English Entertainment
Experiential & gaming zones, animated & online events mark Comics Convention
MUMBAI: Alto Bengaluru Comic Con saw a huge turnout of fans cosplaying along with Special Guest appearances, amazing fans experiences and awesome sessions! Comic Con India hosted city’s biggest pop culture event over the weekend at KTPO Convention Centre. The show hosted a spectacular lineup of events including special international guest appearances, exclusive experiential & gaming zones, artist alley, fans sessions, cosplay, book launches and much more.
“It was yet another exciting year in Bangalore, the fans were amazing!, shared Comic Con India founder Jatin Varma. Famous international personalities like Todd Nauck, Artist, Amazing Spider-Man, Teen Titans Go, Dr. Who, Nightcrawler; Joe Harris, Author, X-Files Comics & Jim Demonakos, Founder Seattle’s annual Emerald City Comicon, author of The Silence of Our Friends attended and took special sessions at BCC 2016.
Maruti Suzuki was not only the presenting sponsor for the show, but also set up the biggest Art & Gaming zone ever at a Comic Con show.
Cosplay (Costume Contest), another major attraction at Comic Con India, continued to give prizes to people in great costumes. Comic Con India had created 5 categories to increase one’s chances of winning gifts. Each day, one winner was chosen from each of the five categories:-1. Comic book/graphic novel 2. Animated Series/Movie 3. Manga/Anime 4. Sci-Fi/Fantasy and 5. Gaming. 5 Cool Cosplayers got a voucher of Rs 2500 (each) for their Spirit of Cosplay.
Also, both days, One lucky winner out of the chosen 5 won INR 50,000 (Cash Prize)! And a chance to enter ‘Indian Championships of Cosplay’. The Winner of ‘Indian Championships of Cosplay’ will compete and represent the country at the Annual Crown Championships of Cosplay at Chicago Comics & Entertainment Expo!
Comic Con India’s partners set up Exclusive Experiential and Gaming Zones at the event. It featured two awesome gaming Zones. Nodwin ESL Gaming Zone & Amazon Battlefield One & FIFA 17 Zone. Amazon Battlefield One & FIFA 17 Zone hosted a slew of gaming activities.
Nodwin ESL Gaming Zone hosted ESL India Premiership, which was a mix of online and offline tournaments, monumental prize pool, daily content, celebrity showdowns, cosplay competition and many more. Fans were part of the second leg of the offline tournaments of the ESL India Premiership, where the champions of last three Starter Cups competed on a bigger stage, for more prize money and larger audience. These champions will battle it out in the Masters which is the season finale event to take place in December at Alto Delhi Comic Con 2016.
One of the other main attractions of the event were the Baahubali Zone & first of its kind Wand Master Training Booth (By Warner Bros). At the Bahubali Zone, the team from the super hit Franchise showcased their “Transgenic Content” for fans at the show. At the Wand Master Training Booth, people learnt to use wands to create official spells and got the video of their experience too.
Not just that, other exclusive Experiential Zone at the event included AXN Zone. It had lots of fun engagements. Fans got to witness some of their favorite characters like Sam & Dean, Sherlock, Heisenberg, Dexter etc come alive.
An “Artist Alley” exclusively featuring artists from all over India and Bengaluru was set up at BCC 2016. Here fans got an opportunity to interact with awesome artists, illustrators, designers working for comics and related fields. The alley featured artists like Saumin Suresh Patel, Reshmi Chandrashekhar, Prasad Bhatt, Rajeev Tamhankar, Nikita Das Gupta, Leena Swamy, Ayan Nag, Varsha Kodgi, Milanpreet, Madhuvanthi Mohan and many more.
Well known creators like Akshay Dhar from Meta Desi Comics, Vivek Goel from Holy Cow Entertainment and Shamik Dasgupta from Yali Dreams were there too! For the sheer love for Comics, 13 new Comic Book titles got launched at the convention.
The launches were, Doc M by Kalapani Comics, Durga: Legends by Vimanika Comics, Space Junkies by S K Comics, Rumi Volume 2 by Sufi Comics, Karma & 13 Days by TBS Planet, Mallory by Red Streak Publications, The Age of Immortals by Holy Cow Entertainment, Mighty Girl by Graphic India, LoSs4A2 by Kuma, Jataka Manga by ICBM Comics, Sirji Comics – Volume 2 by Sirji
Comics & Rakshak by Yali Dream Creations.
At the convention, fans got to buy merchandise from the best and most exclusive International merchandisers. Also, there were exclusive Indian merchandisers including Planet Superheroes, The Souled Store, Frog, PosterBoy, Greenrock, Macmerise, Bombay Merch, MC Sid Razz, Anime Pop Mall, Wacom, Comic Con India Store, G2A.com and many more.
The main participants at the event were — Harpercollins Publishers India, Campfire Graphic Novel, Viz Media By Simon & Schuster, Graphic India, Vimanika Comics, DC, Darkhorse & Vertigo Comics By Random House India, Dorling Kindersley India, Red Streak Publications, TBS Planet, Sirji Comics, ICBM Comics, Holycow Entertainment, Yali Dream Creations and many more.
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.
