With the announcement of Netflix to launch in the UK and Ireland it will be interesting to see how their entrance into the TV market will affect the UK TV & film market. Lovefilm is already well established and present across numerous platforms, Facebook is dipping it’s toe into letting content owners ‘broadcast’ content from their facebook pages and the main broadcasters mostly have established a strong VoD offering, so is there really a need for another service which is providing similar or the same content which is already accessible?

Hulu has been rumoured to be launching in the UK for the past 2 years but has yet to take the plunge possibly highlighting that the UK broadcast space is fiercely competitive and they are less than 100% confident they could establish a UK operation which would make financial sense. The day after Netflix announcement of a UK and Ireland launch their shares dropped 27% in the US highlighting even further that the digital on delivery broadcast landscape is a perilous one to enter.

I think the crux of being successful is for Netflix to launch across as many platforms as possible with a flexible subscription service allowing people to choose the devices they want to access content across as well as competing on price with their closest rival LoveFilm.

Whether this is the direction they take or if it’s successful we’ll only know in time, but as a consumer Netflix seems to be a great US service so it’s nice to see it coming to the UK and giving us consumers more choice.

What does everyone else think?

This Sunday the Super Bowl will take place in between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers in Dallas and whilst the sport is the main draw for pulling in record breaking viewing figures the ads are almost as much an integral part of the event.

We know all the big brands such as Coke, Apple, McDonanld’s etc will have an ad, the alcohol brands and car manufacturers will be involved as well as many ads for the up coming summer blockbusters but I think the most entertaining and creative ad will come from a brand no one has really heard of who will be hoping for some TV fame and for consumers to wonder how they never knew about it before.

Unfortunately in the UK we’ll have to wait until monday morning to catch the latest big budget ads desperate to entertain us, but the question is who do you think will have the best ad during superbowl?

The hype of podcasts has risen and slightly floundered now that video has such a strangle hold on the web but recently I have started to become an avid fan of a number of great podcasts which I have came across.

For sport, football and general blokey nonsense and banter it doesn’t come any better than Danny Baker’s Radio Five show from Saturday mornings and the legendary Football Ramble which has to be one of the best and most consistently entertaining pieces of entertainment ever. Coffee Break Spanish has been great at providing bite size commuter chunks of Spanish to help me try and get some basic Spanish under my belt, which the Veteran Gamers podcast provides an insight and mature observation on gaming that doesn’t concern itself with any of the fan boy idocy.

Despite having these though I want more and besides trial and error it is hit and miss at finding the gems amongst the rough so I put it to you, people of the internet, to recommend some further podcast joy to get me through the weekly commutes.

There has been an interesting development from Warner music who appear to be about to stop their music being streamed for free on the likes of We7, Last.fm and Spotify. What will be interesting to see is whether they are alone in making this move or if other labels will follow suit pulling all of their music or even just certain artists.

The economics for record labels obviously aren’t stacking up for Warner and the ‘freemium’ model isn’t delivering the sort of revenue they were hoping for and this must also highlight some of the pressures of streaming costs on the music services as well.

It seems the record labels are yet to find a way to regain even a small percentage of the perceived lost revenue by illegal downloading and with the mounting losses and debts could it be that 2010 could start the decade with the biggest shake up ever to the music industry and one of the big labels goes into administration or worse? Surely they can not continue losing money as they are forever?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8507885.stm

BBC iplayer have been blocked from sharing their iplayer technology free of charge with other UK commercial broadcasters by the BBC Trust. To me this seems to raise two problems. Firstly iplayer is by far and away the best technology and platform for VOD currently in the UK and has also been a massive success. For other broadcasters to compete with this will require a huge investment in time, technology and people at a time when traditional advertising revenue is declining wont this strengthen the BBC’s position making it the dominant UK player.

More worryingly with the imminent launch of Hulu in the UK and Youtube starting to carry long form content (C4 has just done a deal for its back catalogue of programmes and U2 are to stream one of their gigs live on YT) the level of competition for ITV, C4, Five and Sky in the VOD area will increase further.

I just can’t help but think that we’ll look back at some recent decisions like this and the rejection of the Project Kangaroo and regret that we didn’t provide British broadcasters a better chance of competing in what is going to be a huge revenue area in the future. Once Hulu arrives and Youtube gets more long form content onboard it may be the begining of the end for certainly a handful of channels and maybe even some broadcasters over the coming decade.

At the moment with advertising money under pressure and web sites trying to find alternative methods of achieving profits plenty are looking at putting all or some of their content behind a pay wall. In theory this may be a viable route for some but unfortunately for the countries major newspapers it may speed the impending doom for some of them based on some research by Harris Interactive. They have found only 5% of people surveyed would pay to continue reading on their favourite news site with the most common behaviour to find an alternative free resource.

This got me thinking about which websites I would actually be willing to pay to access myself and the answer is not many. We already pay for the BBC in a round about way and the only other sites I would consider paying for are those which I have a particular affinity for such as nufc.com and aintitcool.com

Entertainment Weekly in the US is doing something a little snazzy with it’s latest issue by having a video ad in it!

Is this the begining of magazines shifting to a more dynamic creative media solution I wonder?

The ad take the form of an insert so opportunities are limited, plus the production must be eye wateringly expensive but in response to the right strategy for the right client it could be just the ticket.

I wonder which UK publication will be the first to give this a whirl?

The impending end of the world is coming. How do we know this? Newcastle about to be relegated out of the Premiership, Swine flu is going to ravage the planet and twitter can’t keep ahold of it’s users.

Yep Twitter the latest shining light in the digital sphere is may be not going to save the world as users are abandoning the site after a month. Seems users get enticed after hearing about it but the novelty soon wears off and they don’t return.

It raises the question about how many social networks can one person feasibly be involved with, plus does anyone really want to know what I am up to on a micro by micro moment? Bloody doubt it, I don’t even want to know what I’m doing having the time.

Are we starting to reach digital saturation where the landscapes starts to settle slightly?

Bored of theme pubs, over priced ‘designer’ bars or hideous weatherspoons full of coffin dodgers making the place look like god’s waiting room?

Then this could be just for you.

A company called Alcoholic Architecture has just opened the first walk in cocktail and it’s London! I can almost hear the ladies on the light side scampering towaards the lift already!

Admittadly it’s quite a gimmick, but for £5 you can spend an hour inside the breathable cocktail. Yep the inside of the venue is made to look like a cocktail glass, quite how you do this apart from it being a lot of glass is anyone’s guess, and get to breathe in gin and tonic fumes.

All I can wonder is what’s the point, and would anyone really want to spend an hour gagging on a variation of an alcoholic airfreshner?

What next? A restaurant that’s full of sunday roast scratch and sniff smells?

Sadly in some parts of the country you don’t pick a football team to support, rather you are lumbered with it like an enigmatic albatross slung around your neck. My particular albatross is actually black and white, oh and a magpie in the form of Newcastle United.

Quite how we’ve managed to make such a mess of one of England’s biggest teams is a mystery but with 8 games left there is still light at the end of the tunnel. The only problem is we’re horrid away from home, haven’t won a home game since Dec and all the teams tantalisingly close to us all play each other whereas we have the joys of Liverpool, Chelsea, Villa as well as a local derby against Boro which guarantees to be one of the worst Premier League games ever.

Logic is telling me that we’re stuffed, but this is football and if we can get 11 players on the pitch who will compete and fight like Geordies then we can get out of this mess.

If not then we are potentially going to have the most highly paid Championship side ever.

Potentially on the 25th and 26th May I may not be he happiest chappy!