Last night Sian and I went to the cinema to watch Children of Men (15), which is an excellent film and you should all go and see it as soon as possible. During the adverts before the film, a trailer for the upcoming new BBC drama Robin Hood was shown.
This confused me because the BBC have a policy in the UK stating that because of the TV Licence they charge to all owners of colour and black and white televisions, TV tuners in computers or personal TV devices, the BBC will not show commercial adverts. However this does not stop the BBC from showing trailers for their own content between programmes.
The trailer for Robin Hood shown in the cinema must have cost a lot of money, in fact a lot of TV Licence money. The cost of the advert in the cinemas, on hoardings and on the sides of buses has probably cost almost as much as a small two-part production. Given the fact that the BBC has nine television channels and multiple radio stations where they can advertise their television shows for free, reaching a massively captive audience, why do they need to waste TV Licence money on further advertising?
A traditional television programme on a commercial channel does need to advertise. This is because all commercial channels do show adverts and receive no money from the TV Licence. If a channel and/or programmes ratings are low, the network cannot charge as much for advertising, so it is important they keep their profile high. This warrants the use of advertising in cinemas, newspapers and on hoardings.
The BBC have an endless supply of TV Licence money, which is set to increase in the next few years, yet they want to spend it all on pointless advertising. Please BBC stop wasting your money advertising programmes outside of your own domain and spend more money making quality drama and entertainment.
P.S. There was no charge to the BBC for the promotion created by this article.
28.Sep.06 
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Due to a DNS error, Polaris Digital’s web site, this blog and all our e-mail services went down from 12pm on Saturday 23rd September until 4pm on Tuesday 26th September. We have now retified the problem and restarted our server and things are looking as though they are working again.
If you are still having problems, please contact us using the contact page at http://www.polaris-digital.com/index.php?page=contact
26.Sep.06 Uncategorized Comments (0)
In the true spirit of ‘Beta’ launches; whether it’s Google and their endless list of ‘Beta’ web applications; or Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mail Beta that replaces Hotmail; I have decided to try out a new source site / wiki.
In the recent months, I have been catching up on ECMAScript, or JavaScript to you and me. JavaScript has been a dirty word until recently, now it is making a big comeback due in part to the huge success of the emerging AJAX applications.
I am now actively developing unobtrusive JavaScript functions for my clients sites. As all my work is released under the Creative Commons open source licence, I figured I would let others view, comment, update and use my libraries. This will contain useful Javascript and PHP libraries.
You can access this resource from: http://source.polaris-digital.com
22.Sep.06 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Over the summer, development on PDnH Server has almost ground to a resounding halt due to an ‘Everest’ mountain of work coming into Polaris Digital. Things are not quieting down for a while yet, so progress is slow and in very small ’spits’ and ’spats’.
However, much has been done since the last update (0.2.1) and internally we are now getting version 0.3.0 ready for testing.
PDnH Server now has these features:
- Fully object-orientated architecture
- Support for MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL databases
- RSS and PodCasting support
- Google Maps Support
- Google Sitemap Support
- Xstandard WYSIWYG editor
- Fully working tiered render layer system
- Structure; XHTML 1.0 Strict
- Layout; CSS
- Behavior; Javascript and DOM
- Audit trail for all content
- Custom Metadata support
- Accessible administration
- Apache mod_rewrite for URL rewriting
- Site search
PDnH Server 0.3.0 system requirements:
- Apache 2.0 HTTP Server
- PHP 5
- MySQL 5.0 (recommended); Oracle 9+; or PostgreSQL database
PDnH Server 0.3.0 should be released in the first quarter of 2007 as a fully working prototype CMS. If testing is successful, Polaris Digital hope to release a stable release sometime next summer.
06.Sep.06 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Dropped through my mailbox today was an interesting e-mail pointing to an even more interesting article about text sizes in CSS. Most designers like myself will have set text size using pixels (px) in CSS, which will enable them to precisely know how large each line of text will be. However, there is a problem with this as Internet Explorer 5 on Windows cannot scale text that has had it size set in pixels. (more…)
05.Sep.06 Uncategorized Comments (0)
