Month: June 2008

  • AM-FM Broadcasting is ‘A Form of Piracy’

    Here’s a remarkable story from Wired. It refers to ongoing talks in the US where the record industry is trying to make the radio industry pay royalties to singers and musicians. Unlike the UK, where both songer writers and the performing artists separately get paid by radio stations, in the US only the songwriters get…

  • I Think I’m Being Watched

    You’d think that this was an incredibly ironic statement on our society, but if it is, it must have passed TFL by. You can see the original work here – it’s part of an exhibition called About 60 Miles of Beautiful Views by Anna Barriball. The phrases in the series come from the back of…

  • Digital Radio Working Group – Interim Report

    If you’re at all interested in the future of radio in this country – then you might want to read this interim report which has just shown up on the DCMS website. In summary there are two sets of key things to take from this: – DAB should become the primary platform for all national,…

  • Wimbledon Live Online

    So today is the start of Wimbledon, and as ever, the BBC has enormously comprehensive coverage. On digital TV they have the exceptional service that allows you to pick and choose which game you watch, and this is all replicated online (for UK users). Five Live and Five Live Sports Xtra have commentaries available throughout…

  • TV Tonight

    The Guardian’s blog has one of those impossible discussions at the moment about how terrible TV is these days. In terms of quanity there’s undoubtedly more dross to be found. But I can remember when we only had four channels – or even three – and there was still rubbish. But it was dull rubbish…

  • Product Placement

    Mark Kermode of Five Live and The Culture Show has a great rant about Sex and the City, exposing it for the product placement-fest that it is. And product placement is only growing in films. It’s long been accepted in the Bond films, but since The Matrix every blockbuster has done a mobile phone deal,…

  • Are You Paying PPL?

    Great story about a craftsman who just likes to listen to the radio while he works.

  • Cliq

    UBC today announced that it was closing down the phone service Cliq while it continues to look towards “connected” radios which will become available later in the year for its future business model. Cliq worked by installing a JAVA app on your mobile that used the data network. The service monitored the output of 28…

  • The Death of TV Reviewers

    There have been a couple of pieces recently wondering about why we’re losing TV critics in our national newspapers. Ray Snoddy in Marketing magazine wrote about it last week following the ditching of daily TV reviews by the Daily Telegraph. He noted that the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail have also ditched them.…

  • The Incredible Hulk

    Back in 2003 one of my favourite directors, Ang Lee, gave us Hulk, a film that I never saw. It’s not that I don’t like superhero films – I’ve probably seen most of them. But I’d heard so much negative press about it that I just couldn’t bring myself to see it. Anyway, it didn’t…

  • Dave’s Success

    As the sale of Virgin Radio nears completion, thoughts turn to the rebranding exercise to be carried out by Albion. One of the most obvious, and spectacularly successful media rebrands of recent years was that of UK TV G2 into Dave which took place back in October 2007. I wrote a piece on Dave’s success…

  • Anybody Fancy An Ice Cream?

    It’s June and a nice day. Who wouldn’t fancy an ice cream?