English Entertainment
Romedy NOW presents a fun filled month
MUMBAI: Summer time’s in bloom and it brings with it three amazing summer surprises only on Romedy NOW, the exclusive destination for English General Entertainment. Let the heartthrob Hugh Grant steal your hearts all over again with a special property ‘Romedy Heartthrob’ powered by Maruti Swift, every Monday Night at 11pm throughout May. Watch the sweetest of his movies like Two Weeks Notice, Music and Lyrics, Did You Hear about the Morgans, and Nine Months.
What does it take for an immature, reckless and self-absorbed billionaire real estate tycoon to find true love? A hard working and devoted attorney who serves him a two weeks’ notice tired of his self-importance to make them both realize that they are more than boss and employee. Watch Hugh Grant as George Wade and Sandra Bullock as Lucy Kelson in the movie Two Weeks Notice.
It’s time for child psychologist Samuel Faulkner to let go of his fears of fatherhood and take responsibility of his soon-to-be-born son in Nine Months after an unplanned pregnancy with the love of his life a ballet teacher Rebecca Taylor (Julian Moore) throws him in a tizzy to be made worse by the boisterous daughters of an imperious couple and confusing advice from his single artist friend.
What’s romance without music? Indulge in music and love in Music and Lyrics, as Grant plays Alex a former pop sensation with a fading career in music. As he lacks inspiration to write a love song ‘Way back into love’ for a famed pop artist he seeks help from a creative writer Sophie Fisher (Drew Barrymore) who waters his plants and is overcoming a failed romance herself. The musical sojourn has more ‘aww’ moments than you can think about!
Running away from a contract killer after they witness a murder brings city slickers Paul Michael Morgan and his soon to be ex-wife Meryl to a small town of Ray in a witness protection program in Did you Hear about the Morgans. They rediscover love in the face of peril of escaping the contract killer and adjusting to country life, horse riding and fighting off bears and bulls. Enjoy the love and laughter in this one.
Too much love and laughter is never enough. It’s time to chill out with the most entertaining movies with a special property called ‘Hangout’ powered by Micro Max, Monday – Wednesday at 6pm all through May. Catch the foot-tapping penguin story in Happy Feet and the world of Emperor Penguins where a penguin cannot sing to find his partner but dance.
Spanglish has an honest Mexican domestic help Flor (Tea Leone) trying to get her teenage daughter Cristina stick to her roots and values while working in the household of a celebrated chef John (Adam Sandler) and his insecure wife. As the imperfect marriage and world of John crumbles down he finds companionship in Flor.
See humans get sued by a bee for eating all their honey in Bee Movie, two 11-year-olds falling in love in New York City in Little Manhattan, flooding an ant colony with his water gun has Lucas Nickle shrunk to insect size and work in the ruins in The Ant Bully. Watch more gems like Big, Chasing Liberty, Say Anything, Anastasia, and Aquamarine.
The feast does not end here! May is also the time for ‘Off the Shelves’ every Thursday night at 9 with some brilliant movies. Learn about the perils of misreading signs and falling in love with people who don’t love you back in the interconnecting stories in He’s Just not That Into You. Drool away watching Bradley Cooper, Scarlet Johansson, Jennifer Aniston, and more such scorchers in this ensemble cast.
The love story of a Parkinson’s patient and a medical rep working for Pfizer in Pittsburg in Love and Other Drugs. Love does not die as proved in PS I Love You where a young widow Holly Kennedy (Hilary Swank) is left 10 posthumous messages by her husband Gerry (Gerard Butler) to help her come to terms with the bereavement and move on. Not just these, enjoy movies like The Devil Wears Prada and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
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.
