The Caretakers' Forum

Most commercial TV channels in the UK are in trouble financially. Due to massive rise in new streaming services, advertisers are spreading their advertising budgets to an ever growing number of services. This mean that advertising revenue for free commercial channels is getting thinner and thinner.

Several streaming services have added adverts to their services where once they were ad free requiring an additional payment if you want to remain ad free (Disney+, Amazon Prime etc)

We can expect to see some massive changes in the coming year with many commercial channels disappearing.

Channel 4 has just announced massive cuts and redundancies in a letter to its employees.
Channel 4 Plans Major Cuts

Sky TV is having issues too. Viewers faces two years of momentous change for pay TV and premium streaming, as three US media giants make decisions that will have big implications for subscribers. How pay TV subscribers face 24 months of big change

UKTV thinks it can improve its own situation with a rebrand. Adding U& to it's channel names. U&Dave, U&W, U&Yesterday, U&Drama etc UKTV announces rebrand of channel portfolio

In the coming years we may see the demise of terrestrial (ariel) TV and satellite (dish) TV with everything going online. That is the hope of the BBC currently as it will work out a lot cheaper for them to go online than keep paying for the upkeep of land based transmitters and satellite uplinks.

Kind of makes you long for the days when TV was just terrestrial and we only had 4 channels.

thecaretaker wrote: ↑8th Jan 2024 at 11:10am Kind of makes you long for the days when TV was just terrestrial and we only had 4 channels.

I remember when BBC2 was the new channel on the massive 19-inch b&w screen making a total of 3 channels. Although it was only transmitted at certain times of the day and then mostly test transmissions. I also remember having the job of holding the set top aerial at a certain angle to stop the picture going round and around.
Those were the good old days, or were they?
Yes, lots of changes coming and I suspect we will need deeper pockets to keep up

Keyolder wrote: ↑8th Jan 2024 at 11:37am I remember when BBC2 was the new channel on the massive 19-inch b&w screen making a total of 3 channels. Although it was only transmitted at certain times of the day and then mostly test transmissions. I also remember having the job of holding the set top aerial at a certain angle to stop the picture going round and around.
Those were the good old days, or were they?
Yes, lots of changes coming and I suspect we will need deeper pockets to keep up

Yes and if I remember correctly, when BBC2 started out, it was in colour. Not that we had a colour set until years later.

First time I saw a colour TV picture was Star Trek at Butlins when I was on holiday (very young boy then).

Then one year, we did the usual seasonal family visits and to my surprise a relative had a colour Rediffusion TV set and was watching Tom & Jerry. I was smitten.

I remember my dad was lent an early video recorder. A huge thing. I'll not go into why he was lent it, that a hole other story.

thecaretaker wrote: ↑9th Jan 2024 at 8:15am I remember my dad was lent an early video recorder.

Video recorder, you were lucky. We had a piece of roof slate and a tiny piece of chalk to record our memories
Yes, BBC2 was in colour I believe. We had an early form of colour tv, but you had to be quick with the crayons

Keyolder wrote: ↑9th Jan 2024 at 11:12am We had an early form of colour tv, but you had to be quick with the crayons

We had colour TV back in the 60's but only at --- (The seasonal word only permitted in December) ---. We always had a tin of Quality Street and as kids, we'd stuff the coloured wrappers behind the lens of our glasses. One eye had the red wrapper and the other the blue

I wonder what the kids of today would make of only having 3 channels which is what us older children grew up with and as colour tvs were a rarity then everything in black and white, they can do more on their smartphone nowadays than we could in the 60s on anything