Sky Living HD's The Ringer and Secret Circle are no more, and don't feel as though you're missing out with Sky Atlantic's Awake - that's been chopped too. Gone for good as well are BBC HD's Pan Am, Watch HD's Alcatraz, Sky 1 HD's House and Terra Nova,
(And anyone who's been downloading The River and Missing will find they've been canned too.)
Quite a big cut then, all in all. Did any new US series of note establish itself this time around?
Even Sky Atlantic struck out with Luck and Bored To Death quickly canned, and only really Game of Thrones (the most pirated show around - go figure!) is on a solid footing both critically and commercially, whilst Boardwalk Empire and Mad Men draw small audiences for such expensive series but survive as critical darlings.
Every autumn the new US shows are hyped and every spring the majority are canned. Personally, I'm getting to the point where I won't even start watch new US shows unless they get strong reviews and US audiences: it just ain't worth investing the time for incomplete stories. (And if they start on terrestrial channels then get picked up by Sky, that's pretty much a sure sign they're not long for this world too.)
8 comments:
I recommend Once Upon A Time. Excellent plotting, and just renewed for season two!
Once Upon A Time was under threat until just recently tho, execs were unhappy with reviews and some ratings. Don't expect a S3 of the show if it doesn't vastly improve.
I personally don't bother watching anything other than The Walking Dead until it is at least two series in, that way I know I can watch it all On Demand or via boxset (usually reduced) in a week long marathon of several shows a night.
No surprise that Game of Thrones is been pirated so much around the world, as it sounds like HBO's backward attitude towards the Internet is repeated everywhere.
If HBO Go was available here for a fair price, and given how little content they have, I'd say somewhere in the region of £2-4 a month, AND it was available on every platform, I could see piracy dropping significantly.
As it stands our only option here is Sky Go, which is very expensive an saddled with picture and sound quality so abysmal it would embarrass a 15th generation pirate VHS tape. Meanwhile anyone can download a DRM free 720p ripp on a few minutes from The Pirate Bay. (or one of it's dozens of mirrors now that the main site has fallen foul of the Internet censors here)
Even in the US you have to subscribe to HBO to get HBO Go. So if you can't get HBO (and many people either find it unavailable in their area or refuse to subscribe to cable on principle), you are out of luck.
So Game of Thrones remains out of reach for many in the US as well, until the DVDs come out. Of course, there, Mad Men is on basic cable, so if you get cable you pay nothing extra for it.
On whether to watch new series I'm with Nialli and p on this one: I don't watch much until it looks like it will make it to a second series. Even then, you can give several years of your life to watching a show (like Chuck), then finding no legal way of watching the final series when no UK broadcaster picks it up. I suspect that Sky have tied up the VOD rights so there's not much chance Virgin will buy those last few episodes for its subscribers.
It will be interesting, in any case, to see what the new US series are and which ones get picked up over here.
Isn't it about time someone called out Sky with Atlantic? It's a ratings killer sending any show there, even the most popular shows are half that of what Sky 1 gets for it's most popular shows.
I also wish Sky would stop shoveling this dross onto Sky1 such as Trollied or other such 'British Comedy". They're ver so smug that one or two newspapers (mostly Murdoch ones) have praised a couple of their new 'comedies'.
I used to subscribe to Sky, and then Virgin, but abandoned it all a few months ago, and apart from Fringe and House, there's really not much else worth subscribing for.
And yet Sky tie down all the new shows so that nobody else can see them.
It used to be the case that sky got first run, then a few months later, BBC or Chanel4 got the rights - see Stargate, Star Trek , X Files etc.
Now it's 'all or nothing' - which stinks.
If Hollywood got wise they'd restrict TV rights sales to specific windows of opportunity so that Sky could never get total exclusives on things unless they make them themselves, just as it used to be.
Also they'd make things available for a small fee online to the international audiences.
All they want to do is maintain the status quo as it was 20-30 years ago when TV companies sold shows to the international audience for large fees, and they dont want to undermine that by making the same shows available on demand on the internet.
That ends up driving consumers to find these shows using the route of least resistence.
Business models have to change, and the sooner the better!
add Harry's Law to that list!
Post a Comment