English Entertainment
Romedy Now will air ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’
MUMBAI: This January, get ready to witness a combination of love and laughter as Romedy Now is all set to air back-to-back episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, a comic family delight for its audience. Indian viewers will also be able to connect with the show due to the significance of family sentiments and emotions.
Starting 14 January 2016, the popular American sitcom will have a new destination, the happiest place on TV, Romedy Now! The channel will air all nine seasons of the show, starting from Season 01 on 14 January 2016 at 8 pm. To air from Monday to Friday, the iconic show will further strengthen the current line-up of the leading English GEC.
Everybody Loves Raymond stars stand-up comedian and Emmy-Award winner Ray Romano. The story revolves around Ray Barone, a successful sportswriter living on Long Island, New York, with his wife Debra (Patricia Heaton) and three kids. But their big happy family gets a bit too big and less happy — when Ray’s meddling parents, Frank (Peter Boyle) and Marie (Doris Roberts), frequently stop by, since they live directly across the street. Brother Robert (Brad Garrett), a divorced police officer, is constantly moving in and out of his parents’ house, and loves to drop by and show his resentment towards Ray’s successful career and happy family life. Dodging Marie’s constant critique of Debra’s cooking, Frank’s witty one-liners and Robert’s dead-pan despair, Ray and Debra just wish someone would ring their doorbell before entering once in a while.
Everybody Loves Raymond was an instant hit abroad and has a huge fan following even in India. While it was being telecast, the show was among Top 5 programs in the prime-time and was watched by over 18 million viewers each week. Further testimony to the success of the show was the fact that the cast members of Everybody Loves Raymond won Primetime Emmy Awards for their roles in the series.
In order to sustain the buzz around the property, Romedy Now will launch a digital campaign in February. Seeing that ELR can alternatively be termed as a ‘Family Comedy’, the core thought revolves around families spending their time together with Romedy Now. The channel will use #FamilyTimeWithRomedy as a sub-plug and build content and activities around how the channel is the most sought after when it comes to family viewing. Using this, it will explore different traits/habits/likes/dislikes of each family. It will use instances occurring in the show and tie it back with relatable scenes and stills from the show. The campaign will be executed on Facebook and Twitter.
Everybody Loves Raymond is yet another show that weaves into Romedy Now’s philosophy of bringing love and laughter to the Indian television viewers. With How I Met Your Mother, Gilmore Girls, Hot in Cleveland, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Romedy Now is undoubtedly the happiest place on TV and the ultimate destination to love and laughter!
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.
