Digital TV Blog

Satcaster fed up with regulatory heel draggage

Sky have temporarily put the kibosh on their proposed Picnic digital TV service, following the non-emergence of the Ofcom report that was due to be published this spring.

“The blunt truth is that Ofcom has spent 18 months looking at our proposals and there is no end in sight. The Picnic team have done everything they can to prepare for launch and there’s nothing left to be achieved until Ofcom makes its mind up,” said a Sky spokesperson, who added that “no business can go on like that.”

With Picnic, Sky had intended to replace its current line up of channels on the Freeview platform – that’s Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Three – with premium Sky Movies and Sky Sports content, and the flagship channel Sky One. Picnic would be available either on its own, or as part of a bundle deal including fixed-line calls and broadband services in the same vein to its See Speak Surf bundles, and would require potential customers to purchase a new MPEG4 compatible set-top box.

The proposal was initially submitted back in February 2007, on the eve of the missing channel hoo-hah with Virgin Media, and prompted a response from rival providers Setanta and Top-Up TV.

Cable Chameleon

Living TV is to go behind the closed doors of Boy George’s life in a new series called ‘Living With…‘. The cable channel will follow the former Culture Club singer to give viewers a snapshot of his day-to-day life, filming both his mother and his friends. The series will also film former Big Brother contestant Jade Goody as she battles with advanced cervical cancer.

Living TV’s director of Programmes, Claudia Rosencrantz said: “We have been incredibly sensitive over this. It was an extraordinary coincidence that we were filming already when it happened.

“It was clear when the whole Big Brother thing happened that there was more to come from Jade. I never thought she was a racist and thought the time had come where our viewers wanted to know what had happened to her. And then this happened.”

Rosencrantz made clear that Goody had set clear parameters within which Living was allowed to film. The show is just one of several in Living’s autumn line-up of programmes offering “trashy glamour”. The channel, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this month, will also be broadcasting Dirty Dancing: The Time Of Your Life, America’s Next Top Model and Grey’s Anatomy.

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Nearly half of the UK’s cable viewers use VoD

According to Virgin Media, roughly 1.6m of their digital cable television customers, representing nearly half of its TV customer base, make use of the Virgin Central VoD (Video on Demand) services. This includes pay per view content such as movies and music videos as well as content offered on the 7 day catch up service and the BBC iPlayer channel.

The company, which has seen net TV customer additions of 24,800 in the second quarter of 2008, reported that average views of video on demand content per month were 24, compared to 14 during the same period last year.

“During the quarter, we launched the BBC’s iPlayer service on our VoD platform offering hundreds of hours of BBC ‘catch-up’ content,” a Virgin spokesperson explained. “Virgin Media is the first TV platform to make BBC iPlayer available in full screen picture quality directly to its 3.4m digital TV subscribers. Developments like this give VoD a new impetus and help establish on-demand as a genuinely mainstream TV service.”

Virgin also noted that take up of its high definition PVR package V+ is used by nearly half a million of its customers (424,900) or some 13% of its digital TV customer base.

Doctor Who and Dot Cotton top downloads

The BBC iPlayer service on Virgin Media saw more than 10m viewers make use of its service in June, according to the first batch of figures released by the quad play company. The June figures are significantly up from the 1.4 million views of BBC content via Virgin when the service was launched in May.

Virgin Media, the first Digital TV platform to give the BBC iPlayer catch-up service its own stand alone menu, managed to attract half as many viewings as the iPlayer website did in June.

Pressing the ‘red button’ on remotes whilst watching a BBC channel on Virgin Media TV brings up the iPlayer menu, without the user having to directly access the internet. Among the top viewings were repeats of EastEnders, Doctor Who and the frankly disturbing kids show In the Night Garden.

Malcolm Wall, the chief executive of content at Virgin Media, said that the figures underlined the “continued success of our on-demand offering,” a sentiment echoed by Rahul Chakkara, the BBC controller for TV platforms, who said: “The initial success on Virgin Media underlines the multiplatform appeal of the BBC iPlayer proposition.”

