Campbell Live last night beat the TV One 7pm show Seven Sharp overall audience for the first time since Campbell Live began in 2005.
It is also the first time TV3 has ever beaten TV One in the 7pm weekday slot since TV3 began in November 1989.
Seven Sharp took another hit in the ratings on Tuesday night after a short recovery in Monday’s show, according to overnight ratings from Nielsen TAM.
But will they come back? Ask MySpace.
Last week a Milanese newspaper announced that Fastweb was abandoning its IPTV offer (in favor of distributing Sky’s satellite Pay-TV solution). Fastweb blames the abandon on dwindling subscriptions and a tough economic climate. As Teresa Mastrangelo highlights in an excellent blog post entitled FastWeb Says ???arrivederci??? to IPTV; Is Telecom Italia Next?, that’s part of the story certainly, but only part of it.
Teresa suspects that Telecom Italia may be leaning the same way soon. More broadly, I’ve been wondering if IPTV isn’t a con’s game for most broadband providers. In a recent study that we undertook for the FTTH Council Europe and that will soon be published, we asked 13 service providers to rank their various services in terms of attractiveness to end users and profitability. IPTV systematically came on top in attractiveness and at the bottom in profitability.
It’s amazing the things a drowning incumbent will cling to. Telcos want to be TV stations? Not even TV stations want to be TV stations, the licence to print money expired with the channel scarcity that drove those margins evaporated.
And they’re not the first:
Calling it the future of TV, Microsoft is unveiling of a user interface for the Xbox 360 console???s dashboard; it is also unveiling dozens of new options for watching movies and TV on the game box. And Microsoft has improved the quality of using voice commands to move from one choice to another on the box or to search through all of the entertainment options at your disposal in an instant.
If it’s the future, it isn’t television.
The BBC is a public broadcaster, and its charter sets out the requirement for everything it does to meet a “public value test.” Ofcom, the independent regulator that oversees the BBC, is charged with “[making] sure that people in the UK get the best from their communications services and are protected from scams and sharp practices, while ensuring that competition can thrive”.
So what did Ofcom do? Naturally, it listened to the public, ignored the uncompetitive rent-seeking proposals from the commercial sector, adhered to EU law, and rejected the proposal.
Well, that’s what they did in a parallel universe. In this universe, Ofcom accepted the self-serving arguments of the companies they’re meant to be regulating, ignored the public whose interests they were meant to be safeguarding, and gave the BBC what it asked for.
Why did it do this? It’s a secret.
But not any more.
Hamish MacEwan 