Month: March 2007
-
“Participation TV”
It’s all go today. Broadcast reports that ITV is losing £1.5m per week while it suspends its premium rate lines. The voting mechanism will be up and running for Dancing on Ice tomorrow, but there’s even a suggestion that ITV Play won’t be returning at all! Of course I doubt it’ll be replaced with anything…
-
Premium rate TV phone-ins: ban them all!
An interesting discussion going on over at the Media Guardian Organ Grinder blog. Janine Gibson hates these premium rate phone-ins as much as I do.
-
Magic For Beginners
Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link comes highly recommended, and I’d been looking forward to picking up a copy for a while. Happily, it’s in a current 3 For 2 at Waterstones, so I’ve been reading Link’s stories over the last few days. Her tales are very magical realism, and I really enjoyed them –…
-
Streaming Radio – US v UK
So the big news in the US at the moment is the announcement by the Copyright Royalty Board of the prices for internet radio royalty rates. A summary can be found here on Radio and Internet Newsletter site. As that same site points out, the prices being talked about, based on a “per play” basis…
-
ITV Suspends Premium Rate Phone Lines
Interesting news from ITV. They’ve cancelled all their premium rate phonelines until a few review by Deloitte has been conducted. This affects all their channels and in effect suspends ITV Play until the review is complete. ITV is “in conversation” with GMTV, who love their terribly hard competitions. What does this mean for Cheggers’ future?…
-
The Police
So the “exciting” news today is that The Police, who recently reformed for the Grammys, are touring the UK this autumn. I have no real desire to either see them or not see them, but I am very interested in their ticket prices. First of all, I understand that tickets at Twickenham will cost £107…
-
Sky’s Poor Grammar
The Sky/Virgin Media battle rolls on, with Sky putting starting a big poster and radio campaign. What a shame that the ads weren’t checked for grammar. Lynne Truss anyone? It’s “Virgin Media has” not “Virgin Media have!”
-
Remote Record
Sky’s done some very annoying things over the past few weeks, not least announcing that they want to pull off Freeview and the stupid war they’re having with Virgin Media over their basic channels. At least they’ve got something right. They’ve just released Remote Record via your PC. Bizarrely both texting them, and implementing a…
-
Trails on ITV
I don’t know how long ITV’s been doing this, since some of the only programmes I’ve seen on ITV recently didn’t even have any adverts – Al Murray’s Happy Hour. But watching a recording of Instinct from earlier in the week, it seems that ITV’s running trails within the adverts rather than bookending them before…
-
Lunar Eclipse
There was a lunar eclipse this evening. Indeed it’s still going on as I type this. I took a bit of a sequence of photos of it which you can see over on my Flickr stream, but here are one or two of the best. A lunar eclipse is caused when the Earth completely blocks…
-
Today’s Haul
As newspapers desperately attempt to shore up their circulations, they keep giving things away. The best of today’s “gifts” was a copy of The Killing Fields DVD in The Times. This is a great film that I haven’t watched for years. It’s remarkable that the film’s director Roland Joffé made this film and The Mission…
-
Born Survivor
So I’m sitting here watching Born Survivor: Bear Grylls. “Bear” (is that really his name?) is some kind of born explorer who’s essentially a more gung-ho version of Ray Mears, except he’s ex-SAS. In this first episode of a new series he begins by leaping out of a helicopter in just a pair of trousers…