Tag: media

  • ESPN, Charter, The Cable Bundle and the Future

    ESPN, Charter, The Cable Bundle and the Future

    I have been fascinated by the recently resolved standoff in the US TV industry between the second biggest cable provider in the country, Charter Communications, and one of the biggest TV providers, Disney. Over the US Open tennis final at the weekend, and the start of the opening weekend of the new NFL season, millions…

  • Did Commercial Broadcasters Really Lose Millions of Pounds on Monday?

    As I type, I’ve yet to see any viewing figures for how many people watched the Queen’s funeral on British TV yesterday – they were going to be late being published due to “abnormally high levels of viewing for The State Funeral.” I think it’s safe to assume that it will be a very large…

  • Podcast Moderation

    Podcast Moderation

    Spotify is learning the tough way that while you can build perhaps the most sophisticated software platform that scales beautifully and completely redraws the revenue model of the music industry, “content moderation” is hard. Particularly when you’ve backed the person at the centre of things with a $100m investment. Spotify has finally responded by finally…

  • Substack Journalism

    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…

  • Four Months In – Many Politicians are Still ‘Zooming’ Badly

    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’…

  • News Subscriptions – and the Lack of Alternatives

    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…

  • 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,…

  • Eleven Sports in the UK Reported to be in Trouble

    I wrote something on Twitter about this, but thought I’d elaborate a little here too. There was something of a shake-up in rights prior to the start of this football season when newcomer Eleven Sports entered the UK market and snapped up rights from Sky (La Liga) and BT Sport (Serie A and UFC) amongst…

  • Eddie Mair on LBC

    So now we know. Eddie Mair will be taking over drivetime from Iain Dale on LBC, broadcasting 4-6pm Monday to Friday. He settles into his new desk next Monday, while previous incumbent, Iain Dale, shuffles into the evening 7-10pm slot. Interestingly, this also means that Mair has the “pleasure” of handing over to Nigel Farage…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…