saying that from the end of this month, Sky subscribers may no longer get access to a Discovery channels. It seems that the two companies have been unable to reach agreement…
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Grand Tour
We’re several weeks into Amazon’s megabudget Top Gear remake, “Grand Tour,” and you can’t fail to have noticed it has arrived. There have been ads everywhere from the sides of buses to TV, and of course, all over the front page of the Amazon website. Even Amazon’s packaging covers their grinning faces right now. We’ve…
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Radio Times – Boxing Day 2016
So you’ve made it through to Boxing Day. Assuming you’re not hitting the shops for the sales, or off to some sporting or outdoors activity, you’ll be settling in at home looking for more entertainment. Here are my choices and anti-choices for Boxing Day from the Radio Times. As ever, click the link below to…
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Radio Times – Christmas Day 2016
Happy Christmas! It feels as though everyone and their mum has released a Christmas Message™ this year. However, I shall simply try my best to satisfy the nation’s TV watching by sharing once more pages from my copy of the Radio Times. Hopefully this will help you find some of the programmes the rest of…
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NFL on Twitter… in the UK
Earlier this year, Twitter signed a deal with the NFL to stream 10 Thursday Night Football games. They paid around $10m, and the NFL noted that theirs wasn’t the highest offer on the table. I’m not going to get into the whys and wherefores of Twitter’s strategy. For the NFL, it’s about reaching harder to…
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An Egregiously Bad Chart
The chart above is screen-grabbed from an otherwise excellent ITV4 documentary called When Football Changed the World. It looked at the state of the game as the old First Division broke away to form the Premier League at the end of the 80s and start of the 90s. It interviewed plenty of key figures from…
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Getting Burnt
The whole fallout over the failure of the BBC and Love Productions to agree a deal over future series of The Great British Bake-Off is fascinating. The series started as a run-of-the-mill weekday evening BBC2 cooking competition show, where it was essentially one of many. Yet it morphed into a beast that became the biggest…
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The Music Industry As Depicted in TV Dramas
We may currently being experiencing peak TV, but even that doesn’t really explain the recent glut of TV series set around the music industry. A couple of weeks ago, Netflix’s new magnum opus was released – The Get Down from Baz Luhrmann. The series is rumoured to have cost a record amount, at least on…
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John Oliver on Brexit
On Sunday night, HBO in the US aired a new episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. The second half of the show was a long explanation/opinion piece from Oliver about what Brexit is (this is a show aimed at Americans after all), and was essentially a 15 minute piece imploring Britain to Vote…
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Euro 2016 – Staying on TV
As Euro 2016 kicks off in France tonight, my inbox has become flooded with nonsense PR stories. My email address has recently been sold to a number of PR agencies and I get a wide variety of emails asking me if I’m interested in writing about things I’m not interested in writing about. I silently…
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Watching European Football Finals on TV
Well the first results are in. BT is very pleased that BT Sport got a record audience on Wednesday night for the Europa League Final – the first big final of their three year exclusive contract for UEFA Champions’ League and Europa League coverage. According to Media Guardian, it drew an average of 1.6m viewers…