The iPlayer, which is available to all UK viewers who have an internet connection, has been running fully since Christmas and pulls in an average of 1.5 million users each week.

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.

Project Kangaroo given the hop

The highly anticipated video-on-demand and catch-up service being jointly-developed by the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 is apparently going to launch under the name ‘SeeSaw’, according to a recently leaked report.

The service, known so far as Project Kangaroo, due to the fact that it would allow viewers to ‘hop’ from channel to channel has been provisionally renamed SeeSaw, possibly for phonetic reasons, almost certainly because it rolls off the tongue a lot better than Project Kangaroo did.

The trans-channel VoD platform is said to launch sometime next year. BBC Worldwide has yet to seek approval from the BBC Trust, while the project is also being investigated by the Office of Fair Trading.

Currently the project exists in name only - there are no details on how the service would work, whether it would follow the iPlayer/4oD format of offering a 7-day online catch-up service, an archive facility or a combination of the two.

It has been suggested that newly launched Freesat platform will eventually allow customers to stream or view downloaded content from the BBC iPlayer on their living room screens, echoing the recent BBC and Virgin Media agreement.

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.

Anything Toucan do…

Broadband ISP, telco and IPTV supplier Tiscali are all set to add another ace to their already impressive hand – mobile phone services. After the acquisition of ISP Toucan last summer, Tiscali also inherited the Toucan mobile service, which piggybacks on the T-Mobile network.

This should certainly give the competition something to think about, especially Virgin Media, who have been able to comfortably claim the title of the UK’s sole quad play provider. BT, which currently leads the UK broadband market and Sky, undoubtedly keen to built on the success of See Speak Surf in 2008, should also have pause for thought. Mobile-and-broadband suppliers Orange and O2 are both thought to be rolling out IPTV in the UK this year – news of Tiscali moving in on their home turf cant be welcome.

Tiscali are thought to be planning on launching the mobile phone service in the UK in the last quarter of 2008 – Tiscali chief executive Mary Turner was quoted in The Telegraph saying: “The assessment is not if, it is who and when. The business case has already been approved by the board.”

Gunners TV to launch in January

Today sees sportscasters Setanta kick off with their Arsenal Month; focussing on the six matches the Gunners face leading up to the launch of the new Arsenal TV channel

The Arsenal TV channel will launch in January and will provide exclusive interviews with staff and players, replays of all the top matches and classic matches, along with coverage of reserves games and documentaries on the history of the club and behind-the-scenes access to staff-only areas of the Emirates stadium.

Arsenal TV will be included in the Setanta Sports pack at no extra charge – the channel will be available on Virgin Media, and Sky. Whilst not available on BT Vision per se, BT Total Broadband customers can sign up for a years free subscription to Arsenal TV Online, which provides live audio coverage of all matches plus access to a large library of exclusive content. Arsenal TV will also be available to Setanta customers in the Republic of Ireland.

The upcoming Arsenal matches for December are:

Saturday 1st December – Aston Villa v Arsenal

Saturday 8th December – Middlesbrough v Arsenal

Saturday 15th December – Arsenal v Chelsea

Saturday 22nd December – Arsenal v Tottenham

Wednesday 26th December – Portsmouth v Arsenal

Saturday 29th December – Everton v Arsenal

Chart Show Channels up sticks

The music channels Bliss, Flaunt and Scuzz have all left Virgin Media’s cable TV line-up, following the failure of an agreement to materialise between owners Chart Show Channels Media and the cable group.

Pop and chart channels Bliss and Flaunt along with rock and metal channel Scuzz, once owned by Sky, are wholly owned by the CSC Media Group and all underwent a revamp following the purchase, with Scuzz in particular focussing more on broadcasting live performances of bands.

Virgin Media are apparently eschewing the CSC channels in favour of focussing their own on-demand content: “We are continuing to harmonise our Digital TV offering and the removal of these channels forms part of that process. All these channels were in our XL TV package and any XL customers can get unlimited access to Music Video On Demand for no extra cost. This service allows the viewer to choose from over 1000 music videos, and play them when they want.”