Financial Times: Disney to buy Marvel for $4bn. Imagine this: you are webslinging across the New York city skyline, just like Spiderman. You swing round to see the famous Baxter Building, home of the Fantastic Four, twith its big "4"...
Posts from August 2009
Disney buys Marvel - more corporate conservatism?
The language of compliance
Broadcast Now: Stephen Fry savages TV box-ticking Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that BBC TV (and radio) producers are now self-censoring much more often than not because of the additional hassles of compliance that have been enforced in the aftermath...
Safe in their hands?
David Elstein: Murdoch "riled" by Ofcom According to David Elstein, formerly of, inter alia, the BBC, Thames and Channel 5, Ofcom's "devastating" and "unanswerable" report of a couple of months ago, which exposed Sky's abuse of its dominant position in...
Murdoch claims independent journalism threatened by "dominant" BBC.
BBC News: Murdoch attack on 'dominant' BBC So James Murduch, the head of NewsCorp in Europe, says a dominant BBC damages independent journalism in the UK. The hypocrisy of that statement is positively drooling out of his mouth even as...
Family values
James Murdoch hits out at BBC and regulators at Edinburgh TV festival James Murdoch attacks BBC and regulators in annual MacTaggart lecture speech shocker - who would have thought otherwise? Indeed it would have been a real surprise if both...
The final eviction?
Channel 4 to launch 'creative overhaul' as it axes Big Brother Big Brother axed by Channel 4 Channel 4's decision to axe Big Brother admittedly wasn't that unexpected, but it still signifies the end of a somewhat ignominious era for...
Grounded
BBC News: BBC to investigate daytime show Yes, it's another 'fakery scandal' rearing its head again, just like the (still) fairly recent events of Crowngate, Sachsgate, etc., that the BBC presumably thought it had finally seen the back of. Having...
The Come Back Kid
More Mark Austin on News at Ten As part of a piece proclaiming that Mark Austin will be doing more News at Ten, is the news that Alastair Stewart is to move to the ITV Evening News, and is to...
Laugh. Or else
Engadget: Sony's laughter-tracking PS3 patent You may have noticed recently that most digital cameras can now take a photo automatically when they detect when the person being photographed is smiling. Sony in their infinite wisdom have now filed a patent...
Awaiting stardom
Some MediaBlog readers might just remember something I posted nearly a year ago that attempted to explain the effects of the credit crunch, albeit in a somewhat unorthodox fashion. Anyway, I mention this again because the puppet theatre responsible for...
Lies, damned lies and Ofcom
Coverage of the data presented in Ofcom's Communications Market Report indicates that many correspondents are not at their best when dealing with statistics. But Ofcom themselves don't make it particularly easy to do anything other than misinterpret the data.
There's no "I" in STV
Broadcast Now: Grade slams STV opt outs Michael Grade in "cannot understand STV's attitude" shocker; who would have thought it? From a purely commercial viewpoint, STV's decision to drop the new 9pm incarnation of The Bill seems to have been...
ITV no longer free?
Broadcast Now: ITV digital channels may leave Freeview If such a thing had happened merely two years ago it would have been a bigger deal than it is today. That's my opinion as to the potential impact of ITV withdrawing...
Fringe benefits
Broadcast Now: BBC slammed for low Edinburgh turnout It seems to elude some people that an arts festival might conceivably be covered in a radically different way to a pop concert. The Glastonbury Festival had a handful of stages combined...
