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.
Much has been made of the return of The Tudors – the hit US-funded historical drama based upon the reign of Henry VIII of England – to BBC2 after a moderately successful first series which, whilst wildly inaccurate historically speaking, put bums of living room seats to the tune of 2.2 million.
The mutli-part period piece, featuring Gormenghast and Velvet Goldmine star Jonathan Rhys Meyers (right) as King Enry Imself, has been heavily promoted by the Beeb, who used Marilyn Manson’s 1996 hit The Beautiful People to advertise the show, perhaps conscious of Rhys Meyer’s screen pairing with former Manson squeeze Rose McGowan, who played Ann-Margret in the 2005 Elvis mini series.
Last Friday saw around 2.3 million of the British viewing peasantry to flock to their screens; the new series deals with tumultuous events surrounding Henry VIII’s attempts to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled so that he can slip the ring on the finger of Anne Boleyn.
Despite all the regal fanfare, the impact of The Tudors failed to dent Big Brother over on Channel 4, which pulled in an altogether more majestic 3.6 million punters, who witnessed the booting out of Luke Marsden, AKA the chap who allegedly got the nasty on with fellow evictee Rebecca ‘Bex’ Shiner.
Henry and the gang even failed to fend off a repeat of Agatha Christie’s Poirot over on ITV1 which, scooped a respectable 3.2 million.
Contestent Maysoon Shaladi has walked out of the Big Brother house just three weeks after first setting foot in it, claiming she was homesick.
The 28-year-old model told Big Brother she wanted to leave after a tough few days in the house, after entering half-way through the ninth series.
Viewers were informed of her departure at the end of the highlights show on Channel 4 last night. Maysoon was due to be up for eviction tomorrow night along with eight other housemates, but decided to pull out before the vote. Channel 4 has told viewers who already cast their vote that they can apply for a refund, but that it would still give all money already donated to charity.
Maysoon had received criticism from fellow housemates Stuart and Rex for an eviction video. On last night’s programme she told housemates “I never really got 100% comfortable in the house,” she said. “I’m happy with the month I did. I wouldn’t change it.”.
The BBC was fined £400,000 by media watchdog Ofcom yesterday, the largest fine in the corporation’s history, for a succession of phone-in competition scandals.
The BBC accepted the fine immediately, levied for breaching the broadcasting code on four television programmes and four radio programmes by “faking winners of competitions and deliberately conducting competitions unfairly”.
The £400,000 fine made up a fairly small proportion of the £11.5 million in charges levied at the broadcasting industry in the UK last year, after a spate of incidents involving the abuse of premium-rate phone-in competitions.
By contrast ITV was ordered to pay £5,675,000 in May for deceiving viewers of prime time TV shows such as Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night takeaway into entering competitions on premium rate phone-lines which they had no hope of winning. The maximum penalty for faking phone-in competitions is £2 million. However, Ofcom said the BBC’s lesser penalty reflected the fact that the broadcaster had not been seeking to gain financially from the deceptions. Nonetheless, the BBC had made serious breaches of the broadcasting code including making “premeditated decisions to broadcast competitions and encourage listeners to enter in the full knowledge that the audience stood no chance of winning”.
There were several issues of faked winners on television programmes: On a Comic Relief broadcast in March 2007 a member of the production team pretended to be a competition winner after a technical issue with the phone lines. In September 2007 a member of staff posed as a child after the programme had difficulty in getting in contact with competition winners. On a BBC Scotland production for Children in Need the name of a fictitious viewer was read out as the competition winner after a technical fault, and a member of the Sports Relief production team posed as a winner on air in July 2006.
However, radio programmes received the brunt of Ofcom’s criticism for their repeated breaches of the broadcasting code. The Liz Kershaw Show on BBC 6 Music received a £115,000 fine for 17 pre-recorded episodes which invited listeners to call or text entries to competitions they had no chance of winning. The names of fictitious winners were later read out on air. Other programmes that received fines were the Russell Brand Show, Jo Whiley’s show on Radio 1 and the Clare McDonnel Show.
The BBC said in a statement: “We have taken these issues extremely seriously from the outset, apologising to our audiences and putting in place an unprecedented action plan to tackle the issues raised.”
The presenter Carol Vorderman has announced that she will be leaving Countdown after being told to accept a 90% pay-cut or quit, her agent claimed last night.
