Category: Media
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Digital Movie Libraries in the UK
Buying a digital movie or TV series in the UK is an utter 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, you can only watch it via that company’s app…
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Netflix Viewing Figures
Bird Box is Susanne Bier’s Netflix film the streaming service released just before Christmas. It stars Sandra Bullock as a mother who has to protect her children from an unseen entity. Furthermore, if she (or others) see it themselves, they are done for. Think of it as a visual companion to A Quiet Place. I enjoyed it well enough,…
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The Death of MoviePass?
A few months ago, I tried to work out what the business model of MoviePass (and putative UK equivalent cPass) might be. I concluded that the operators were going to need very deep pockets, and there was absolutely no certainty that the model works. And that seems to have been an accurate prediction. The service…
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Is IP TV Really Ready for Primetime?
Last night YouTube TV went down for an hour. That’s not YouTube the platform, but the premium TV service that YouTube offers customers in the US a range of broadcast TV channels in exchange for a monthly fee. The service went down right in the middle of the England v Croatia World Cup semi-final in…
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Marketing TV
If you’re a TV channel and you’ve got a new show you want to tell people about, it should be relatively simple. You make a trailer or two for it, and then you run that trailer around programmes that the audience for the new show are already watching. You might want to be a bit…
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Netflix, Independent Cinema, and Hollywood’s New Business Model
The other day The Ringer published a piece about Netflix and their original movie strategy. The piece, entitled Netflix and Shrill listed the original movies that Netflix has already released in 2018 and challenged readers to see how many they recognised. For most people, the most familiar title will have been The Cloverfield Paradox. This…
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The Business Models of MoviePass and cPass
Over the weekend, a new company raised its heads above the parapets. cPass is a new subscription cinema going scheme that allows members to see one film a day at the cinema for a monthly fee of £9.95. Cinema membership schemes aren’t unheard of, but they tend to be more expensive. Cineworld has its Unlimited…
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Netflix: $8 Billion and 700 NEW Shows?
How much programming is Netflix actually making? The answer is a lot, but I think that the widely reported numbers are a little misleading. Heavily retweeted earlier today was this: Wow. Fact of the day: Netflix plans to spend $8bn on content this year. That’s roughly 700 (!) new series and 80 films. Shows how…
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The Tabloid Guardian
It has now been over a week since The Guardian, and sister paper The Observer, both rebranded. Perhaps more saliently, they also reshaped themselves, moving from the unique “Berliner” format to a tabloid. Now in some respects I feel unusual these days in still buying a physical printed paper. “It’s all online.” “You can get…
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Digitising My Life in 2018
Life is digital. We’ve known that for a long time. Digital offers lots of convenience, but it brings with it complications. In particular, safe storage. In 2018 I need to try to fix three or four problems/issues I have coming up. 1. Cloud Storage As longtime readers might know, I have a couple of Synology…
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2018 Media Predictions
It’s that time of year when, because not a lot else is going on, and pages need to be filled, everyone is busily predicting what might happen in 2018. So here are my bold and not so bold predictions in the coming year across the media industry. A streamer will win some Premier League rights.…
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11 Reasons I Hate Listicles – Stuck in Draft #5
Here’s a short piece I wrote years ago. Published here as part of my Stuck in Draft series. First things first – I’m not even sure that “listicles” is a real word. However I expect it pop up in the OED in due course because so much “journalism” is today being built around lists. So…