How refreshing it is to hear ITV being negative about its own online service, ITV Hub. Apparently, it is clunky, looks dated, isn’t a destination, and there is nothing on it. All pretty much true, and expressed only a good chunk of a decade after all those things were clear to the UK consumer. Why this sudden honesty? The imminent launch of Hub’s replacement, of course: ITVX will debut on 8 December.
All4 has grown in popularity in recent years with an increasing collection of box sets that users are able to watch on-demand, including Chewing Gum, National Treasure and Peep Show.
Testing of Channel 4’s new SVoD service, All4+ begins in December with a sample group participating in a beta test using a web-only version of the service.
The beta test will include offering the ad-free service to the sample group for £3.99 per month, the same price as ITV’s Hub+.
Comedian Hugh Dennis aired the thoughts of many trying to navigate the new television landscape when he introduced this session. In a video diary shown to conference delegates, he was seen stuck inside a room for a month. His task was to watch all the content available to modern audiences.
“Watching telly used to be so easy,” he complained. “Four channels, maybe five – everyone watched the same thing in the same place at the same time, unless your family was at the cutting edge of technology and had a VCR.”
Carol Thompson, 26, spends her day battling to get the attention of a classroom of small children. She gets up at 6:15am, runs to work, starts preparing for meetings and adds her finishing touches to lesson plans. At 9:00pm she relaxes on the sofa. Watching the news is the last thing on her mind.
“I generally watch television that I have recorded, rather than watching anything live or simply watching things because they happen to be on,” explains Thompson, whose viewing choices tend towards All 4, iPlayer, ITV Hub and Sky Go.
Catch these gems before they disappear.
The slick, silver-haired comedy from Friends creator Martha Kauffman is back for a second season.
Straight-laced Grace and free spirit Frankie are both happily married women when their husbands, Robert and Sol, announce that they are leaving them – for each other.
Based on true story of Marc Victor, a Radio France Internationale journalist, who ran a restaurant in Kabul for French expatriates until 2008, Kabul Kitchen is a hilarious French-language comedy taking a sideways look at life in the Afghan city.
Jacky runs the popular restaurant, Kabul Kitchen, and all appears to be going well… until his daughter arrived to do some humanitarian work.
In London sky-high rent means that young people are looking for an affordable alternative.
Crashing is a comedy from writer and actress Phoebe Waller-Bridges (Broadchurch, Bad Education, The Iron Lady).
It follows the lives of six twenty-something property guardians who live in the abandoned Great London Hospital.
Live television remains the most popular way of watching TV in the UK despite a large drop of 4.9% in 2013-14, research by Ofcom shows.
As many as 70% (31m) of UK adults will be watching on demand television this month from free-to-air providers such as BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub and All 4. This figure places the UK ahead of all other major European countries, as well as big TV consuming nations Australia, Japan and the USA.
