Digital TV Blog

Personal Services Required gets personal

RDF Media, the TV production company that sparked a row after falsely portraying the Queen as storming out of a photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz when, in fact, she had been walking in, has again been accused of misrepresenting the truth. Participants in the Channel 4 reality show Personal Services Required claimed that the production company made them look “ridiculous.”

The show films families seeking to employ a housekeeper, and follows them through the recruitment process. Headhunters Gabriella and Danny Grasso claim that when looking for a housekeeper, they were wrongly depicted as offering someone a job below the minimum wage. They are worried that the slur will have a negative impact on their business and are considering suing for libel.

“For us this was a serious process, but RDF belittled us and tried to make us look ridiculous on television,” said Danny Grasso. “They’ve given us unfair representation and made us look like people who are exploiting other people for entertainment. Had I known about them and their reputation, I wouldn’t have agreed to it.”

Well, the whole BBC/Queen/photoshoot/apology fiasco was pretty big news last year Danny, and Wife Swap is one of Channel 4’s biggest pulls. RDF Media are also responsible for shows such as Location Location Location, Rock School, and Shipwrecked. You might have heard of them. You might want to check them out.

The Grassos were approached by RDF, when they posted an advert for a housekeeper on the website Gumtree. They initially declined the offer because they were living in Dubai at the time, but later accepted when RDF offered to fly the couple and their 13-year-old daughter back to Britain first-class. Three housekeepers were interviewed and filmed at the couple’s five-bedroom home near Flitwick, Bedfordshire, having been chosen by the production company, supposedly on the basis of their suitability and experience.

37-year-old Danny Grasso said: “We were told the housekeepers would be qualified and vetted, so it would be a service to us. But when they sent in the first one it was clear they had chosen people who were ‘entertaining’.”

The couple ended up employing Wendy-Anne Passmore, but at the end of last week’s programme she said she doubted whether she was being paid even the minimum wage, at £250 a week. However Danny insists this is a ludicrous claim. “We were offering separate living accommodation and food with all utility bills paid; there’s no way that’s below the minimum wage.”

However, RDF maintains the episode gave “a fair and accurate representation of what happened”. Another applicant for the position of housekeeper called the couple “chavvy Lottery winners” to the camera. The last RDF fiasco, which showed the Queen apparently storming out of a photo shoot, prompted the BBC and ITV to stop commissioning productions from the company for a limited period. It also led to the dismissal of RDF’s creative director Stephen Lambert and the controller of BBC1 Peter Fincham.

Satcaster in Scottish Switchover Stink-up

The decision to award Sky the contract for a digital switchover help scheme has been criticized by a Scottish MP.

The scheme, set up by the British government, helps elderly and disabled people make the switch to digital TV by converting one of their televisions to digital. Individuals aged 75 or over as well as those eligible for certain benefits will be offered digital equipment fully installed by Sky at a cost of £40, or free for the less well off, enabling them to access over 200 Freeview television and radio channels without subscription. They will also receive extra Sky channels and the Sky Plus digital recording facility free for two months, after which period they can opt to pay for the additional service or simply retain their Freeview channels.

However, the Liberal Democrat MP for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk has criticized the scheme sharply, saying that the digital market is no long a level playing field for Sky’s competitors: “What it fundamentally does take away is the idea that the transfer to digital television is done on a neutral basis, without any particular choice between the different television platforms. This is giving Sky an unprecedented marketing opportunity to some of people who are the most vulnerable in our Borders’ communities.”

He said that people on the scheme would have to pay for installation if they opted for an alternative provider which “seems to me absolutely crazy”.

However, chief operating officer of the Switchover Help Scheme Tony Noakes insisted that the decision to award the contract to Sky was a fair one: “The Help Scheme chose Sky as the standard offer because it represents best value for money and a high-quality service for eligible people. People using the Help Scheme in Scottish Borders will be free to choose from a range of other ways of going digital.”

BBC iPlayer and 4oD come bundled gratis

BT Vision has introduced a monthly subscription for its previously free on-demand digital TV content.

BT Vision who want to make use of the 7-day catch up service now have to sign up for the new £3 a month Replay service for their IPTV demand/Freeview hybrid. However, the subscription also covers the 4oD and BBC iPlayer online services, allowing viewers to enjoy on-demand content on big, widescreens in the living room as opposed to grainy, pixellated flatscreen monitor displays.

