Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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How To Incentivise Your Audience to Skip Podcast Ads
If you publish a podcast, your podcast may well take advertising. And if it does take advertising, you probably want people to actually listen to the ads. Your audience listening to podcast ads increases the likelihood of products being sold, and therefore the advertiser coming back to buy more advertising. If your podcast doesn’t increase…
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Radio News
GCap’s announcement on Monday about its plans for the future were big news this week in the radio world (I’ll get around to some of my thoughts in due course), and the media sales trade magazine Media Week gave its cover lead to the story. GCap’s withdrawal from Digital One and the knock on effect…
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BBC Three – Designed For Two Year Olds
We all know that bright and shiny things attract children (and magpies). You only have to look at CBeebies to see examples of that: Teletubbies, The Tweenies, Bob the Builder etc. I can only assume somebody over at BBC Three is aged about two and a half. Otherwise they wouldn’t have decided that a bright…
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And Now On Radio 4
This is one of two books published towards the end of last year to tie in, unofficially, with Radio 4’s 40th anniversary. And Now On Radio 4 takes a fairly brisk look at the history of the channel, with very little background about what radio had been broadcast in the UK prior to the big…
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There Will Be Blood
I’m not quite sure why, but I always treat a Daniel Day Lewis film with some trepidation; he doesn’t exactly produce films at the same rate as Samuel L Jackson. But There Will Be Blood has been talked about with such great praise, that I was really keen to see it. The distributors have gone…
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BAFTAs 2008
9.00pm The BAFTAs begin and we’re told by our host, Jonathan Ross, that this is has been a great year for films. We see a montage of clips from various films. For some reason, Transformers is in there. 9.01pm It’s clear that the sound is completely out of kilter with the left and right channels…
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1 Billion Viewers
Yesterday the news broke that the Premier League is considering giving everyone an extra fixture which will be played in one of five cities internationally. I’ll leave others to debate the pros and cons of such a scheme – or “brand extension”. But plenty of reports claim that “an estimated 1bn people watched the Premier…
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Podcasting Forecasts
As a follow-up to RAJAR’s recent research into podcasting, the US based eMarketer.com has just released some forecasts for podcast revenues for the next five years. The full report retails for $695, so you’ll excuse me if I limit my notes to the findings they publish on their blog. They suggest that total audience for…
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Timewatch – The History of a Mystery (1996)
“Someone” uploaded my favourite ever episode of Timewatch. It’s an episode that examines, seemingly at face value, the claims of such books as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (you know, the one Dan Brown has evidently written). At the time this documentary was shown, there’d been a rush of similar titles. Indeed, the…
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MMR and Autism
The Guardian has a front page report on yet another study which should finally dismiss any links people might believe can be made between the MMR vaccination and autism. This is accompanied by a leader. But as you can see, there’s also an advert on P17 of G2 for a company called Wellcare which plainly…
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Robin Hood Was Real
In a smart PR move to promote UKTV Gold now running BBC1’s Robin Hood, the company commissioned some research which has resulted in worldwide coverage. Seemingly teenagers think that Winston Churchill didn’t exist and that Robin Hood was real. When I read about something like this, I immediately want to read the full press release,…
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Derren Brown: The System
I do enjoy most of Derren Brown’s programmes. The last series was a bit poor however, with episodes in which he essentially “kidnapped” a person and had them “wake up” in Marrakesh, not really going anywhere. But he’s a great magician and showman who positively reinvigorated magic on television. The System began with Brown claiming…
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Cloverfield
I must admit that I hadn’t been looking forward to Cloverfield with quite the same enthusiasm that some on the internet had been. But the teaser trailer was good fun, as did the idea of a film with no stars, and all that it brought with it. I will just mention that having two brothers…
Hadrian’s Wall
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