Month: October 2006
-
Copyright in Music
Technology Guardian has a front page piece on proposals to extend the lifespan of copyright on music, from 50 years to 95 years. Why 95 years? Well because that’s what it is in America. Actually, the real rush is because music recorded in the 1950s is now coming out of copyright and in 2012, in…
-
Mobile Data Costs
The failure of the BBC’s Dr Who mobisodes, with an average of just 3000 people downloading each episode, only further highlights the problem with mobile data in this country. As the Mediaguardian piece points out, despite the fact that episodes were offered free, they cost users between £1.50 and £2.00 each to download. The versions…
-
Newspaper Confusion
With the advent of two new free evening papers, the Evening Standard is finding it hard to compete. This week it’s offering a free DAB radio every night. A fine prize certainly, but not really in the realms of free cars every night that it’s managed in the past. But I digress. One of the…
-
Booker Prize on the Beeb
Last night, the Man Booker Prize was awarded Kiran Desai for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. And congratulations to her. But what was curious was the manner of its announcement. Yesterday I spent a short while scouring TV listings to find what channel it would be shown on. BBC2? Nope. Channel 4? Nope. BBC…
-
Blacklisted Writers on Robin Hood
A good piece on the Hollywood blacklisted writers who wrote for The Adventures of Robin Hood in Britain as the only way to continue working once Hollywood prevented them. The story is also well told in the TV film Fellow Traveller.
-
Radio Radio
This week’s Mediaguardian has two articles that are worth commenting on regarding radio. The first is a piece on the future of DAB. It focuses on the recent decision, since reversed, to lower the Radio 3 DAB bandwidth from 192kbps to 160kbps. A further drop in bit-rate occurs when either Radio 4 or Radio Five…
-
Horizon
OK – perhaps it’s still early days in the new series, but am I alone in being very slightly worried about Horizon? Last week it was The Survivors Guide to Plane Crashes, and this week it was Danny Wallace asking if Chimps are People Too. Now I like Danny Wallace, but this programme felt like…
-
Transatlantic News Values
Listening to this week’s On the Media on the way home today, it was suddenly very jarring to realise the real difference between US media and its British equivalent. In a piece about in-fighting between the English language Miami Herald and its sister newspaper El Nuevo Herald, one of the main differences between the papers…
-
Death of a President
The assassination of George W Bush as part of a new drama airing on More4 tonight. Some bright spark decided to buy a four-page wraparound ad for this programme – an ad-type that only a free newspaper would sell. Of course, someone might be mislead into believing that Bush really had been assassinated on first…
-
Out Stealing Horses
This novel won The Independent’s Foreign Fiction Prize earlier this year. Per Petterson is Norweigian (well – it’s a while since my last Scanidnavian title), and is very well regarded in his homeland. Out Stealing Horses is a wonderful novel telling the story of Trond, both as a child in 1948, just after the war…
-
The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
If you’re really quick, you can get this book from Penguin in 10 weekly paperback chunks for £25. They’re serlialising it in a Dickens manner, before publishing it in hardback in January (for less than £25). Obviously, if I’ve read the book, I’ve done none of these things – it was published in the States…
-
Digital TV Secrets
Torin Douglas writes an article in this week’s Marketing Week which pretty clearly explains the whole situation at the moment regarding digital TV. First of all he points out that one of the things most people don’t tell you is that many flat screen TVs aren’t as good as old cathode ray tubes. I still…