The first woman to appear on Channel 4, Vorderman joined the quiz programme 26 years ago as a fresh-faced maths graduate and has charmed millions of viewers ever since with her gentle banter with presenter Richard Whiteley and her head for figures. The two presenters turned the low-key tea-time show into a national institution. Even the Queen is said to be a fan.
According to Vorderman’s agent, John Miles, the presenter told Channel 4 she was happy to receive a 33% pay cut in line with a reduction in the show’s budget. Vorderman, who had previously earned an estimated £1 million for 225 episodes a year, was offered less than £100,000 and given 48 hours to decide. “It was a non-negotiable take-it-or-leave-it offer. I was stunned,” said Miles.
What is more, one executive reputedly told her the show had survived Richard Whiteley’s death in 2005 and “could easily survive without you.”
Vorderman had initially claimed on Friday that she was stepping down because she did not want to go through the stress of bonding with another new presenter, after Des O’Connor announced that he would be resigning from the show at the end of the series. However, she said that she wanted viewers to know the “truth” about leaving the show.
“I am devastated that my joyous time with one of the best programmes on television has ended this way,” she said. “I was happy to continue doing the numbers and letters for years to come. I wish all of my friends and colleagues every success in the future.”
Rory Bremner is the favourite tipped to be the new host of Countdown, after Des O’Connor announced his resignation from the Channel 4 games show earlier this week.
Others touted for the position include singer and host of Songs of Praise Aled Jones, former Antiques Roadshow host Michael Aspel, and ex-MP and HIGNFY guest Gyles Brandreth. Both Aspel and Brandreth have appeared on the programme in ‘dictionary corner’, with Brandreth gaining a reputation for wearing brightly-coloured jumpers.
Satirist and impressionist Bremner has been a regular on Channel 4 for a number of years now, as one of the presenters of the satirical series Bremner, Bird and Fortune.
Carol Vorderman’s future on the show is also being questioned, as Granada television plan on making cutbacks to staffing costs. Vorderman has been with the programme since it started, along with Channel 4 itself in 1982, shuffling and arranging the letters, as well as adding up the numbers effortlessly after each round. Vorderman is currently one of the highest paid women in Britain, earning £5 million a year.
However, Granada, which owns production company Yorkshire Television, is understood to be planning a reduction in wages for the show’s presenters. “The advertising recession means that at the moment budgets are tight,” said a source at the show.
The quiz show is the longest running programme on Channel 4. Until his death in 2005, Richard Whiteley’s clashing ties and corny jokes, as well as his on-screen chemistry with Carol Vorderman were popular with viewers. Sports presenter Des Lynam took over but proved to be a highly uncharistmatic presenter and quit after 18 months on the programme. Things picked up with Des O’Connor, and Channel 4 is hoping that the new presenter will follow in his footsteps.
A cartoon based on the 1970’s kids’ TV programme Monkey is being used to promote coverage of the Olympic Games on the BBC.
Animated by Jamie Hewlett and with music from Damon Albarn, the duo behind both Gorillaz and stage adaptation of Monkey: Journey to the West, the campaign features Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy as they embark on a perilous journey to the Olympics Stadium in Beijing. The two-minute promotional clip takes inspiration from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, a fictional account of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to India during the Tang dynasty.
In the BBC version, the cartoon trio use a variety of Olympic sports including gymnastics, diving, javelin and hammer throwing, defeating scary monsters along the way, on their journey to Beijing.
Jonathan Bramley, executive producer at BBC sport said “This has been a really exciting collaboration. To work with such renowned artists as Jamie and Damon is a real plus for BBC Sport. Their treatment of the trail and titles will kick start our Olympic coverage in a really different, energetic way”.
The first clip from the sequence will be broadcast at 7.27pm tonight on BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4 and BBC News. It will air on the BBC website and YouTube channel, on social networking sites Facebook and Bebo, as well as in cinemas.
The campaign, which was created by ad agency RCKR/Y&R and media agency MPG, aims to link closely with the BBC’s existing Olympics coverage resources. It is being targeted at audiences in their twenties and early thirties.
