Thursday, February 23, 2017

DAILY TV NEWS ROUND-UP. Today's interesting TV stories to read from TVwithThinus - 23 February 2017.

Here's the latest news about TV that I read, and that you should too:


■ Nigerian "invasion" planned on South African companies MultiChoice and MTN on Thursday.
Public protests want to "stampede" MultiChoice Nigeria and MTN in Lagos on Thursday because of xenophobic attacks in South Africa.

■ Take a guess how many TV news channels there are in India?
Almost 400! And now a new TV news channel RepublicTV launching soon wants to enter the competition.

■ BBC will start a new TV channel for Scotland in 2018.
BBC Scotland will focus on drama and factual content and an hour-long news programme.


■ British mumbling mars BBC's latest TV series SS-GB.
Viewers are once again complaining that they can't hear properly. This time its the new alt-history series SS-GB starting soon on BBC First (DStv 119) in South Africa.
Is the problem new flat-screen TV sets?

Meanwhile SS-GB has "cliched, clunky, dialogue delivered at a snail's pace".
The BBC says it will again look at what's wrong after all of the sound complaints.
More than 1.5million viewers of the 7 million who started watching the drama series that used the wrong model of Spitfire,  tuned away amidst the BBC "mumbling row".
The TV is hard to hear, says The Wall Street Journalbut you can fix that.


■ Spanish TV gossip shows
violated the rights of a singer by discussing her sex life on the private TV channels, the European Court of Human Rights finds.

■ This is Us is now American television's biggest hit.
Yet its nowhere in South Africa, not on M-Net (DStv 101), not on DStv, e.tv or anywhere else. Vanity Fair has the story on how the great emoti-drama in which "nice people really like each other" dethroned The Big Bang Theory.

■ Pakistan TV drama in trouble over the lesbians.
Pakistan's media regulator tells Hum TV the "topic of homosexuality is against our values" after two women are shown being in a relationship.

■ Turkish TV dramas are slowly conquering the world.
The Turkish delights are apparently even responsible for a less fighting in Gaza during the afternoons.

■ Something for 7de Laan?
Perhaps an idea for SABC2's viewership shedding soap? Australia's soap Home and Away sees rating spikes with stories about hunks caring for babies.

■ China's relaunched CGTN (DStv 409 / StarSat 266) apologises for wrong Somaliland map.
"Terribly sorry" for Somalia map bungle, says wrong Africa map "was a mistake by one of our editors and does not in any way reflect the standpoint of the Chinese government".

■ Shock in Brazil as TV channel reveals dancer will have to wear clothes
for the first time in 26 years on TV Globo's coverage of upcoming Rio Carnival.

■ American pay-TV boss warns:
Pay-TV subscribers are going to continue to flee if traditional pay-TV services "continue to raise prices and continue to have 16 to 18 minutes of advertising per hour".

■ Don't cry for the laugh track.
Inside the morbid secret of one of the classic TV sitcom's most annoying tools.

■ Study finds millennial men are abandoning pay-TV in droves.
Young guys are not just no longer paying for television, they're simply quitting watching TV.

■ An American rightwinger says he has "tapes" about CNN and will release it on Thursday.
Says he has a "few hundreds hours" of material recorded inside CNN that he will release as "CNN Leaks".

■ A whopping number of pay-TV channels - 127 - in India are showing too much ads.
Who knew a rule capping ads on a pay-TV channel to 12 minutes per hour existed somewhere in the world?
Several Indian TV channels also seen in South Africa went way over the prescribed 12 minute cap, like B4U Movies, SUN TV, Star Plus, Colors, SET Max.