English Entertainment
AXN delivers a boxing punch to the reality genre
MUMBAI: AXN is strengthening the reality programming genre in Asia. The action oriented broadcaster has acquired the rights to NBC’s upcoming reality show The Contender , following its success with other reality shows like Fear Factor .
The show, which deals with 16 boxers competing for the chance to win a million dollars and go professional, will air across AXN Asia from January. Episodes are expected to run less than 24 hours after their initial broadcast in the US on NBC.
The show is the creative brain child of Mark Burnett who is also responsible for Survivor. Dreamworks will co-produce the show and actor Sylvester Stallone will supervise and mentor the contestants. Stallone will be jojuned by boxing legends Sugar Ray Leonard and George Foreman.
AXN Asia GM Ricky Ow said, “We are extremely excited to bring The Contender to Asia. The Contender’s combination of high adrenaline action and real-life drama, together with the creative genius of Mark Burnett, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the unprecedented line of boxing legends and the mega star power of Sylvester Stallone, are certain to make this show a knock-out hit amongst our viewers across Asia.”
What is interesting is that in the US Fox had entered into the boxing arena first by airing its own boxing reality show The Next Great Champ in September. Endemol USA had conceived the show for Fox.
There was a heated fight between the two broadcasters. However responding to an NBC lawsuit in September trying to block Fox’s show from airing a California trial court had said that Fox’s show was protected by the First Amendment.
Fox had come up up with its own boxing based reality show after losing the bidding war to NBC for The Contender. However The Next Great Champ’s host Oscar de la Hoya had been quoted in a report claiming to have been approached by Dreamworks head Jeffrey Katzenberg to consider the host’s role on the NBC show.
He claimed to have turned it down because The Contender is “merely a glorified tough-man contest and not a legitimate boxing-focused show”. De la Hoya said that, by contrast, his show was “going to have real amateurs fighting, and I think that it will be great for the sport.”
Burnett was not surprisingly furious at Fox’s move. In an interview with Variety he said, “Fox lost out fair and square in the bidding. It is hard to believe that they would do something substantially similar. ” While The Contender was an original idea after having seen Fox’s show there is the danger that come January NBC’s show could well be viewed as a copycat among US viewers.
Talking about his show The Contender Katzenberg said, “Everyone connected to this series has felt a rush of adrenaline in the struggle to see one champion emerge victorious. We can’t wait until America gets its chance to see the emotional challenges faced by our contenders as their quest to be number one begins in January.”
“It has long been our dream to bring boxing back to primetime television and this show is the realisation of this goal, said co-executive producer Jeff Wald. I couldn’t have asked for better partners in this great endeavour than Mark, Jeffrey, Sly and Ray.”
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.
