Posts from
October 2003
Friday 31 October 2003
With Freeview on the up, one wonders how many people will be wondering whether yet another inflation busting rise in subscription fees at Sky, is really worth it. The 5% rise will come in from January and is the fourth...
Read all of 'Sky subscriptions to rise'.
There was lots of doom and gloom mutterings about the ITV Digital fiasco - analogue switch off just not going to happen; DTT is a dead technology; five channels are enough for me. And then there is the reality. One...
Read all of 'Freeview: One Year On and Doing Well'.
Tuesday 28 October 2003
Strange testpage A search on Google for Transdiffusion brings up a new look for LogofreeTV. This site, which started out with the admirable aim of campaigning against the various screen furniture now imposed upon us by nervous broadcasters who don't...
Read all of 'LogofreeTV self-destructs?'.
New contempary comedy and drama station from UKTV tells the Media Guardian. Sounds just like PlayUK but with drama instead of music to me......
Read all of 'UK G2'.
Sunday 26 October 2003
A brief history of CBM. Crown Castle fail to sell space to Turner. Boomerang, TCM and CNN running on a time shift basis won't be appearing on DTT. Crown Castle instead signs contract with the unheard of CBM. CBM promise...
Read all of 'Free to view sport antics.'.
One of the many ideas for a replacement for ITV Digital was to do an element of pay-TV with mostly free-to-air programming. Ex-BSkyB bosses David Chance and Ian West were behind the proposal. Over a year on and Media week...
Read all of 'Pay TV on Freeview? Yeah right.'.
Friday 24 October 2003
Oddly parochial story from 'The Scotsman' All of you people left without access to ITV, Channel 4 and five on Sky will be very pleased to discover that you can pay a private company £20 to get these channels back...
Read all of 'Don't bother'.
Wednesday 22 October 2003
As someone kindly pointed out the other day, that old Channel 4 out-of-hours stalwart, "The Art of Landscape" is back, but this time on FriendlyTV (Channel 268 on Sky). It's running from 04:00 to 09:00 hours and from 10:00 to...
Read all of 'Quiet blast from the past'.
Tuesday 21 October 2003
BBC NEWS report It was inevitable. When huge numbers of your shareholders try to get rid of you, there isn't much hope of you clinging in there. And so it will be that Michael Green won't be taking a role...
Read all of 'The End of Michael Green.'.
Monday 20 October 2003
It seems past failure won't necessarily bring about the reward of a plum job in the new world of ITV. The OnDigital saga is just one reason why many of Carlton's shareholders are currently in revolt over Michael Green's position...
Read all of 'No reward for failure?'.
Friday 17 October 2003
And so it begins. London News Network is to be the first casualty of the Carlton/Granada combination, with the role of producing London's news programme being taken over by ITN according to a report in the Media Guardian. Although the...
Read all of 'Bye bye London News Network.'.
Wednesday 15 October 2003
MediaGuardian article BSkyB are about to embark on a huge sales push of their Sky Plus box - a set top box which includes a hard drive recording system, which of course can only be used to record digital satellite...
Read all of 'Sky Plus Box Equals?'.
Friday 10 October 2003
Grauniad speculation Oh good, the same bunch that have made ITV such a success in the last decade will continue in power for the next phase of ITV. Plus a bunch of tired old retreads from the likes of Sky,...
Read all of 'ITV plc's new board'.
Reuters speculates... A Disney channel, but not branded under the Disney name. Sky Travel to go General Entertainment, but not until there are 2 million 'subscribers' to the Freeview service. Disney to buy GMTV if it goes up for sale...
Read all of 'Freeview plans'.
Eastern Daily Press news story Of course, you have to expect the regional newspapers, struggling for so long, to welcome - or at least fail to notice the shortcomings - of a plan to reduce the regional ITV licences commitment...
Read all of 'No news is bad news'.
Wednesday 8 October 2003
Croner news release "Some day a sympathetic writer will have to analyse the effect of mergers - and there are hundreds of them - and the impact they have upon the people concerned" - Howard Thomas, With An Independent Air...
Read all of 'The true cost'.
So, the decline and fall of ITV is complete. What does a 20-year-old Australian care about the Granada-Carlton merger? Well, you'll have to wait for a future article! Unlike most of the Transdiffusion staff, I have hardly ever seen ITV....
Read all of 'Regional? Regional?'.
Name dropping signals end of an era for Granada So, farewell then Granada TV Manchester 3. You were staid And old fashioned But you had dignity. Keith's mum says She'd forgotten about you. But then she's stopped watching ITV like...
Read all of 'Thanks for the memories'.
Tuesday 7 October 2003
BBC Business News Video Clip: Rory Cellan-Jones on BBC News BBC Business News Q&A BBC Entertainment sees things from a programme perspective BBC voxpops filler on Carlton-Granada merger The Guardian on the negative... ...and the positive reactions The Guardian doorsteps...
Read all of 'Newsround-up: ITV 'merger''.
It is hard to imagine that the Granada/Carlton merger, mooted for so long, could do anything other than steepen ITV1's slide into mediocrity. In the best (or worst) Thatcherite tradition of eschewing small, human-sized enterprises in favour of enormous trans-national...
Read all of 'ITV Loses its Place'.
The estimated savings from the combination of Carlton and Granada's broadcasting businesses are around £50m a year... One of the first things to go? Well according to a report on the Media Guardian website, Merdian's Maidstone studios are on the...
Read all of 'Money Talks.'.
The ITC have approved the "merger" of Granada and Carlton. Most likely outcome: both companies continue to exist as seperate entities, but the broadcast licences of both will be merged into a new ITV plc, in which shareholders of Carlton...
Read all of 'Yes'.
The year was 1999 and BSkyB tried to buy Manchester United Football club. In many ways it seemed the perfect deal - a large broadcaster with a huge reliance on football broadcasting, buying one of the biggest football clubs in...
Read all of 'Sky move away from football.'.
Sunday 5 October 2003
Press release Sky News are to launch a 9pm news programme targetted at the Republic of Ireland, to go out on the pre-existing version of Sky News with RoI adverts, I'd assume (though a 30-minute daily round-up of news from...
Read all of 'Sky News Ireland'.
Friday 3 October 2003
One interesting thing from the ITC press release marking the end of news at when is this delightful little paragraph: "The change will also mean that most of the regional non-news programmes currently shown at 10.30pm will be moved into...
Read all of 'Bong! (Again)'.
Thursday 2 October 2003
Granada writes An update to Telemusications - a very detailed article by Dave Jeffery, originally published by EMC in September 2002, is nothing less than hardcore presentation: the fonts of Granada through the ages. A fascinating and unmissable read that...
Read all of 'From the forge'.
ITC Press Release The useless ITC, now marking time waiting to become part of the useless OfGums, have finally - finally - finally - decided: no more News at When. So it's to be the News at 10.30 (or the...
Read all of 'Bong!'.
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