Thanks to frantic politicking in the House of Lords, the 2003 Communications Act endorsed, but didn’t quantify, the idea of a “sufficient plurality” among news organisations in the UK. In the wake of the deal to spin off Sky News from News Corporation last week, have we now got a definition? In part, perhaps. Last [...]
I love the BBC, but I tend to worry about it a lot. On p70 of Mark Thompson’s Strategic Review, I found the kind of evidence that supports my fears. The paragraph that gripped me refers to the future of BBC Online. It goes like this: There will be no specialist content for a specialist audience, [...]
At both the Guardian and the Daily Mail, readers are outraged by Mark Thompson’s plans to prune the BBC’s output. It might not feel like it, but this is excellent news for the Corporation. Finally, the BBC has achieved its aim: it has moved ahead of the curve in terms of anticipating a Conservative government’s actions. In [...]
Heard the one about Sky launching an own-brand touchscreen tablet? If you can take any more rumour-mongering during the week in which the world’s technology journalists converged on CES, the scuttlebutt I’m hearing is that Sky is “very interested” in bringing to market a “fourth screen” device that offers browsing, video conferencing, e-reading and – [...]
Like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, Project Kangaroo was only resting. Or so it seems. Eight months ago, the Competition Commission blocked the launch of the much-heralded video-on-demand service planned by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. Now the broadcast infrastructure company Arqiva plans to use the same code base – built for [...]
Obviously, it’s a pity that Robert Peston and James Murdoch didn’t come to blows at the Edinburgh TV festival last week. It’s also a pity that the vast murmuration caused by Murdoch’s speech overhadowed another, equally important, theme at Edinburgh: the impending clash of civilisations between the broadcast establishment and web video. In this debate, Ashley Highfield [...]
Interesting stat: the has BBC received 748 complaints about its allegedly excessive coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. According to a BBC source quoted by the Guardian, that’s “10 to 15 times” the number of complaints that the Corporation received about its directors’ expenses, which were published last week. Of course, this is an apples and [...]
This morning, staff at the headquarters of the Daily Mail who looked closely enough would have detected a thin ribbon of smoke curling skyward from the nostrils of Paul Dacre. The paper put to bed by Dacre last night contains a fearsome Godzilla-style rant about the BBC’s “world of chartered planes, Las Vegas hotels and [...]
To be honest, I’m not a great fan of the Economist. Using all of that superb brainpower to promote a predictable species of conventional wisdom has always seemed a bit like driving a Rolls Royce to your local Tesco. There’s nothing terribly wrong with doing this. But it does make you look a bit arrogant. [...]
Amid the billowing clouds of fear and loathing that surround Project Canvas, I’m tempted to use Occam’s Razor. Ask yourself this: who stands to lose the most if the BBC – with a range of partners including ITV and BT – brings on-demand IPTV, including programmes from the iPlayer, to set-top boxes owned by people [...]