Tag: TV
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BT/UEFA Rights Deal
Last week, BT Chief Executive Gavin Patterson was reported as saying that “rampant inflation in sports rights” had to end. Today we learn that BT is going to pay £394m a season for UEFA Champions’ League and Europa League rights from the 2018/19 season, up from £299m a season under the previous agreement. By my…
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In Advance of The Nightly Show
This evening, ITV launches its big new entertainment gamble – The Nightly Show. They’ve taken over The Cochrane Theatre near Holborn, and for the next eight weeks they’ve also taken over The News At Ten’s slot. (Recall, this is the slot that only a year ago, the then Media, Culture and Sport Minister was wondering…
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Sneaky Pete
I only seem to write about television very occasionally these days. I suspect I struggle because there’s so much to catch up on at any given time, there’s no time left for writing. Sneaky Pete is a new series from Amazon Studios provided free to their Prime customers. The hook as far as Amazon is…
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Hans Rosling – Forming His World View on Facts; Not Feelings
In my recent RAJAR piece, I made reference to the sad news that Professor Hans Rosling had died. Rosling was a Swedish professor of global health, and had found fame in a series of videos and programmes – notably beginning with a widely shared TED talk – that elucidated stories behind data in a way…
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YouTube-ing
YouTube is a wonderful thing. From music, to how to’s, to clips from films and TV, to game walkthrough’s and a myriad of thousand other subjects. But I confess, that I’ve always struggled with the “YouTubers.” Now that’s not to say that there aren’t personality-driven YouTube videos that I watch. There are the guys at…
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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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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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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…