Harsh? I don’t think so. Forget everything else, if a provider can’t do better than a voice loop telling you a lie about when the broadband service will be restored, it has no business pretending to be a TV service provider. There are, of course, plenty of question marks over a strategy that sees a […]
Jeff Bezos has bought The Washington Post. At $250 million it is a snip – when viewed as a fraction of his personal fortune – for one of the great remaining ego trips. That is what owning a big newspaper is all about; always has been, always will be. That doesn’t make it a bad […]
A recent report informed us that the City of London Police are, along with the Intellectual Property Office, setting up a special unit to tackle digital piracy and counterfeiting. The IPO is going to provide £2.5 million over two years for the unit. Not exactly the FBI is it? I’m guessing that sum is less […]
Larry Gerbrandt finds parallels between the development of the aviation and television industries. I spent several summers working my way through college in a fruit-canning plant where my grandfather was a manager. During one of our evening conversations, it dawned on me that he had witnessed the entire evolution of aviation, from the Wright Brothers […]
Gatekeeping is a cornerstone of academic media theory – that boom industry of the Noughties. But it is a theory under strain as the idea of a few privileged outlets choosing what content is relayed and in what form, and thereby shaping cultural and political agendas, seems less convincing in the Internet driven, social media […]
It doesn’t seem that long since owning networks was the very unfashionable, potentially less profitable and, frankly, dead boring end of the business. Commoditisation of bandwidth provision and the obligations of neutrality both put pressure on pipe owners and many looked enviously at their content cousins. Some pipes bought content – Comcast and NBCU – […]
It’s that time of year again and the industry is gathering in London for the TV Connect event. This is the latest iteration of what was founded as the IPTV World Forum, and the more generic name reflects the maturity of the business and the increasing transparency of the barriers between once competing segments. Virgin […]
I remember a press conference many years ago down at MIP, the room was packed and not just with eager reporters, there was also a surfeit of testosterone. Television, then recently released from the monoculture of national broadcasters, had become the field of choice for the world’s more colourful entrepreneurs to compare appendages. Ranged before […]