Tag: TV
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Why ‘Access’ and ‘FYI Daily’ Exist
The other night I was looking for something to watch mindlessly for a bit and noticed that action film John Wick: Chapter 2 was on Channel 5. That would be suitably mindless. So I flicked over and was presented with a needless bit of fluff about some terrible-looking new Robert De Niro film. I was…
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Eye Level
This Sunday sees ITV launch a reboot of one of their most famous detectives – Van Der Valk. Based on a series of novels by Nicolas Freeling, which were mostly published in the 1960s, the TV series began life in 1972 with Barry Foster starring as Commisaris Van Der Walk of the Amsterdam police. Produced…
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The Nadir of Local TV
Local TV has been a failure since the start. It was started on a fallacy, and has proved uneconomic, with most of the stations licenced (Ofcom has stopped licencing new services) rolled into a single service with minimal local output. But London Live has lived on. Owned by Evgeny Lebedev, also the owner of the…
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The Premier League in an SVOD World – Running the Numbers
This week, Amazon Prime in the UK has begun the first of its streaming-only games offered to Prime subscribers. You will recall that during the last UK round of Premier League TV rights, a package comprising of the entirety of one mid-week “matchday” and all the Boxing Day games was offered. In the end Amazon…
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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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Amazon Prime Premier League Fixtures – Redux
I’ve repeatedly tried to explain why the Premier League was foolish to package rights to every fixture across two of their Match Days as a single TV package when they sold their latest UK TV rights last year. Amazon Prime ended up buying those packages after neither Sky nor BT felt they were worth buying.…
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What Do Disney+ and HBO Max Mean for Sky?
Disney+ and Sky Earlier this year, we finally got some detail on Disney’s upcoming new service, Disney+. The new streaming service will launch on November 12 this year in the US at a monthly cost of $6.99 – discounted a little to $69.99 if you pay for a year up front. Or you can pay…
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I Like to Watch by Emily Nussbaum
Emily Nussbaum is The New Yorker‘s TV critic, and this is a collection of her writing about TV from that magazine and others that she had worked for previously. There are often short introductions to these pieces, and a couple of brand new pieces – one of which takes up a significant proportion of the…
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Champagne Superova: Sport and TV
Sunday was an incredible day for sport. Personally, I spent quite a lot of time flicking between ITV4 and Eurosport’s coverage of Stage 9 of the Tour de France, with South Africa’s Daryl Impey winning from a breakaway on France’s national day. But I was also watching quite a lot of cricket – especially early…
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The Biggest TV Show in the World
A question. What is the biggest TV show in the world? That’s a good question. And, despite the image I’ve put at the top of this piece, I don’t think the answer is Game of Thrones, the series that has just aired its last episode (Don’t worry – no spoilers here). But what does the…
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The Good Fight
Once upon a time, I wrote down a list of all the TV shows that I know I should have watched, but never got around to. These days it’s more of a list that floats around in my head. At the top of that list is Breaking Bad, but there are plenty more. And it’s…
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Apple’s TV Offering: Difficult to Get Excited
On last night’s BBC Ten O’Clock News, there was a story on the [re-] launch of Apple TV [+]. I suspect that this had become a diary item after Apple announced that they’d be announcing something yesterday, because in the end, I’m not sure that there’s a great deal to talk about yet, and the…