Blogging the Beeb

It's the Product, stupid

Ever since Mark Thompson and Greg Dyke highlighted the role of personal video recorders in the year 2000, advertsiing publications have been full of fears about the end of spot advertising as viewers hurtle through the ad breaks - with the obvious conclusion that ad-funded TV is in decline and in future there will have to be more sponsored programming and product placement.

Wired points out that writers for US TV are now having to insert product references, and their unions are calling for a Code of Conduct.

Product Placement rules are to be revised in the new TV Without Frontiers Directive, and OFCOM is consulting on this.

Commercial TV programmes will be even more commercial - a good reason why we need the BBC to provide an alternative.

Newsnight and the war

I missed Newsnight's Allies on Trial episode. Thankfully. Oliver Kamm - not a kneejerk BBC critic - makes some important points about it. He also comments on David Aaronovitch's entertaining Times column on Today programme snorting.

Apologies for lack of recent blogging. Actually trying to write the book....

Gerry Anderson

Gerry Anderson has made it into the UK Broadcast Hall of Fame. That won't please some Radio 4 listeners who campaigned to get him removed from the station in the 1990s.

Various

Too busy to blog recently. As an update, the BBC plans to reduce finance jobs and move some to Cardiff, there's been a restructuring of the BBC senior board by Mark Thompson, and there are plans to split the BBC's Kingswood Warren research team and move part of it to Manchester.

David Elstein is interviewed about the BBC by Digital Spy. Via.

Interesting post on ReinventTV about the economics of TV in the Video on Demand age.