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Digital gurus hail 'most exciting time' for online video

YouTube and Facebook, which between them boast 19 billion daily views worldwide, offer huge online platforms to video content producers but television is also entering the market.

Sky’s new TV service Sky Q includes an online video section, bringing together content from many digital creators, including Barcroft Media, Red Bull Media House and GoPro. And youth brand Vice recently announced that its first European linear TV channel, Viceland, would launch in September.

Andor star Varada Sethu to join Doctor Who as new companion

Millie Gibson, Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu sit together smiling, with Sethu holding Gatwa's arm

Sethu will play the Doctor’s companion, alongside Millie Gibson (Coronation Street), who will be returning to play fellow companion Ruby Sunday. Gibson made her debut in the 2023 Doctor Who Christmas Special ‘The Church on Ruby Road’.

Gatwa and Gibson’s second season of Doctor Who will be the 15th series since the sci-fi staple was revived in 2005. However, Gatwa and Gibson’s first series – which sees the return of the revival’s original showrunner, Russell T Davies – will officially be known as ‘season one’.

AI: TV’s next frontier

A white man sings on the America's Got Talent stage, but is shown on the big-screen behind him as Simon Cowell

Daily, we are bombarded by headlines announcing the wonders – and risks – that generative artificial intelligence is bringing to our lives. AI has been used to help identify the hostages taken by Hamas from southern Israel on 7 October. More mundanely, apparently it can also help stem the alarming rise in shoplifting. On the other hand, it could put many of us out of work, lead to rampant breaches of copy­right and, ultimately, make it nigh on impossible to tell what on our screens is fake and what is real.

Disney+ steps in for families

When Disney announced that its eagerly awaited streaming service, Disney+, would launch in the UK and Western Europe in March no one knew that the service’s debut would coincide with a global pandemic keeping millions of people at home.

“With much of the UK looking for entertainment while they are stuck at home, Disney+ is likely to be a big hit,” said Shiv Pabari, director of media and entertainment at Simon-Kucher & Partners. “Families, in particular, will be excited by the content offered.”

Rupert Murdoch's secret battle with Downing Street

Simon McBurney as Rupert Murdoch in The Loudest Voice (Credit: Sky)

During these past 12 months Rupert Murdoch has been only half the man in the UK he used to be. But that’s only by one measure – Ofcom’s “share of references”, which calculates which news sources are consumed across different media. It was a year ago, in September 2018, that the then 87-year-old’s long association with Sky came to an end.

What Comcast's purchase of Sky means for the future of the pay-TV platform

Riviera (Credit: Sky)

It’s official. Sky, the leading pay-TV platform in the UK, is no longer a Murdoch company. The man most closely identified with the launch and development of the film and footie satellite giant, Rupert Murdoch, signalled his departure late last year, when his 21st Century Fox media behemoth agreed to sell most of its pay-TV and Hollywood studio assets, including a 39% stake in Sky, to Disney for $71bn.

Fox clearly preferred the Mouse to a competing approach from US cable and broadcast combo Comcast.