It’s all happening around Sky at the moment. The first was an unexpected bid from the US giant Comcast, disrupting the cosy deal that the Murdoch and Disney groups had planned. The second was Sky’s own doing: to offer Netflix subscriptions on the Sky and Now TV platforms… which now incorporate voice recognition. One is a fascinating business saga that will impact on user choice in the long term.
“The US network The CW celebrates its ten-year anniversary this year.” That is the opening sentence of the call for papers for an upcoming conference at the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne that makes the CW its main focus. “Network” – for the CW that has been a defining term, maybe one limiting the young station at its onset.
Why has the television business made it so hard for its users to find something they want to watch? It used to be so easy. You turned on the TV and instantly there was something, if you didn’t like that you could hop from one channel to another… or use the handy scheduling grid to find what was on when. There is no equivalent for the digital age.
A year ago Elke Weissmann wrote about finding time for television, and discussed that when we actually find that limited time in our day to sit down and watch television, we do not actually watch television. Instead we watch a specific programme, whether on DVD or on-demand, and are often prone to binge watching these programmes.
After many happy years basking in its warm, electronic glow, my once-reliable television set recently emitted its final diodes of light. An ominous dark patch in the upper left corner of the screen had been growing larger over the past year or so, like some slow but inevitable illness. It seemed to vary in its severity but on particularly bad days it had become difficult if not impossible to decipher what was happening in that area of the image.
It’s been one of those days. The Christmas holidays had been lurking around the corner, and finally I had some free time on my hands, between the formal end of the academic calendar of 2015, and the big celebration rush that we tend to throw ourselves into, meeting up with family and long-time friends.Free time – priceless. And somewhere, somehow, I had come across an announcement that a new SciFi show would be airing on SyFy;
Mad Men [is] arguably the dominant TV drama of its time. — Time critic James Poniewozik, 24 June 2015
Graduating from the Juilliard School as recently as 2009, Adam Driver is currently experiencing a seminal phase of his career with his mass exposure to a worldwide audience via Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J. J. Abrams, 2015). His breakthrough part has undoubtedly been Adam Sackler, ‘the sexually debased actor-carpenter-weirdo’ in Girls (HBO, 2012-present); a part for which he has
So here’s a list of show titles for you: The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Prison Break, The A-Team, Hart to Hart, Gilmore Girls, Star Trek, Full House, and Magyver. Looking at it, you might think that this was a catalog of DVD box sets or, perhaps, the line-up for another one of those cable channels devoted entirely to reruns.
At a time when a growing number of older persons in the United States are living with their adult children (between 2000 and 2011, this figure rose from 2.2 million to 4.6 million [1] ), the U.S. broadcast networks Fox and CBS have each launched a new situation comedy about retired parents invading their children’s homes.
