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Communications Minister Helen Coonan today unveiled her media reform plan. Its not all good, and its going to be far from quick, but the one good thing that might come out of it is multichanneling, albeit in 4-5 years. The video is ABC’s coverage of todays announcement.
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Well, that wasn’t too shabby was it? A night of Planet Earth and Bleak House. Outside of the actual content of the shows I found it interesting to see a watermark on the ABC’s HD channel.
Admittedly I don’t flick onto the high definition stream too often but last time I did I remember there being no watermarks at all. The “HD” is probably a little big but apart from that I don’t mind the ABC branding this burgeoning television experience.
(I don’t think my computer was quite up for recording both the HD and SD streams of the ABC simultaneously so forgive me if the video jumps a bit).
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From the US Constitution to Family Guy’s commentary on the content of BBC Four.
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Tonights episode of The West Wing won an Emmy for outstanding directing for a drama series and also happens to be the first episode I ever saw of the show. Because the ABC is airing two episodes at once viewers are in the unique situation of watching the finale of season four and the start of season five in one sitting tonight.
Basically the Presidents daughter has just been kidnapped and enacting the 25th Amendment he removes himself from office, and because there is no vice president the Republican speaker of the house takes over as president.
The first video is a promo for tonights episode, and the second is the end of last weeks episode along with those dual credits.
(Last time the 25th was used was in 2002 when Cheney took over the powers of the president while Bush got a colonoscopy).
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First it was the Chaser that showed us the video of the Today show making a continued fool of itself, well now Media Watch has taken a look at the Tapestry of Seven vs Nine.
This video also includes the famous “Ambulance chaser” promo that Nine ran during the miners interview.
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Maybe its just my uninformed 21-year-uni-graduate perspective on it, but the whole digital television thing in Australia doesn’t seem to be taking off.
The UK seems to know what its doing, and I know there’s legislation in Australia that prevents certain programming and multichanneling, but I think the only way people are going to migrate to digital TV is if there is more content on more channels, I have a HD television, and as nice as the picture is on the news, I’d rather have an ABC3 or a TenTwo.
Three of my closest loved ones have had set top boxes forced on them as “presents”, and after the initial “gee… thanks John”, I like to think they’re actually using them, for example my chicken pox laden four year old niece, whose father won’t get Foxtel got to watch ABC Kids on two channels today, with children’s programming stretching from 4.30am to 3pm across ABC and ABC2.
This video is an ad for the UK’s digital television push, the character ‘Digit Al’ is voiced by Matt Lucas and the ads have been “interrupting” normal television across the UK since the 5th of May.
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After the passionate response I got to the new BBC 6 and 10 o’clock news I thought the next logical step would be Newsnight.
I’ve never actually seen the show, but I have seen it parodied on Dead Ringers (second video). Am I right in saying the Australian equivalent would be Lateline?
The combination of round desk and couch looks interesting, and the huge screen at the back seems more versatile then the usual plasma or graphics that accompanies most news presenters.
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For some reason I want to be cynical about this moment, but that little interaction between Sunrise and the Beaconsfield miner really added some humanity to the breakfast show that Today will just never be able to achieve, not even with money.
Even if Todd and Brant have signed themselves to golden handcuffs at the Nine Network I doubt they’ll be able to create anything as real as what happened with Sunrise as the ambulance drove out of Beaconsfield that morning.
I hope Nine pay them millions, because all that money won’t buy them a request for a hug from Jessica Rowe, or that security tag.
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One day after I wrote my previous post where I quoted a snippet of Today Tonight’s Naomi Robson questioning what is and isn’t journalism, the ABC’s Media Watch decided to repeat the piece for us all to enjoy (and for me to record).
Tonight’s Media Watch went on to blast Today Tonight a little more about a miracle fat loss device that turns out wasn’t approved by the FDA, which TT had to apologise for and followed that up by a story the same night about a cosmetic that claimed a little too much that the TGA is now investigating… good work gang, I’m so proud this show gets a primetime slot.
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“God, we have fun”, that was a line from the opening scene of this weeks episode of The Simpsons. I thought it was an appropriate line, nicely reflexive and retrospective and timed perfectly for The Simpson’s Movie trailer.
My love of the Simpsons is pretty well documented, so I couldn’t not post this.
I leave the comfort of my Arlington wifi tomorrow so probably won’t bug you with Simpsons crap for a few days.