Archive for Television
Autism: is TV the culprit?
July 28th, 2008 • Life, Television
New report points to television being a cause behind the growth of autism in the US (it has gone, apparently, from one in 2500 children in the late ’70s to one in 166 today).
TV shows to fight (Neilsen Net) ratings wars
September 20th, 2007 • Internet, Television, Video
Tags: publishing, Video
This one’s a little beyond my simple mind, but I get the gist. NewTeeVee delves in a possible near future for the television and movie industries, taking recent predictions of an exponentially expanding online video market and converting it into a new currency for TV producers:
Using today’s encoding techniques, an hour of video content equates to around 850 megabytes of data. According to the Cisco report, by 2011, Internet video will consume more than 17 exabytes of data a month (an exabyte is 10 to the 18th power). Divided by 850 megabytes, that 17 exabytes works out to some 20 trillion hours of video delivered over the Internet each month. Given that volume of video, it seems likely that some piece of content –- as an episode of Heroes or Desperate Housewives, perhaps — will garner a million simultaneous viewers and add a Nielsen ratings point to the viewing audience. In fact, it seems contradictory to think otherwise, 20 trillion is 20 million million hours per month — surely one popular piece of video content will generate this audience.
Can Internet Video Deliver A Nielsen Ratings Point? « NewTeeVeeMakes sense: creators and funders get a metric they can work with, building a foundation for popularity and sales. The only issue beyond there is measuring quality of audience (so making a big difference to advertising revenues): is there an argument here for YouTube working a lot harder at profiling and promoting its channels?
XBox to become your TV and cinema?
September 9th, 2007 • Technology, Television, Video
Tags: TV, Video
You can understand why the television and movie industries are in such a fluff. Their businesses are changing in front of their very eyes, and the film and TV execs are not necessarily in control of their own destinies.For example, who would have imagined five years ago that games consoles could eventually outstrip cable and analogue as the main means of movie and show delivery? Yet this year, Microsoft plans to unleash its on-demand video service on an unsuspecting Europe, using the XBox 360 as its Trojan horse.There’s absolutely no reason (bar dumb pricing and marketing) why this shouldn’t succeed: there are an awful lot of 360s under an awful lot of HD-ready tellies in the UK. And thanks to the huge popularity of XBox Live, a lot of those consoles are already connected to networks. As Bink.nu points out, Redmond is already courting the content suppliers:
MICROSOFT is courting the BBC as it plans to launch its digital television and video service in Europe. The software giant is intent on turning its Xbox 360 video-games machine into a digital entertainment hub offering films, TV shows and high-definition programmes. It already offers video content in America via its Xbox 360 video-games console.
Studio employee seeds P2P networks with new TV show
August 2nd, 2007 • Television, Video
AllYourTV claims to have an interview with a Warner Brothers Television employee, who admits to leaking episodes of a major new series for the network onto P2P and BitTorrent sites.
The nameless employee uploaded with files of ‘Pushing Daises’ with help from a ‘neighbour’s kid’, who got ’some kind of uploading credit’ in return for helping out.
But did WB sanction the leaking of the series? Over to AllYourTV:
Q: So what made you decide to pass along the file? Was this your idea, or did your boss approve it?
A: MY boss? Oh, God no. I mean…look, I think a lot of people….it’s a bit like the military’s ‘Don’t’ Ask Don’t Tell’ rule. I think a lot of people think in theory that getting a show out there ahead of time is a good idea. Especially a show (like “Pushing Daisies”) that generally gets a lot of excitement from people after they watch it.But it’s not like anyone I know would admit to that while they’re on the clock, and it’s not even something you would bring up seriously as a suggestion.
Studio Source: ‘I Helped Upload TV Pilot’–AllyourTV.com
And over at NewTeeVee, they have a little tongue in cheek advice if you’d like to begin promoting your studio’s new big production using your peer groups…
The worst TV presenter ever?
August 2nd, 2007 • Life, Strange, Television
TV advertising should return to the 50s
August 1st, 2007 • Advertising, Television
David Kiley at BusinessWeek is sick of the quality of television commercials, and argues that the broadcasters are becoming ever more desperate in their ploys to make you watch ads. I think I agree: it may be a result of old age, but I seem to remember better TV advertising in the 80s and 90s than I do now. But I shouldn’t worry: David has an idea that could save the day…
One idea for getting high commercial ratings would be to go back to having hosts like Ferguson and Jay Leno read ads and hold the product up. That is an ad that will score very high.
These guys could probably invent cool riffs on the products. Johnny Carson used to do it. Even Edward R. Murrow read ads on his show. Don Imus, before he got canned earlier this year, used to riff on ads for Bigelow Tea, Tassimo coffee makers and North Fork Bank. And they were far better ads than what was coming out of the ad agencies.
How we all learned to stop doubting and love our TVs
July 28th, 2007 • Business, Television
I lost a Saturday afternoon recently, having lazily turned the TV on to be greeted by the opening credits to Network. The next two hours vanished: I was only 13 when the Sidney Lumet film was released, and had somehow managed to miss it in the intervening 31 years.
It is one of the most powerful uses of a movie camera I have ever witnessed, and will subtly, permanently budge your view of the world. Peter Finch’s quasi-religious monologues to camera will stay with you, whether to want them to or not. And you’ll certainly never view television the same way again.
So I stopped again this afternoon, this time reading Shelly Palmer’s reasoned rant over at the Huffington Post.
If you live in the United States, you have watched approximately 30,000 hours of television by the time you are 18 years old. This factoid is important when you consider that the “conventions of television,” our willingness to suspend disbelief for our own enjoyment of the medium, are learned behaviors. People unfamiliar with television usually walk behind the box to see how the people got in there and wonder why they are so small. Over the course of our childhood, we have come to accept the images on TV as “real” and sometimes we forget what is really “real” and what is fake “real.”
Shelly Palmer: You Mean TV is Fake? - Media on The Huffington Post
Joost: one million and counting
July 25th, 2007 • Best sites, Business, Television, Video
Joost - The new way of watching free, full-screen, high-quality TV on the internet
And we are about to go live on the service. Dead excited. Oh, I know that there are new ways of delivering video springing up from every corner. But there’s something about Joost that’s right - maybe it’s the ‘oooh, it’s just like Sky on your PC’ interface - or the MyJoost section with the clever IM client and the RSS feeds. Don’t know.
Either way, I can’t wait for the Stuff.tv shows to be seen by a new audience.
ABC launches Hi-Def streaming
July 24th, 2007 • Media, Television, Video
Now this is what we needed: hardcore streaming. You’ll need to download a player (and no, you won’t be able to skip the ads), but the new ABC.com HD shows could be just what the Gadget Doctor ordered.
We’ve been thinking about HD video ourselves, partly inspired by the new Hi-Def vidcasts from the Wall St Journal. Main issue is file size: the WSJ have their 10-15min show down to around 200-250MB, while we’re still struggling with the same length of show at 600-700MB. We’ll get there, we’ll get there…
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