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No morality in this tale

There’s no moral in this story because, of course, it is about television. For as long as it has been around there have been moral panics about TV, as in ‘does what it puts on screen erode the moral fibre of a nation?’ As the word panic implies, the answer is, generally, no. Nowadays even […]

July 23, 2025 Nick Snow

The Advanced Television Podcast

For 25 years Advanced Television has covered the ups and downs of the digital media delivery sector. In this new podcast series founder and publisher Nick Snow leads discussions with handpicked experts and vendors on the topics that will shape the years ahead.

July 14, 2025 Nick Snow

Stream, stream, stream

Stream, stream, stream; to corrupt the Everly Brothers classic. Nielsen has recorded that, for the first time ever, American viewers ‘tuned in’ for more streamer TV than OTA, cable or DTH put together. As a story it feels simultaneously momentous, but also has ‘small earthquake, not many dead’ vibes. One natural reaction is ‘oh, I […]

June 17, 2025 Nick Snow

Completely Mad Max

The 2001 merger of Time Warner and AOL is up there in most analysts’ top 10 of worst, and most value destroying, deals ever. But those troubles were meant to have been long left behind with the much later deal to drop any reference to Time, merge with Discovery and resurrect the old Warner Brothers […]

May 23, 2025 Nick Snow

AI drama can run and run

Everything is all about AI. Even a lot of TV and film dramas feature it somewhere in the plot. But they will be in trouble if they have actually used it in production; see the fall from grace of The Brutalist, the Oscar favourite until it was found to have used an AI app to […]

March 5, 2025 Nick Snow

BBC plays dangerous game, again

Let’s not be coy, the demise of the Conservative government in the UK was a relief to the BBC. The relationship between the two was tense, at best, wilfully frictional at worst. The next Charter review begins this year, and the BBC will feel more relaxed about preserving the universal licence fee intact with a […]

January 21, 2025 Nick Snow

AI: Devil and Deep Blue Sea

Remember Deep Blue, the IBM computer that beat a Grandmaster at chess? Sometimes seen as the moment Artificial Intelligence entered the public consciousness? These days, it is front and centre in both the tech and the creative industries. Uniquely, you can find protagonists in both who regard it as humankind’s next great step, and those […]

December 17, 2024 Nick Snow

News bump from Trump

How did he do that? A question asked many times about Donald Trump, now to be the 47th President of the US, having already been the 45th. It turns out he’s better at politics than business. When that question is asked about him in the business world, it usually relates to how did he lose […]

November 6, 2024 Nick Snow

AI, AI, AI what’s all this then?

AI: Artificial Intelligence, it may as well have been the sub head of the recent IBC. Was there an exhibitor or a product that didn’t have an AI tale to spin? We have been here before, the years when AR, VR or 3D were the letter pairs de jour. But AI is different, it isn’t […]

September 25, 2024 Nick Snow

Nepo babies fight for control

It seems a bit unkind to refer to players in their 40s, 60s and 70s as nepo babies but, as they say in Hollywood: “whatever”. Is it just a coincidence that a third nepo has joined the fray – the never-ending fray – over who will win control of Paramount? Edgar Bronfman Jr – scion […]

August 21, 2024 Nick Snow