In this feel-good beauty series playful stylist Gok Wan pitches designer fashion items that cost the earth against his own bargain-basement fashion-fixes and asks the audience to decide on which they prefer. This week it’s all about beaches - “one of the toughest challenges in any woman’s calendar” according to Gok, “because deciding what to wear on holiday can be a recurring nightmare”.
Gok joins fashionista and former OC star, Mischa Barton on an exclusive shopping trip in Paris, in which she revelas the secrets behind the unique wardrobe that has made her one of the most photographed women in the world.
A light-hearted but genuinely useful programme to get you all set for summer.
A Channel 4 documentary on the Qur’an described as an “exemplary piece of programme making” has been severely criticised by a group of Shia Muslim scholars for making “seriously inaccurate statements,” about their branch of the faith.
In the documentary which launched a Channel 4 Islam week, film-maker Antony Thomas looks at the history of the Qur’an, examining it for statements on equality, suicide bombings, and relationships with other faiths.
Whilst some have praised the documentary for its careful study and insights into the Muslim faith, it has angered prominent Shia Muslims, who make up about 20% of Muslims internationally. In a letter to Channel 4, a group of Shia scholars said that the depiction of Shia beliefs in The Qur’an, broadcast earlier this month, was “disappointing, misleading, even defamatory.”
The scholars believe that the documentary presented an imbalanced view of the Shia branch of Islam, portraying it as violent as Iranian Shias were seen on the programme burning effigies, chanting anti-Western slogans and encouraging acts of terrorism.
Yousif al-Khoei, director of the Al Khoei Foundation, largest Shia organisation in the UK and one of the letter’s signatories, said that a second letter would be sent to Channel 4 dealing with the group’s grievences:
“We are going to handle the issue with Channel 4 directly to highlight how it managed to get such imbalances in prime-time TV,” al-Khoei said. “If we don’t get any joy we will point out all the technical faults, mistranslations and editorialising opinion as fact.”
He said that Channel 4 owed its viewers and apology, and that a second programme should be broadcast in order to present to the public a more “balanced view” of Islam.
“If this doesn’t happen we are going to go to Ofcom. We are pretty confident we have a case,” he added.
However, it was not only members of the Shia community who criticised the programme. Muhammad Abdul Bari, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, also wrote a personal letter to Channel 4’s Chief Executive, Andy Duncan, last week, saying that “specific misrepresentations” of certain Muslim groups could threaten unity between Muslims in the UK. “The programme unfairly maligns Muslims following the Shia tradition by accusing them of heresy based on a collection of age-old polemics and misinformation,” Bari wrote. “With respect, this is an irresponsible portrayal which plays into the hands of those who wish to seek discord amongst Muslims, which we hope you did not intend.”
Shia Muslims believe that there is a direct line of succession from the prophet Mohammed, and that those in this line should lead Muslims worldwide, whereas Sunnis, who make up the majority of Muslims reject this. The documentary nailed its colours to the mast when it asserted that there was no basis for the direct line of succession in the Qur’an. Having explained Shia doctrine, the programme asked: “But do these specific beliefs have any substance in the Qur’an? The answer is no.”
However, Channel 4 has defended the documentary, saying “Antony Thomas’s acclaimed film was clearly labelled as a documentary about the Qur’an, not about Islamic belief… Both sides of the various discussions were fully aired within the programme. The film was critically acclaimed and generated a positive response from viewers.”
Witchfinder General, ex-gambling addict, intern-botherer and ITV2 star Jeremy Kyle has emerged unscathed from the wreckage of his black BMW, after it was involved in an accident on the A1 near Blyth this Monday.
The talk show host was being driven north to film a special edition of his show in a black BMW when it collided with a Mazda MX3 in Nottinghamshire on Monday afternoon. His dinged Beemer finished up on the central reservation; 35 year old Darren Shannon who was behind the wheel of the Mazda was not so lucky.
“I was absolutely petrified,” he told the Daily Mirror. “I was upside down in my car on the wrong side of the dual carriageway. If something had been coming the other way, I would have been annihilated. The emergency crews said Jeremy was shaking like a leaf.”
“Thank God no one was injured,” said Jeremy. “In any accident you are shaken, but I am fine.” Well, that’s all right then.
A Notts Police spokesman said: “It’s too early to say whether anyone will face charges but we are investigating the circumstances surrounding the collision.” Maybe a lie detector test will reveal who is to blame.
C4 rock the casbah
