A bad week for wine drinkers this, since it was the first one in living memory in which there has been no story in the papers asserting either that (a) red wine has life-giving properties formerly only associated with the grotto at Lourdes, or (b) that it could kill you stone dead if you so much as try to work out what all the French words on the label mean.
A new Adam Curtis short which was shown during Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe programme.
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The New York Times has been experimenting with an almost iTunes-esque article skimmer interface for accessing the papers on-line articles.The NY Times magazine style layout is a format that many newspapers have used for their Internet based offerings aside from those that offer paid for PDF or Pagesuite style digital facsimiles of the print editions but sometimes the amount of information can be hard to navigate and filter. Clearly customization as well as social features is one of many directions that old media can explore.
Teletext and its stable mate Oracle were probably where many of us in the UK first got to tap into a stream of pre-Internet information which was available via our analogue television sets. Page 888 for subtitles together with pages for news, cheap holidays where page numbers were accessed via a remote control.
Teletext did make the jump to digital TV though these days is often a reworking of content available on the Internet which of course has largely taken its place.
Ofcom have now stated that they see no reason to renew a public service teletext license beyond 2014 and so teletext services will slowly become another technology of the past going the way of VHS video recorders, film cameras and other gadget of the analogue era.
The BBC had already committed to phase out its own Ceefax service in the run up to the 2012 digital TvVswitch over. Subtitles are likely to remain on separate streams for digital TV programmes.
It’s thought that hybrid IPTV and Internet service enabled televisions are more likely to appear over the coming years
Photo by lambigred under this creative commons license
TV broadcaster Channel 4 (UK) have been rumoured to be in financial trouble for some time. Currently they are are a public service broadcaster who fund themselves despite being publicly owned unlike the BBC which is funded by the annual license fee.
The department of culture, media and sport has denied that an upcoming ‘Digital Britain’ report by Lord Carter will suggest that Channel 4 merges into a new public service body, possibly seeing the BBC sacrifice their majority holding in BBC Worldwide as a way of Channel 4 remaining financially viable.
The BBC would probably not like to see Channel 4 brought under the wing of the TV license fee funding and so may be willing to allow BBC Worldwide , a profitable wing of the Beeb(earning £112 million last year with the Radio Times and BBC DVD’s part of its offerings) to be offered up in this way though BBC Director-General Mark Thomson has suggested that he’d rather see Channel 4 and Five merge which was not initially received well by Channel 4 chief executive Andy Duncan who described the prospect as akin to mixing ‘oil and water’.
Channel 4 are perhaps less known these days for the edgy niche content it broadcast in the early years of its inception in November 1982. Over the years they have brought us programmes such as Countdown, The Tube, The Snowman, Father Ted and The IT Crowd and part funded films via its Film Four wing but Big Brother was its cash cow for funding which let it subsidise departments such as the well respected Channel 4 news but with controversy in recent years dogging the Big Brother franchise and the end probably in site for the reality TV stalwart the channel is now looking at other sources of funding to stay afloat.
Ofcom has calculated that Channel 4 needs £100 million a year to survive.Less than this and the Channel will allegedly go bankrupt.The channels public service remit currently includes the provision of programmes for schools.
Sources: 1 2 3
Photoshop image of the Richard Rogers Partners designed Channel 4 HQ by nick.garrod under this creative commons license
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