Here's the latest news about TV that I read, and that you should too:
■ Robert Bianco is gone as TV critic of USA Today in America; and meanwhile in a MUST-READ, TV critic Gail Pennington is retiring from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after 23 years of covering television (PS: TV critics no longer take pictures with the talent.)
■ The upcoming new TV season from America is going to be basically trash, warns AdAge, "cobbled together from the contents of a junk drawer stuffed with reboots, spin-offs and formulaic mush".
■ Reports of the death of broadcast television are greatly exaggerated, to kinda quote Mark Twain says the boss of NBC in America.
■ An uninformed idiot who really should know better, is let loose to share his "impression" that TV audiences in South Africa and DStv audiences are "dwindling". Of course it's growing since DStv subscriptions are increasing (more South African homes have DStv than ever before) as are TV set sales, but as this person says "I have no evidence for this other than my own observations".
■ Technology companies are the new titans of television.
As TV, the internet and wireless technologies converge, it's spend, spend, spend for tech companies to create and own content.
■ As SuperSport spends a lot of money to hype its acquisition of WWE wrestling, Africa's DStv subscribers are very angry at SuperSport for its failure to show the Canelo Alvarez vs Gennady Golovkin boxing match outside of South Africa.
The rant-filled comments from angry DStv subscribers directed at SuperSport and MultiChoice below Edem Djokotoe's article are fascinating and revealing.
■ MultiChoice Botswana wins in court over Botswana's broadcasting regulator.
The Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority (Bocra) demanded that MultiChoice Botswana submit its DStv price hike tariffs. MultiChoice Botswana won by showing that MultiChoice Africa is responsible for DStv tariff and DStv bouquets design and was granted the urgent court interdict to prevent Bocra from suspending its licence (and shutting MultiChoice Botswana down).
The case will be heard in October.
■ FOX that wants to take over Sky will be the British broadcasting regulator's hardest test ever.
Ofcom will have to decide whether the take-over will represent a "FOX News-ification" of Sky News (DStv 402), and also whether it will threaten and diminish media plurality.
■ The mess created by trash press, that creates an even bigger mess.
Long story short: So MultiChoice Nigeria keeps inviting moronic media to media briefings - dumb-dumbs who don't understand television, don't understand pay-TV, don't care to learn, report wildly incorrectly and end up inflicting reputational damage on DStv Nigeria, misinforms consumers and makes things worse.
- The latest trashination started when MultiChoice Nigeria had a media briefing to explain that DStv Nigeria subscribers actually benefit through bundling of content.
DStv explained that nowhere in Africa is pay-per-view (PPV) used and that DStv subscribers could watch the Floyd Mayweather/Connor MCGregor fight on SuperSport for instance where in America they would have had to pay much more for this single PPV event.
1. Lo and behold Nigerian trash-reporters literally reports that MultiChoice Nigeria is set to introduce "Pay-per-view".
2.Trash-bad copy-and-pasters ranging from IT News Africa to Telecompaper to several others, damage their credibility and make the misinformation worse by re-"reporting" without checking anything, that MultiChoice Nigeria is launching PPV.
3. MultiChoice Nigeria is forced to issue a new statement to deny that it's launching PPV - ironically what the original press briefing was supposed to spell out. MultiChoice Nigeria - without calling out the specific media trash that caused the mess, says MultiChoice has no pay-per-view plan.
■ The 69th Annual Prime Time Emmy Awards 2017 in America made history when The Handmaid's Tale became the first TV show by a streaming site (Hulu) to win the Emmy for best TV drama.
- Deadline analyses that the 2017 Emmy "had something for everyone". "Sleek and sincere," notes Variety but says there's still a long way to go.
- Women working in television in America are making strides, the audience stood up for those who really deserved it and there were memorable speeches, while Strange Things, The Crown, Feud and Westwold turned out to be duds.
- It's also been disappointment for This Is Us seen on M-Net (DStv 101) that lost out on all its Emmys except for one (but the show is still great!). Why a lot of the stars wore blue ribbons on the red carpet.
- A lot of diverse winners at the 69th Annual Prime Time Emmy Awards 2017, the Emmy's best and worse moments, more snubs and surprises, how his Donald Trump overkill marred Stephen Colbert's hosting debut that included Sean Spicer's surprise appearance. Donald Trump basically got a key supporting role at the 2017 Emmys.
- How Saturday Night Live (SNL) got it right and won several Emmys in the "year of Trump". Netflix spends $6 billion per year on new content and Hulu ended up winning the big Emmy first.
And Entertainment Weekly chooses its 10 best moments.
■ Snapchat is against freedom of speech. Snapchat has agreed to a request from the Saudi Arabian government to block Al Jazeera (DStv 406 / StarSat 257) news articles and video on its Snapchat app in that country.
■ "The national broadcaster has to look for quality content as well as improve on other issues like presentation and the general programming format".
That's interestingly not being said of South Africa's inept, debt-riddled and struggling SABC although it's as applicable, but of Zimbabwe's propagandistic state broadcaster, ZBC in what Zimbabwe's The Sunday Mail describes as a "do-or-die moment".
