English Entertainment
Star World Premiere HD kick-starts the New Year with brand new offerings
MUMBAI: Star World Premiere HD, India’s premium English entertainment channel is known to bring some of the best and latest English television series. It is the only channel in India to bring all their television shows right after its international telecast. Taking this offering a notch higher, Star World Premiere HD has now started airing the latest shows all seven days of the week, with 4 hours of the most popular shows for audiences to catch every day.
The channel that is home to 70+ new shows and offers over 1000 hours of fresh content to its viewers has acquired some of the most anticipated shows of 2016, day and date, making it ‘the’ channel to look out for in 2016.
Star World Premiere HD will be enticing longstanding fans of the cult sci-fi series – The X-Files, with the all-new The X-Files: Event Series premiering on the channel on 30 January 2016. Marking its momentous return on global television, the series will pick up with a developed plot-line to match new-age conspiracies and technology; not to forget the ever-famous Mulder-Scully pair and what they have come to be 13 years on, on the show.
Ace comedians, Louis C.K. and Zach Galifianakis come together for the first time on television with a brand new comedy, Baskets. The show will be marking its premiere on 24 January 2016 and stars actor and co-creator of the show, Zach as the protagonist Chip Baskets. Audiences that have long known Zach for his role as Alan of the Hangover series will now witness him in an all-new avatar of Chip Baskets. He will be portraying a man aspiring to become a professional clown but has to settle for a gig at the rodeo when he loses the opportunity to attend a prestigious Parisian clown academy.
Cooper Barrett’s Guide to Surviving Life falls next in line with its premiere on 24 January 2016. The show is an American comedy television series that follows Cooper Barrett (Jack Cutmore-Scott) as he figures out his life beyond hedonistic behavior. It revolves around Barrett, his friends and family as they try finding out the real meaning to life while overcoming complex situations.
The creators of popular series Glee, American Horror Story and Scream Queens bring their new show, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story which will be premiering on Star World Premiere HD on 8 February 2016. The show comprises of an invincible cast of John Travolta, David Schwimmer, Cuba Gooding Jr., Sarah Paulson, Selma Blair, Jordana Brewster, Bruce Greenwood, Nathan Lane and many more. With a distinct and true plot-line, the show focuses on America’s most sensational and publicized criminal hearing – the O.J. Simpson trial, with a riveting look at what really happened behind the scenes from the lawyers’ perspective.
Not last, neither the least, Martin Scorsese’s foray into television will also be marked with his debut show Vinyl premiering on the channel this February. One of the biggest shows on television in 2016, Scorsese has collaborated with rock n roll legend Mick Jagger to produce Vinyl and this will mark the television debut of Jagger’s son James Jagger too alongside prominent actors Bobby Cannavale, Olivia Wilde, Ray Romano amongst others. Set in the 1970s of New York City, Vinyl follows the uproarious character of Richie Finestra as he looks to bring the music genre into a new era, while trying not to let his company fall under or let his work interfere with his drug and alcohol use.
With English television entertainment and Hollywood’s finest on Star World Premiere HD, the channel promises these offerings as just the beginning of an enthralling television-viewing experience.
After all, why hold back when you can walk side by side with the world’s best television series right here on Star World Premiere HD – home to day and date viewing!
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.
