Category: Media
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What Will The Beeb Suggest Shutting Down or Cancelling Next?
Hmm. Cancel BBC2 daytime programming and rebroadcast the BBC News channel during those hours. Essentially close down BBC Local Radio in England with just local breakfast and drivetime shows. Stop broadcasting Wimbledon and F1. What do they all have in common? They’re surely not ideas that are being “flown” to see what the reaction is?…
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Why Merging BBC Radio Five Live and BBC Local Radio Would Be A Bad Idea
If a tweet from BBC Radio Nottingham editor Mike Bettison is to be taken at face value, the BBC is considering some kind of merger between BBC Local Radio and BBC Radio Five Live. This idea mirrors something that James Cridland pondered in a blog posting on his site last year. Except he talked about…
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The Business of Football
I’m still coming down from an excpetional Wednesday night that saw Arsenal overcome a 1-0 defecit to win beat Barcelona, easily the best team in the world, 2-1. As I sit there dreaming about how Arsenal might maintain that lead in the much tougher return fixture in the Nou Camp a fortnight from now, I’ve…
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Searching Myself
That sounds quite philosophical doesn’t it? Well it isn’t. Earlier today, I just wanted to check whether I’d previously commented on something in Twitter. All I needed to do was doublecheck my Twitter feed and I’d be away. Except that it would have been about a year ago. And Twitter’s river of tweets doesn’t really…
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Prime Suspect – US Style
If you live in Scotland, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen the US version of Cracker – aka Fitz (probably when the rest of the country was watching something STV thought Scottish audiences wouldn’t like – Downton Abbey for example). While the original featured Robbie Coltrane as the overweight chainsmoking Fitz, in the US…
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I’ll Have A “P” Please Bob
You might be seeing the image above – or an inverted version – quite a bit on TV in the coming months. Ofcom has announced that it’s to be shown when a programme has accepted product placement. You’ll get at least three seconds of it at the start and end of the programme, as well…
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Sexism and Sky Sports
Tonight Richard Keys has resigned from Sky Sports following a last ditch attempt to apologise in the form of an interview on Talksport this afternoon (Kudos to Talksport for getting that interview). He joins Andy Gray who’s already gone. There are lots of interesting question raised in this affair. How sexist is the regime at…
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10 O’Clock Live
So what to make of Channel 4’s new “it’s not The Daily Show that we just cancelled” comedy current affairs series? Well it’s not all bad, and it’s not all good. There seemed to be quite a few first night nerves and a generally quite disjointed feel to the programme, but that’s something that will…
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Local TV
Today, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt gave his backing to a new network of local TV stations built around the hub of a national spine. In other words, it’ll be a national service with local opt-outs at various times of the day. Hunt has been talking about this for ages, often with hackneyed references to Birmingham…
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World Cup 2018 Redux
Broadcast magazine has a really interesting story relating to England’s failed bid for the 2018 World Cup. The story is here (behind a paywall). In summary, it seems that in its bid proposal, England agreed to remove the 2018 World Cup tournament from the Listed Events which would have effectively let companies like Sky and…
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More On Cars (And Mobile Data)
CES has been taking place recently and one of the themes seems to have been the increased amount of sophistication in the in-car audio market. In particular Pandora is getting a lot of support from major manufacturers like Toyota and Ford. But there are plenty more besides. Last month I wrote a piece about in-car…
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Data Reductions Hurt Mobile Media
The news that T-Mobile is dropping its mobile data usage limit to 500MB from 1GB is not great news. This is not just about one operator, but a trend across the industry. While T-Mobile says that “over 90%” of its customers use less than this a month (does this include customers without smartphones?), it’s not…