Tag: streaming

  • Netflix and Disney

    Last week came news that Disney would be pulling its movies from Netflix at the end of the current arrangement, and that Disney would in future launch its own streaming service. This licensing agreement generated a vast amount of coverage, much of it ill-informed, and ignoring wider issues in the market. There are a few…

  • 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…

  • The End of Digital Downloads?

    That’ll teach me for writing this too quickly. I based this on a Digital Music News report which was published Wednesday evening UK time. A few hours later, and ReCode was reporting that Apple is planning no such thing. Of course plans change all the time, and record labels can get angry. So who knows…

  • BBC Store – Initial Thoughts

    After much ballyhoo, the BBC Store is finally with us, and well, um, it sells downloads and streams. You buy episodes rather than rent them – although the prices are much of a muchness really with television. And then you play them back via the web, or in due course, mobile apps. To be honest,…

  • The Joys of Online Streaming Sports

    Picture the scene. You’re travelling and Twitter tells you that the final rugby World Cup quarter final is a tight affair. There are just minutes left, and a single score could send the match either way. The final “northern hemisphere” side are fighting to stay in the competition. You fire up ITV Player on your…

  • How Should Spotify Pay For Its Music?

    Yesterday I got into a bit of a discussion with James Cridland on Facebook about the rights and wrongs of how services like Spotify distribute their revenues. And I thought it was worth sharing and expanding on some of my thoughts on the matter. This comes off the back of a Medium piece from Sharky…

  • Apple, Spotify and a Binary Way of Selling Music

    Apple Music is now up and running. If you have an iPhone, you’ll be pestered to update your device, and a new Music app will appear that on first open is desperate to give you a 90 day free trial of Apple’s Spotify-like experience. So I dusted off an iPod Touch (mainly bought to use…

  • Apple Music

    So now we finally know the details of Apple Music. I won’t go through all the details because every site on the planet has already done so, breathlessly live-blogging the full announcement. So go elsewhere for those. To be honest, as The Verge reports there are probably some sighs of relief around the rest of…

  • Mozart in the Jungle

    A mini-review of this new Amazon series, because I think it deserves it! First things first: there’s no doubt that this is a terrible title for a TV series. It’s supposed to shout something like “classical music in New York City” but I’m really not sure it does. I complain when titles are boring, but…

  • The Price of Rental

    I missed Guardians of the Galaxy in cinemas earlier this year. But it was well reviewed, and I did plan to catch it. The good news is that it came out on “home video” recently. So I could either buy it on DVD or BluRay, or watch it in download/streaming. If I choose to rent…

  • Battle of the Streaming Services

    This morning, Amazon UK announced a shake-up of its streaming offering, hitherto called LoveFilm. From next week, the service gets rebranded as Amazon “Prime Instant Video”, but perhaps more importantly, it gets rolled into the regular Amazon Prime offering. So far, so good, unless you were attached to the LoveFilm name. However there are price…