Category: Media
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It’s Different This Side of the Pond
Yesterday I saw my first TV ad – at least in quite a few months – for Wonder Woman 1984, the next instalment of the blockbuster DC Extended Universe film series. The TV ad tells me that the film is opening in UK cinemas on 16 December. Hmm. Now this is a film who’s release…
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Amazon and Rugby
This weekend the hastily arranged Autumn Nations Cup competition kicks off, with eight European nations playing each other in two pools initially before a finals weekend determines the winner. The competition is there to replace the usual Autumn internationals made up of southern hemisphere sides playing a series of big games in Europe. I’m sure…
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Substack Journalism
Earlier today, the actor Johnny Depp lost a libel action against News Group Newspapers and the journalist Dan Wootton. I’ll leave others to get into the detail of the case. But I follow a handful of folk in “British legal Twitter” and there were a few interesting summaries and thoughts on what the outcome meant…
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YouTube Ads Are Not Smart
Like many people, I watch a fair bit of YouTube. A surprisingly large amount I watch via an app on my TV, but I also watch all kinds of how-to tutorials on my PC. And with YouTube videos come ads. I’m a YouTube Music subscriber (previously Google Play Music) so it’d only be another £2…
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Four Months In – Many Politicians are Still ‘Zooming’ Badly
I posted a Twitter thread on this subject earlier, but I thought it was worth exploring a little more here. This morning I was watching BBC Breakfast, and Louise Minchen was interviewing Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds from his home constituency in Torfaen. What I couldn’t get over was the poor resolution of Thomas-Symonds’…
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Micropayments and Transaction Fees
Yesterday I wrote about my frustration that every news outlet that doesn’t want to – or more likely can’t – rely on advertising alone, wants to push me down a subscription route. I said that I am basically maxed out as far as news subscriptions go right now. I’d like a pay-as-you-go offering, much as…
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News Subscriptions – and the Lack of Alternatives
I’m a bit of a news junkie. I always have been. I read a newspaper each day – and spend a lot of time online reading lots and lots of stories from lots and lots of sites. I might regularly have 60+ Chrome tabs open on my browser full of long reads that I’m planning…
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HBO Max in the UK… Or Not
Yesterday AT&T held an event called WarnerMedia Day that largely detailed the launch plans for their new streaming service HBO Max, which builds off the successful HBO. So lots of announcements of how you’ll be able to see Friends episodes and watch the new Game of Thrones sequel on their platform. From a UK perspective…
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Further Apple TV+ Thoughts
This Friday Apple TV+ launches globally. In the UK, the PR launch is already well underway. Stars from some of the first tranche of Apple shows have been made available to various media outlets – Jason Malmoa was on Graham Norton for example. And there has been an absolute blitz of outdoor advertising for the…
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RIP Flixster
At the start of this year I noted that buying a digital movie or TV series in the UK was an absolute mess. You can buy movies or TV series from a number of sites including: iTunes, Google Play Movies, Amazon, Sky Store and Rakuten. But if you buy something in one of those places,…
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BritBox
ITV plc has just reported its annual results, and it was for that reason that we got the announcement of BritBox pretty much simultaneously. Because, from the careful phrasing the in the press release, you can tell that the deal hasn’t quite been done and that there is a final bit of finessing to do:…
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The Desperate Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is not doing well right now. It only sells 363,000 paid copies of the printed paper, having long since been overtaken by The Times. Despite being one of the earliest news providers in the UK to have a web presence – eTelegraph anyone? – it feels somehow left behind now. Titles like…