Category Archives: Culture
Wednesday 10th April 2013
This is going to be my final post on Ripper St using the AQUA tool from Attentional’s overnights.tv service. AQUA is available to anyone who wishes to explore audience data and start to understand the performance of a given show. This post is about Competition analysis. What might you use the Competition function for? You can probably think of a number of uses. I have gone for just one…. On January 29th, the BBC announced that Ripper Streetwould be renewed for a second season. I am going to try to … Read more…
Friday 22nd February 2013
This week I go back to Ripper Street for the third introductory post on Attentional’s online research tool, AQUA. It is nearly at the end of the series, so we can start to look at the series as a whole. Attentional’s AQUA system has an easy option for this. You can go into Programme Search, put in the name and get all the editions of a series. Then you can select the ones you want to run a Series Report on. The table looks like this. There is also a … Read more…
Monday 12th November 2012
You may know the song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe which goes: “Every boy and every girl/ That’s born into the world alive/ Is either a little Liberal/ Or else a little Conservative!” Are political opinions born or made? Are they determined as much by rational choice as by genes? Are political attitudes hard-wired? For example, some twin studies show that identical twins, separated at birth, seem to end up with very similar political attitudes. Bruce Goerlich, who is Chief Research Officer at Rentrak, has done an interesting … Read more…
Tuesday 16th October 2012
In America, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States has been announced and it’s due for release on Showtime in November. (The book of the series, written by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, is to be released on October 30th.) The series has been a labour of love (and some pain) both for Oliver Stone and Matt Graham, who is British and co-writer of the series along with Peter Kuznick. My guess is the series will surprise, even shock, many Americans and result in lots of comment. If … Read more…
Friday 17th August 2012
I turned on to watch the swimming the night Michael Phelps got his 15th medal. That was on Tuesday July 31, just before 9pm UK time. It got a lot of viewers. In fact they peaked for that race and fell away afterwards. Extended live Olympic coverage was something different for BBC1. So I wondered how its audience had changed. I did that by creating ratios, for each age group, between BBC1’s usual share and its share that night. Here are the uplift ratios: So the uplift came … Read more…
Wednesday 18th July 2012
It is now becoming widely accepted that stories are, as they say, in our genes. (I am using that to mean any kind of Story – including a TV Reality or Talent show. Susan Boyle’s appearance on X Factor singing I Dreamed a Dream is a two-minute story – and a very powerful one at that.) Some of you who write or create stories will say: “I want to know more”. If so, ask us about workshops. Last week I was in Israel for the Entertainment Master Class, … Read more…
Monday 21st May 2012
Two weeks ago, as reported in our news section, the European Commission released its latest Study of the Audiovisual Services Directive (AVMS). This Study specifically reviewed Articles 13, 16 and 17. The Study is a result of a requirement in the Directive that the performance of these clauses should be reviewed every two years. These clauses are about securing a given amount of European content on broadcast media, including new online services. They do not relate to cinematic releases of films or retail media like DVDs. The clauses … Read more…
Tuesday 24th April 2012
The BBC is advertising for a new Director General. Like many others I have been asked what I think. About 25 years ago I was asked the same question by the Times. It was a very different era. The UK was arousing itself from a long period of decline. What I wrote looks naive now. The UK needs growth again but the Government’s “growth strategy” does not include the BBC, the UK’s largest media company — though outside observers remind us from time to time that the UK should be … Read more…
Monday 26th March 2012
The UK’s film and TV industries are pleased. In last week’s budget, they got their tax breaks. The Right Decision? Yes, it was the right decision. Too many of the UK’s competitors use them, with little chance of the UK’s being able to do doing anything about it. So the UK is simply losing the business. There is no single set of state aid or competition rules that can be applied across all the national jurisdictions involved – and they can all call up some kind of “cultural … Read more…
Tuesday 28th February 2012
The two most important recommendations of the recent UK Film report, according to its author, are (1) that producers should be free to use the money generated by success to invest further – as opposed, I presume, to returning money to public bodies which have funded them – and (2) that producers should work with distributors right from the outset to tailor their film to audiences. All this is in the interest of greater commercial success – but not necessarily mainstream films, the term used by Prime Minister … Read more…
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