Posts from
May 2004
Saturday 29 May 2004
Digital Spy: UTV "significantly outperformed ITV peers" Whilst ITV plc has been preoccupied trying to erase all of its former regional identities to create a sea of blandness in order to supposedly avoid confusing its (assumed to be) half-witted viewers,...
Read all of 'It's the way they sell 'em'.
Friday 28 May 2004
I haven't been able to find any actual press release or web story yet on it, but BBC Radio Five Live are reporting that Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has said that reality TV shows...
Read all of 'Big Brother is Public Service Broadcasting'.
Watching Paint Dry Well, UKTV Style seem to have some up with the perfect antidote for Big Brother crazyness (which starts tonight) - Watching Paint Dry. Yep. Someone paints a wall and you watch it dry and vote for your...
Read all of 'As dull as watching paint dry'.
Broadcaster gets apology from BBC as history repeats itself Here's a news item which is quite amusing to read since it is obvious that only a junior researcher would make such a fundamental mistake as to plagiarise whole sections of...
Read all of 'A history lesson'.
Monday 24 May 2004
Investors tell ITV to ditch Allen for Dyke You can almost feel sorry for Charles Allen at this point; his ITV plc has spent a lot of time and effort trying to placate shareholders by showing more soaps, Pop Idol,...
Read all of 'Variety act'.
Friday 21 May 2004
Channel 4 boss lands BBC top job Well, is this a good or bad thing? Channel 4 seems to be a lot more entertainment oriented than it used to be, and perhaps this is a slight worry. But Mark Thompson...
Read all of 'Mark Thompson gets DG'.
Thompson named BBC director general Choosing Greg Dyke's long term replacement was never going to be easy, especially under the circumstances of the selection process and the requirements imposed by the forthcoming charter review. Though as with the choice of...
Read all of 'An obvious post'.
Thursday 20 May 2004
AzerTAj, an example to us all Ok, so the parallels aren't really there: the BBC is a state-owned broadcaster but (thank you thank you thank you) remarkably independently minded. AzerTAj is a state news agency, perhaps the complete opposite of...
Read all of 'Labour's commitment to an independent BBC: from lip-service to mouthpiece in one simple war?'.
Media Guardian: Top Up TV signs up 20,000 viewers Top Up TV may well have signed up 20,000 viewers in its first month. The more interesting question will be... how many will they actually keep?...
Read all of 'Top Churn TV'.
Monday 17 May 2004
Japan's Daily Yomiuri on the BBC's Pronunciation Unit At last count, I had some 1,127 reasons for the continuation of the BBC (and 2 for ITV, but that's a different matter). Thanks to the Yomiuri for adding reason 1,128: the...
Read all of 'I'm sorry, I don't need to read that again'.
Sky boss hits back at Channel 4 If it wasn't obvious before it should be by now; I'm talking about the fact that Sky seems to exist in a parallel universe to the rest of the UK media industry. Indeed...
Read all of 'Bulk buying'.
Saturday 15 May 2004
The production was fine, the live voting via satellite was flawless, and apart from a live link to outside the venue and up until the last few minutes after the victory, where the presenters ad lib-ed for ages, TRT put...
Read all of 'Worst Eurovision ever?'.
Thursday 13 May 2004
Keating set to take BBC2 job Well, it has looked likely all along, but Roly Keating is set to take the BBC2 job when Jane Root leaves for Discovery. I'm not sure whether this is good. While I admire Roly's...
Read all of 'Keating to get BBC 2 job'.
Voting fault hits Eurovision heat Deutsche Telekom, owner of the UK's T-Mobile brand, appears, according to the BBC, to have dropped the ball when it came to tabulating the results for the Eurovision Song Contest semi-final on Wednesday night. The...
Read all of 'Now, there's lucky for you'.
The Scotsman: Towns to Trial Digital TV Switchover Finally it looks like someone has got off their backside in government and is thinking properly about analogue switch off. The DCMS are apparently looking for sites to pioneer digital-only broadcasting. Towns...
Read all of 'Finally they start to do something...'.
Eurovision Song Contest So last night was the first ever Eurovision Song Contest Semi-final where 22 countries for the first time, competed for 10 places in the main Grand Prix on Saturday night next. Coverage was on BBC Three, not...
Read all of 'Eurovision Song Contest Semi-final'.
Wednesday 12 May 2004
BBC's £15m advertising under attack The last few months have been a particularly tough time for the BBC, so any fresh criticism of what the BBC does is likely to reverberate rather more than it would have usually done,...
Read all of 'Spending spree'.
Tuesday 11 May 2004
Digital Spy: 'Enders win was due to 'superior website' First the writer has to admit something. He doesn't watch either Corrie nor EastEnders. Although he did once watch Corrie and saw a bus drive past the end of the street....
Read all of 'Any excuse?'.
Monday 10 May 2004
Tonight, Sky News launched a new twice-nightly news bulletin for Ireland, called Sky News Ireland. For 30 minutes at 7pm and 10pm each weeknight, the Murdoch empire takes its first footsteps into programming in the Republic (its been taking Sky...
Read all of 'Mr. Murdoch comes to Ireland'.
MediaGuardian: ITV buys GMTV stake from SMG It's an era where one company own the entire of ITV in England and Wales (and a small part of Scotland). 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No separate weekend franchises,...
Read all of 'The last oddity'.
YouGov's Channel of the Year Online Survey Here's an interesting survey which has been created for the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival in conjunction with BBC Broadcast. There are four groups of questions in the categories of "Channel Awards" (for...
Read all of 'Taking the survey'.
Friday 7 May 2004
BBC Online, no wait, BBCi, sorry, bbc.co.uk Good old BBC. Just a couple of years after the all encompassing BBCi branding was introduced to cover Interactive TV and the Website, replacing the existing BBC Online and BBC Text brands, they...
Read all of 'BBCi Online.co.uk'.
Wednesday 5 May 2004
BBC slashes documentary jobs Perhaps too easy to overlook is this story that could potentially have deep and very serious repercussions for the quality of factual programming in the UK; put simply, the BBC has decided to make some redundancies...
Read all of 'Costing behind the scenes'.
BBC News: NTL losses cut by new subscribers Media Guardian: Customer drive boosts NTL hopes Well what do you know? Persuading people to pay for your service apparantly can make you money! Or at least in NTL's case, stop them...
Read all of 'NTL cut losses with radical concept in money making'.
Black Tuesday for ITV as ratings crash Whilst a 'ratings crash' can happen to any channel at any time, it was rather amusing to notice that ITV1's share of the audience fell below 10% during a programme entitled "All New...
Read all of 'ITV's All Old Dumbest Blunders'.
Saturday 1 May 2004
Typical MediaGrauniad non-story This story digested in case you're short of time: An advertiser today complained that the BBC wasn't playing fair. They exist and therefore interrupt the stream of fools who the advertiser wants to watch his ads during...
Read all of 'Idiot Toyota ad chief attacks BBC 'sabotage''.
|
