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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Audience fragmentation has been a feature – perhaps a dilemma – for channel owners, schedulers and advertisers for a long time. Everyday there is a new piece of research implying everything from ‘linear TV is so over’, to ‘chill, most viewers still want, and watch, most TV on a TV in a traditional way.’ It’s […]
There’s a lot of whooping at Apple product launches. As the analysts and reporters are unlikely culprits (though I do know some journos who are worryingly hard line Apple adherents), we have to assume the uncontained excitement belongs to staffers. I suppose it’s hard to not to drink the Kool-Aid when you’re on the payroll. […]
The English language is a beautiful thing and it is the lingua franca of this industry, and every other. I, for one, am unsurprisingly grateful for that. Because we’re in a relatively new industry a number of terms have been introduced that didn’t really exist before; digital, streaming, downloading, online, etc, and many other languages […]