Virgin Media, which also offers all its TV customers free catch up TV from the BBC and 4oD said it had no plans to start charging its customers for this content – bearing in mind that Virgin who already charge a premium for their souped-up cable service can probably afford to absorb the cost of on-demand downloads.

Endemol conjure an affront to taste and proper geometry

We all knew that this time round Big Brother was going to come down hard on those who broke the rules (clue: don’t be a massive racist) but this is taking the michael just a little.

Pictures of the new garden area have just been posted up on msn.com a day before the ninth British series of the genre-defining reality TV show is unleashed on Channel 4 and it looks like Endemol let the design team who came up with the 2012 London Olympic logo loose on the set. In short, it looks horrible – jaunty, colliding angles and various shades of sick-inducing green, with an oversized Dali-esque ashtray placed in the middle. So the housemates, and by extension the viewers, have already been punished by this aesthetic offence before having committed any sin.

Those who do will find themselves locked up in the BB chokey – the ‘jail’ is also incorporated into the garden area of the house, so that those incarcerated will have to suffer the added humiliation of watching the other housemates having a good time, enjoying the weather and cooling off in the pool – given that the sun will be shining directly into the cramped cell at some point in the day, we reckon its going to get pretty hot in there.

The interior of the cell is also decorated with pictures of Chucky from Childsplay-style eyeless doll’s heads intended to creep the inmates out, and features a two-way mirror reflecting the endless heads and ensuring no privacy for the captives. It’s a given that all housemates will undergo proper psychological profiling before entering to prevent any full on claustrophobia induced wig-outs, but is this too much? Maybe. We’ve not yet met any of the housemates, and some of them are bound to be excruciatingly annoying wastes of matter.

Say what you like about Big Brother, but the show certainly has a knack for extracting the inner misanthrope from pretty much everyone.

Even more talks

It turns out that TV rivals Sky and Virgin Media have been having more talks concerning the return of the missing channels to the cable platform. Virgin Chief Executive Neil Berkett told Reuters that administrative changes played a part in the discussions; “It’s fair to say that with a change at the top of both organizations, there is a dialogue and there’s no sort of emotional legacy that would hold us back,” he said yesterday.

Last year, Neil Berkett stepped into the shoes of Steve Burch, and James Murdoch stepped down from the top spot, allowing Jeremy Darroch to take the reins.

Virgin Media have another reason to be cheerful - churn has fallen significantly in the last quarter, with the rate falling to 1.2 per cent during the first three months of 2008 - in Q2 of last year, this rate peaked at around 1.8 per cent.

Virgin Media also added a net figure of 4,900 new cable customers - its third successive quarter of customer growth despite the seasonally-quieter post-Christmas period.

Auntie and Ninty bunk up

The BBC’s Future Media and Technology department has announced the inking of a deal with Nintendo UK, that will bring the popular BBC iPlayer to owners of the Nintendo Wii console in the form of an application which streams content to your TV screens over a broadband connection.

Erik Huggers, (a man who sounds like a cutesy cartoon Viking) of le Beeb revealed that Nintendo Wii owners will be able to stream BBC content directly to their tellies via their console via the Opera browser feature of the Wii, a move which should equal joy for twentysomethings across the nation who until recently were forced to watch grainy, low-res episodes of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe on YouTube via their TVs via their Wiis.

“Working with Nintendo marks another exciting milestone for the BBC iPlayer,” Huggers said. “It underlines our commitment to reaching new audiences by making the BBC iPlayer available on as many platforms as possible.”

Once the iPlayer service for the Wii is live, a notification message will be sent to all Wii consoles in the UK currently connected to the internet. In other cross-platform console and digital telly news, BT Vision have hooked up with Xbox 360 manufacturers Microsoft, and Sony are preparing to launch their Play TV install app for the PlayStation 3 which turns their shiny black boxes into a combined games machine/Freeview receiver with record and rewindability.

New Media IPTV recruits former Auntie adviser

As mobile and broadband providers O2 and Orange prepare to launch digital TV platforms in the UK. BT has appointed Simon Milner, former BBC policy adviser, as its head of media and convergence policy as it makes plans to moves further into the digital media market, hoping to shake off the perception of some, that IPTV is something of an attendant white elephant broadband add-on.

Milner said: “Convergence [in the telecoms market] has been a hot debating topic for at least a decade. For BT and our customers, it’s now a reality and it’s generating policy conundrums which need tackling.”

