Tag : TV

Did you see Black Mirror on Channel 4 recently? It's a bleak and paranoid set of 3 parables of a future with unintended consquences. Created by Charlie Brooker, all three are available to watch now on 4OD.

Thanks to the Telegraph for this gem from a senior TV exec talking about another six month delay to the launch of Youview, the £35m JV between BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel Five, TalkTalk, BT and Arquiva: 

"It just doesn't work when you turn it on and keeps crashing. 

"You would think that after at least 18 months of development and at least six million pounds worth of investment from each shareholder, the box would actually work when being shown to its owners." 

Tags: BBC, Ofcom, waterfall, clusterfuck

A news program has opinions, news items (which might contain locations, types of events etc), issues, methods of finding out more. A news story itself might be part of a bigger feature, which has related stories, or they may be stories that are part of a larger story. 

Our friends at Mint Digital hosted an entertaining evening at Conway Hall last Thursday with some super smart folks talking about the phenomenon of the second screen and its relationship with TV viewing: 2Screen - Make an event out of TV.

Illustration credit: "Split Attention", Dar Freeland, http://www.faceupstudio.com/blahg/

Before I go on… ARG = Alternative Reality Game – an interactive, cross-media narrative.  ARGs are cross platform games that explore storytelling in an interesting and non-linear way.  They tend to be used as a form of viral advertising, a way to get people involved and engaged in a product so they continue to support it.  However, as the genre grows, self-supporting ARGs are created which function in a similar way, but aren’t based on the back of another media product.

I made bad choices for the first two time-slots at SXSW, so I had high hopes for the third, PayTV vs Internet – The Battle For Your TV, featuring Mark Cuban of HDNet and Avner Rosen of Boxee.

It was good to see a debate between two people who genuinely disagree by 180º on how the future of TV will pan out, even if some of the argument was basically dick-swinging.

Cuban believes that the future of TV is basically the same as the present: subscription services over cable or satellite, with a light dash of so-called ‘Interactive TV’. Rosen believes, as I do, that the future of TV is on the web. To be clear: everyone sane accepts that we will continue to have a dedicated large screen in our houses on which we watch video. I just don’t believe that broadcast TV has a future that looks anything like the present, if it has one at all.

Mike’s post on Apps for Telly inspired me to write about something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: my ideal TV of the future.

It’s pretty clear that, with a few very specific exceptions, broadcast TV will become a thing of the past very soon. Other than ‘event telly’, things that need to be watched live, such as the World Cup, the Olympics and (shudder) X Factor, I either watch shows on DVD or record them on my PVR, the excellent EyeTV for Mac.

Last week, the BBC Trust gingerly announced provisional approval of the BBC’s Project Canvas. 

The aim of Project Canvas is to define a set of standards for set-top boxes that will allow integration of web and TV. Although, it isn’t clear exactly what the standards will consist of and what Project Canvas’ vision of IPTV really is.

Before TV schedules disappear completely, there’s a breed of TV channels that have built their schedules around predictability.

Audiences know that at 7pm on More4 they’ll be an episode of Grand Designs. And an hour later they’ll be an episode of Top Gear on Dave. These schedules feel unchanging: the only certain things in life are death, taxes and Jeremy Clarkson shouting ‘Power’ at 8pm.

Iplayer, Hulu, Vimeo and Youtube have made it manifestly evident that TV is facing a huge challenge from the web, not just for revenues and mindshare but also as an alternative channel to market. But it’s not just a quantitative ‘cheap and many’ channels issue; there’s likely to be a profound qualitative change in how we watch television that threatens the value of things that conventional TV people hold as given: things like scheduling, channel brands and the primacy of television commissioning.