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VR: Virtually a Reality?

Virtual Reality is becoming part of the furniture of all media business conversations in the way that 4K did three or four years ago and 3D did seven or eight years ago. Which one will VR go on to resemble – the one that is becoming a standard for TV and marks the beginning of […]

June 30, 2016 Nick Snow

Bonne Chance indeed

If you’d asked me to predict the outcome of the Brexit vote I’d have said it would be Remain, for sure. When I left the coverage at about 1am on Friday, the pollsters had called it for Remain. That’s the same pollsters that called a coalition government at the last election. If only they had been […]

June 28, 2016 Nick Snow

EU in or out? Dog fights and dog whistles

Liberty Global is donating nearly €900,000 to the Remain Campaign lobbying for the UK to stay in the EU when it comes to the seminal referendum vote next week. Ironically, the Brexit campaign would say liberty (from Euro law makers, red tape etc, etc,) is what they are campaigning for. They’d also say Liberty is […]

June 17, 2016 Nick Snow

Blood and Sand and BBC reform

In 1908, Vicente Blasco Ibáněz wrote Blood and Sand, a novel about that most visceral of activities, bullfighting. It so captured the imagination it was made into a movie no less than four times, most famously with Rita Hayworth in 1941. When it comes to BBC reform, it is tempting to draw in an analogy […]

May 12, 2016 Nick Snow

Big Data – no Big Easy

Broadcasters could be forgiven for wishing the digital train would occasionally slow down or at least rest a little longer in one station before moving on to another. For many years, of course, it was very straightforward – a signal was sent, by a variety of means, to a TV where it was watched or […]

April 22, 2016 Nick Snow

Here’s the TV News: It’s not great

Newspapers used to be – sometimes still are – the playthings of powerful people, the kind of people who didn’t want to do anything as grubby as get elected, they just wanted to control those who were through the ‘power of the press.’ Now that the press is in decline surely it is a good […]

March 31, 2016 Nick Snow

British broadband; a conflict of duty

Duty is an old fashioned word normally reserved for talk of public service but, in fact, it is a very common word in business law and regulation. Company directors have many duties and regulators have the duty to ensure they abide by them. Some regulators and, theoretically, all politicians have a wider duty to prioritise […]

February 29, 2016 Nick Snow

Time Warner bid talk is all OTT

Love him or hate him – and, like most, I have a chronically schizophrenic attitude – you have to hand it to Keith Rupert Murdoch. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again: 84 years-old, three marriages down, let’s just give it one more (bets anyone?) go. Ripper. I for one don’t want to […]

January 15, 2016 Nick Snow

Testing times for audience measurement

By Larry Gerbrandt Digital has been a decidedly mixed blessing for the television industry. Digital compression has led to the creation of hundreds of new channels, HDTV, IPTV, streaming media (from YouTube to Netflix), video-on-demand and digital video recorders. It has also made television viewing measurement a nightmare. While much of the recent growth in […]

December 22, 2015 GuestBlogger

OTT QoE: Who carries the can?

A couple of recent polls have revealed that Quality of Experience is an important factor in satisfaction and subscription renewal with OTT services. You may feel this falls into the ‘You don’t say?’ or even the ‘Do bears use wooded areas as lavatories?’ category of surveys. But behind the obvious are challenging technology questions and […]

November 18, 2015 Nick Snow