In the last five years alone we’ve seen mobile phone companies merge with internet service providers, and TV companies setting up their own fixed line networks – BT Vision was launched just over a year ago, and has been busy in snapping up content for the service, most notably near-live coverage of Premiership football games, which when combined with the Setanta Sports Pack, made for an alternative to Sky.

Last year, BT inked a deal with Channel 4 which allowed customers to watch content downloaded on the 4oD platform on their TV screens via the BT Vision box. BT also made noises about New Media 2, a new concept for 21^st Century TV which would see viewers actively participating in the plot outcomes of drama series, allowing for multiple endings to programmes via a library of additional content downloaded from an online backend of additional material.

BT Vision currently has a consumer base of nearly 200,000.

Sony-backed format triumphs

Whilst this isnt strictly a post about the telly, it will be of interest to those who’ve shelled out for big expensive HD Ready TV sets, presumably to enjoy the superior picture and sound quality available on next gen services and products such as Sky HD, V+, Xbox 360 and the PS3.

Sony’s Blu-Ray has won the battle of the HD formats, as HD DVD backers Toshiba formally announcing that it is to cease producing HD DVD discs and players. This is bad news for Xbox owners who shelled out for the add-on HD DVD players, although thanks to the deal done with BT Vision, owners should be able to watch downloaded HD content when the platform is released next year.

People have been quick to point out that this is a repeat of the old VHS/Betamax format war, although the difference here is that both the HD disc formats were practically identical in terms of image quality. Blu-Ray discs had the edge over HD DVD in that they could store more information, but the Toshiba-backed product was cheaper to manufacture and reportedly was easier for studios to implement interactive elements such as fancy DVD menus and hidden easter eggs.

We also find out what bears get up to in the woods

In news which will come as a shock to absolutely no-one, Secretary of State for Business John Hutton has ordered Sky to reduce their stake in ITV from the current 17.9 per cent to less than half that amount at 7.5.

The statement released from the Department for Business reads:

‘The Secretary of State has decided to make an adverse public interest finding, taking account of the Competition Commission’s decision that this transaction results in a substantial lessening of competition within the UK market for all television.

‘The Secretary of State has also decided to impose the remedies recommended by the Competition Commission to address the substantial lessening of competition identified in their report: divestment of BSkyB’s shares in ITV down to a level below 7.5 [per cent] and behavioural undertakings from BSkyB requiring the company not to dispose of the shares to an associated person, nor to seek or accept representation on the board of ITV and not to reacquire shares in ITV.’

Thus ends one chapter of the tangled war of attrition between Sky and Virgin Media, with enough arcs and twists to be considered worthy of a Lost season. The Byzantine legal wrangling over the carriage fees farce is still ongoing, as is a separate but closely related joint complaint by BT, Setanta and Virgin over Sky’s so-called ‘vicious circle’ of control over sports broadcasting. Ofcom are to decide whether the latter case should be referred to the Commission by the end of the month, but it is looking unlikely.

BT’s beef is related to its battle for broadband – Ofcom regulation saw the telco having to open up it’s network of phonelines to rival ISPs, including Sky. BT are currently market leaders in the broadband market, whereas Sky sit pretty atop of the pay TV pile.

Take-up of next-gen digital telly skyrockets

Recent Ofcom figures point again to the massive growth of digital TV in the UK, and Freeview in particular. The report shows that over 80% of UK households are using some form of digital TV viewing equipment on their main living room set, and that in the last year, some 8.6million Freeview set-top boxes or Digital-ready TV sets were sold.

Freeview’s relative inexpense and accessibility is undoubtedly the platform’s strongest point, and the advent of Freeview Playback – affording viewers Sky+ style recordability – has also seen take up increase. The recent report also claims that many viewers are upgrading secondary tellies in increasing numbers, with just under 12 million additional sets now converted to digital.

The number of UK households with digital TV on their main set is 21.7million, according to Ofcom. Sky currently has in excess of 8.4 million TV customers with a view to getting 10 million by 2010.

Virgin Media currently has over 3.4 million subscribers now signed up to its cable TV services, an increase of over 100,000 year-on-year, with over 190,000 customers using its V+ personal video recorder and HD service.

BT Vision has netted 100,000 customers since its inception, with a view to exceeding double this amount by 2010 – as of yet, there are no figures to show how many customers have been making use of its on demand services.