English Entertainment
‘Contender’ suicide catches AXN off guard
MUMBAI: The omens are not good for NBC’s upcoming boxing based reality show The Contender. It has lost a participant several weeks before its take off.
In what could turn out to be a public relations disaster as far as ratings are concerned Najai “Nitro” Turpin, a 23-year-old contestant committed suicide in Philadelphia. Police say that he apparently shot himself in the head while sitting in a parked car with his girlfriend outside his gym at about 4 am on Monday.
The show, which has been given a starting date of 7 March, had been delayed a few times already this year. However NBC officials insist that the show will go on. Reality TV guru Mark Burnett who is making the show says,”The episode in which he was most depicted will stand as a wonderful testament to who he was. It will not be changed.”
AXN caught off guard: One person who is clearly unhappy with the delay in starting the show is Sony assistant VP marketing Rohit Bhandari who looks after the action oriented AXN in India. AXN will air the show in India with a two hour delay after the US broadcast. There will then be a primetime repeat the same day at 9 or 10 pm.
Speaking to Indiantelevision.com Bhandari said, “Each time marketing activities have had to be scrapped. I am now waiting for a final confirmation on the show. We will be using hoardings in a big way for the show. This is a tactic that we are currently employing for the AXN Extreme India versus Pakistan Challenge. The ratings for the first two episodes were not that good at 0.1 and 0.2 but we expect things to pick up.”
AXN is also doing a contest around the India Pakistan Challenge. For this purpose it has tied up with Red FM. Bhandari claims that each week the contest has been getting a few thousand entries. All this is a part of its Big thrills TV campaign. The tagline for the India versus Pakistan Extreme campaign is ‘Will you not support India’?
As far as The Contender is concerned Bhandari is hopeful that the suicide will not have a negative effect. ” A lot will depend on how the show is packaged and the spirit. Mark Burnett has made reality hits in the past and there is every reason to believe that he will repeat his success.” Bhandari added that a new block that the channel has introduced is the Platinum Showcase. This will cater to the intellectual audience that wants high brow stuff.
The first show that is airing in this block is the science fiction themed 4400 which airs on Tuesday at 10 pm. Bhandari explains that this is aimed at clearly segment the audience which will benefit the advertiser. ” We now have three clear bands. The X-Zone has The Amazing Race, Fear Factor . This caters to a mass audience. The Contender clearly belongs to this category.
“Then we have Prime Zone which caters to those who want sophisticated fare like 24. Finally there is the Platinum Showcase. Our acquisition team in Singapore has already identified titles that fit into this third block.”
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.
