.
As well as dipping into some of the newspapers online each morning, I generally watch snippets from the main television programmes to catch up on the daily news.
I used to enjoy the newsy magazine show of Penny Smith and John Stapleton for an hour from 6am. They’ve gone, along with most of the other GMTV presenters, who were axed in favour of an expensive revamp. Now people I’ve never heard of stagger along with a dire programme called Daybreak which, apparently, cost ITV a staggering £10 millions to formulate and equip in new studios. The result was an immediate 20% drop in viewers in just the first week. An ITV official said optimistically, ‘Daybreak has made a strong start in a very competitive breakfast television market’.
Not only ITV have been ‘tinkering’. Someone in the BBC decided to revamp their website and the result has been a disaster. When once you could scan the main stories at a glance, now you have to hunt around to find them. Even worse, they adopted the same format with all their regional websites. And now the latest version of their iPlayer, a useful computerised ‘catch-up’ service which enables you to watch programmes you’ve missed, is now so full of bugs that using it is made extremely difficult. A BBC official said sniffly, ‘New products sometimes have technical issues’. He got that right.
We like some things left as they are: predictable, comfortable and friendly. So why people in the television business feel that by scrapping some things completely, rather than attempting to revitalise them is beyond me. Especially when the changes are so dreadfully expensive.
Bring back GMTVs Penny Smith and John Stapleton, along with the ‘old’ versions of the BBC website and iPlayer is what I say.
But, of course, no-one will be listening!
.
As well as dipping into some of the newspapers online each morning, I generally watch snippets from the main television programmes to catch up on the daily news.
I used to enjoy the newsy magazine show of Penny Smith and John Stapleton for an hour from 6am. They’ve gone, along with most of the other GMTV presenters, who were axed in favour of an expensive revamp. Now people I’ve never heard of stagger along with a dire programme called Daybreak which, apparently, cost ITV a staggering £10 millions to formulate and equip in new studios. The result was an immediate 20% drop in viewers in just the first week. An ITV official said optimistically, ‘Daybreak has made a strong start in a very competitive breakfast television market’.
Not only ITV have been ‘tinkering’. Someone in the BBC decided to revamp their website and the result has been a disaster. When once you could scan the main stories at a glance, now you have to hunt around to find them. Even worse, they adopted the same format with all their regional websites. And now the latest version of their iPlayer, a useful computerised ‘catch-up’ service which enables you to watch programmes you’ve missed, is now so full of bugs that using it is made extremely difficult. A BBC official said sniffly, ‘New products sometimes have technical issues’. He got that right.
We like some things left as they are: predictable, comfortable and friendly. So why people in the television business feel that by scrapping some things completely, rather than attempting to revitalise them is beyond me. Especially when the changes are so dreadfully expensive.
Bring back GMTVs Penny Smith and John Stapleton, along with the ‘old’ versions of the BBC website and iPlayer is what I say.
But, of course, no-one will be listening!
.
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