English Entertainment
Diwali: English shows, movies to watch out for
MUMBAI: It’s that time of the year when the entire nation is bedecked with colorful lights. The most exuberant of all Indian festivals is knocking at our doors, and television channels are doing their bit to make it a Happy Diwali for their viewers!
For all those binge-viewers who like staying back home glued to the television, apart from feasting and gifting, the English entertainment and movie channels have dished out an exclusive line up of shows and movies for the festivities.
As the Diwali fireworks light up the night sky, viewers will get to amplify this year’s Diwali bonanza. After perusing the available options on channels like Colors Infinity, Comedy Central, Movies Now, Romedy Now, Sony Pix, Zee Café, Zee Studio and VH1, Indiantelevision.com recommends a few shows that viewers can gape at this festive season.
Colors Infinity
While everyone indulges in some quintessential Diwali rituals of playing cards and eating King-size meals, the channel will air Queen Helena, played by Elizabeth Hurley, along with Princess Eleanor and Prince Liam starrer The Royals. The viewers can binge-watch the season 1 and season 2 on 29 October and 30 October 10:30 am onwards.
Comedy Central
Comedy Central is all set to light up the weekend with an unconventional and amusingly opinionated family of the Carmichaels! The channel will air The Carmichaels Show on 29 and 30 October 4 pm onwards.
Movies Now
The channel plans to showcase special properties this Diwali, called Fireworks and Boom Boom Blast. Fireworks began from 24 October and will air movies at 9 pm. The line-up of movies includes Dracula Untold, Fast Five, 2012, Godzilla, Edge Of Tomorrow & Furious 6.
The other property which started from 3 October ended on 28 October which showcased movies like, Into The Storm, The Darkest Hour, Godzilla, Spiderman 2 and Olympus Has Fallen.
Romedy Now
The channel is set to broadcast a new property called Diwali Delights. In this property, popular titled like, The Duff, What if, We’re the Millers, About Time, A Little Bit of Heaven, Blended, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Endless Love, Begin Again, Cuban Fury, etc will be aired from 24 October to 4 November every Monday to Friday at 11 pm.
Sony Pix
The channel will air Pitch Perfect 2 at 12:59 pm followed by the Lone Ranger at 3:13 pm. Battleship will be aired at 6:12 pm, followed by Pitch Perfect 2 at 8:59 pm. King Kong will telecast at 11:24 pm.
Zee Café
The channel will usher into the festivities by 12 am with The Whispers show till 4:45 am followed by America’s Got Talent till 6:15 am. Post that, an hour of Just for Laughs followed by Lethal Weapon up to 9 am. The Big Bang Theory will air till 9:30 am leading to back-to-back episodes of Mysteries of Laura till 12 pm. Pretty Little Liars will air till 6 pm followed by Lethal Weapon and The Big Bang Theory. The channel will air The Shannara Chronicles at 8pm, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders at 9 pm, Code Black at 10 pm, The Real O’Neals at 11 pm and Two & a Half Men at 11:30 pm.
Zee Studio
Zee Studio is all set to air Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol on 30 October at 4:20 pm followed by The Expendables 2 at 7 pm. The Amazing Spiderman 2 will air at 9 pm whereas Transformers: Age of Extinction will telecast at 11:50 pm.
Vh1
Celebrate this Diwali with the Vh1 One in a Billion– Diwali Special. Viewers can watch some of the best music videos that have achieved the milestone of having over a billion views in the digital world. The property will telecast on 31 October at 12 pm and 8 pm.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
