This is quite a big story in my world (commercial radio, rather than BBC). At the moment it's just a consultation, and the services won't actually close until the end of 2011 assuming the consultation doesn't change anything which isn't actually a given. Personally - I quite like 6 Music. I didn't listen a great deal, but it plays music that basically isn't heard anywhere else in UK radio. Think a good US college station (if they exist) or perhaps somewhere like KCRW. It's also digital which means it's a reason for people to buy a digital radio. I could bore you all to tears over this.
Incidentally the old "needletime" requirements didn't really have anything to do with the actual playout medium be it vinyl, tape, CD, or digital. It was more to do with agreements with musicians' unions. Anyway, these things are long gone. But recording live sessions has always been a major part of what the BBC has done. Yet aside from maybe a single play around the time of the recording, many of these just sat in the archives. 6Music has been dusting them off. Cutting back on TV imports is something of a sop since as Mark says, the BBC really shows hardly any US TV. BBC2 has just finished Nurse Jackie and also has Heroes, BBC1 has just started showing series 3 of Damages, and BBC4 is showing series 3 of Mad Men. That's pretty much it. American Dad and Family Guy run on BBC3, and the channel also shows The Tudors, but just about everything else is shown elsewhere. And two other imports that *nobody* apart from the BBC would buy are French series Spiral, and the original Swedish version of Wallander. When was the last you saw an imported foreign language TV show? Just about never. They do actually exist if you search them out, and I recommend both on DVD if you can find them. The workaround to the new rules, of course, is to be a co-producer, as the BBC was with HBO on Rome and Extras. Still, that's one less likely bidder for US studios to have when they shop their fare around - usually during the May screenings when pilots are shown of series that have been greenlit for full production for the Fall season. Adam On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 5:45 PM, Mark J. <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Mar 2, 11:19 am, "Kevin M." <[email protected]> wrote: > > Gone is BBC Radio 6 (a.k.a. the channel that plays music). > > Gone are the high-end bids for foreign (a.k.a. US produced) shows and > sports. > > Supposedly, the money is going into journalism budgets, and to produce > > more dramas and comedies in-house. > > > > http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100302/tts-uk-bbc-strategy-ca02f96.html > > 6Music was a digital channel with a AAA format and, AFAIK, the only > AAA station in the UK (unless Adam wants to give Absolute the crown). > It had a specific remit to feature the thousand of hours of live > performance recordings in the Beeb archives, both concert and studio > (including John Peel's "Peel Sessions"), that were especially recorded > in the 60s, 70s and 80s, when there was a "needle time" limit on > playing records (and I assume CDs made irrelevant, since CDs aren't > "gramophone recordings"). The other network that's supposedly going > is Asia Network, which was a 24/7 net for Asian listeners (in English) > which was 24/7 on digital and a low-powered AM in London and in > weekend blocks on the various BBC local stations. > > It also seems to me that the Beeb's U.S. series acquisitions were for > BBC2 and the satellite culture channel BBC4--by and large, U.S. series > aren't the ratings magnets over there compared with back when "Dallas" > and "DIN-asty" were the top ratings-getters. > > -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
