Tag: amazon
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Premier League Rights 2025/26 – 2028/29 UK TV Deal
This evening, the first games in Amazon’s deal for TV rights to two rounds of the Premier League get underway. But Amazon’s coverage ends after next season’s Festive period games, because from the 2025/26 season, they will no longer have live rights. Amazon, you will recall, have the rights to a midweek round of games…
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The Dark Ages of Film History?
I was recently talking to a some colleagues at work about one of my favourite films of all time, the classic Howard Hawks screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby. Made in 1938, it stars two of Hollywood’s biggest ever stars, Kathryn Hepburn and Cary Grant, both giving terrific performances in a classic of the genre. How…
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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…
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Faster, Faster, Faster!
There was a Buzzfeed piece recently, exploring those people who listen to podcasts at super-fast speed. I don’t just mean 1.2x or something, but some of them listen at 3x speed or even faster. Elsewhere, a Guardian writer thanked Netflix for allowing him to skip all the intros to TV series and the ability to…
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Premier League TV Rights – 2019-2022
The new Premier League TV rights auction for the UK has just got under way, with bids due in at the end of January, and the results announced in early February. Such are the scale of these rights now, that the announcement tends to be made to accommodate the stock market. If a PLC is…
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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…
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BBC Store is closing; Streaming v Ownership
Back in 2015 I took a look at the then new BBC Store. It had opened in a blaze of publicity after a relatively long gestation period. Visitors could buy to own BBC catalogue programmes as well as some of the latest dramas and comedies. Since then, announcers have mentioned the ability to buy programmes…
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The Perils of Alexa!
This story started earlier today when I got a notification from Amazon’s mobile app that my order of a Lost in Translation DVD had been sent out for delivery. What? It’s a wonderful film, but I hadn’t ordered a copy. Indeed, I already own it on DVD. I was confused, and a little worried. Was…
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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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Amazon Echo – A Longer Term Test
I bought my Amazon Echo on its official UK release back in September last year. I wrote about it at the time, but I thought it might be worth checking back in here to see exactly how I’m using it. Right off the top, I’ll note here that I use Alexa multiple times a day,…
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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…