24February
In These Times publishes a brief history (and lexicon) of political correctness.
The United Nations has likened Israel's occupation of Gaza to apartheid South Africa, and proposes bringing a case to the International Court of Justice.
Christopher Howell publishes the correspondence he had with Joyce Hatto and William Barrington-Coupe. We don't have much to add to this exhaustive account, and point interested people to The complete Hatto primer.
We've been crunching the numbers for SKY's withdrawal from the cable market; we understand that the cable providers pay roughly £6 million per month (nominally for SKY Comedy, with other channels bundled free). At a conservative estimate, the reduced reach will shave 10%-20% off the advertising card, reducing income by somewhere between £2 million and £4 million per month. Over the course of a year, that amounts to the thick end of £100 million.
We're also reminded that SKY has proposed to withdraw from the Freeview DTTV consortium, and replace its channels with a subscription offer. If this happens, factor in another £5 million loss in advertising revenue - the comedy channel's potential audience will have halved in two strokes. That's at least £150 million per year gone, and we can't see the subscription model bringing in more than £10 million. Can SKY afford to lose such huge sums of money, never mind the severe loss of goodwill that will be incurred? Transdiffusion has something of interest.
Meanwhile, Flextech suddenly gets a budget to make some entertaining programmes, cable viewers get an excuse to ask for the likes of France24 and Motors TV to replace the gone-and-soon-forgotten channels, and everyone's a winner. OK, except for the handful of people watching television from satellite, but they have all the German channels to watch...
