This week TalkTV announced that they are taking their channel off air and moving online. This could be interpreted as a sign of the decline of broadcast TV, that it just doesn’t matter anymore and reading the BBC News article on this last night you could be led to that conclusion. However, I believe this is not the case and that TalkTV simply lost to GB News. Which may be the first time I’ve seen this happen to a Murdoch company. There had been talk for many years about the launch of a right leaning news channel in the UK... Read more →

In September Everyone TV announced the development of Freely, a new free TV service, launching in 2024, that will deliver live TV over broadband here in the UK. I’ve had a several people ask me what exactly it is, so I thought it would be helpful to explain what I think it will be and why I think it is important. Read more →

When I first heard the rumours about Sky Glass just before its launch in October 2021, I was really quite surprised and I have to say a bit confused. Sky was about to launch their very long-awaited and anticipated Sky Q over IP product and it was not a set-top box but a whole television. What’s more is that it wasn’t actually part of the Sky Q ecosystem. It took me a couple of days to recover, reflect and realise the strategic brilliance behind this bold move. It positioned Sky against their future competition pivoting away from the battles with their past competitors. Read more →

Recently I have found myself doing a Mandalorian. This does not mean I have become an inter-galactic bounty hunter or started walking around with a bucket on my head that I refused to take off in public. I'm referring to how I consume subscription VOD services. Read more →

Last week I had the privilege of attending the Sky Tech Summit, now in its 3rd year. The agenda had multiple tracks covering content innovation, superior streaming, people & skills and emerging tech. But, for me, across these there were two bigger themes linking them all together, which were Artificial Intelligence and Inclusion. #skytech2018 Read more →

In this series “The Future of TV”, I will explore concepts that I believe could have a big impact on television. Concepts beyond what most people are thinking about today. People often ask me what is the “next big thing” is for television? They sometimes ask this for true insight but generally it is just as an ice breaker. As with any industry, the history of the “next big thing” is full of successes and failures. For a while the “next big thing” was thought to be 3D. Early in the hype cycle for 3D I rejected it for being... Read more →

I've taken a look at the numbers to determine if the Internet Giants (Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Netflix) could take a big chunk of the English Premiership Football rights any time soon. Read more →

What is significant about the Apple TV App? Why is it worth writing about? Well, it does much of what TV operators have been trying to achieve for years and, maybe more importantly, it also does something the UK broadcasters should be doing without Apple. Read more →

My recent appearance at the Set-Top Box Gateway Summit in London picked up a bit of coverage (mainly from CSI who hosted the event). I've been meaning to post an article on the topic of the "OTT Tipping Point", which I have been researching, but the quotes, which I really did say, that were picked up by CSI summarise the topic well. Watch this space for the full analysis. Read more →

Broadband TV News amongst others recently ran an article comparing the top 10 most illegally downloaded movies from Bit Torrent with the Top 10 streamed Netflix movies. Now I had expected the lists to be roughly the same, but it is interesting that they are not, in fact they are very different. In all the coverage of these lists no one gave any real reasons or analysis. As I’m always willing to provide an opinion I thought I would present some potential reasons for this divergence. Read more →