Idiotic article.The opposite is true.The striking thing about the Tory Right is how few apart from Farage and the journalist Delingpole endorsed Trump to any degree .Inevitable that Cabinet Ministers had to put govt business first.Of course Gove gave a sycophantic interview in january 2017 - what else was he supposed to given the timing? When the House of Commons in 2016/ 2017 had a debate on whether President Trump should be able to come to the UK only a handful of Tory MPs spoke in favour of Trump.It has been noticeable how on mainstream TV so many Tory journalists tried to distance themselves from being linked to Trump on a personal level even if being sympathetic to some of his policies
Yes, Gove is just a victim of circumstance. There was literally no way for him to avoid flying 3,500 miles and crawling up Trump's backside.
Brexiteers and Trump supporters overlap massively in the Venn diagram.
Brexiteers and Biden supporters overlap even more.
I think not.
You're wrong then.
On the Venn diagram the intersection of Trump + Brexit < the intersection of Biden + Brexit.
Wasn't there a Yougov poll that had Leave voters splitting about 60/40 in favour of Biden? There's no doubt Leave voters are more likely to favour Trump than Remain voters, but most still preferred Biden.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
The PL are unlikely to launch their own channel, one of the advantages selling the rights to others is that they get the money via instalments well in advance of the season starting, and the equivalent point of the season. Put it this way they get paid in full for the season by around January.
If they went for a PL subscription model, they'd only get the money linearly throughout the season which would ruin the cashflow of most of the PL clubs.
Are you suggesting the billionaire owners cant organise very cheap finance against reliable recurring revenues in a world of ultra low interest rates? Very strange.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
It is impossible, Netflix was supposed to be that service of having most of everything. Then the media owners realised how much money they were leaving on the table by not having their own service. It's also why Netflix is spending billions per year on original content so they aren't beholden to studios who will withdraw the rights and launch their own platforms.
I could see one or two fall aside, Amazon prime is definitely one of those that I can't see lasting, it's a huge money black hole for returns that might never arrive and if the US gets serious about breaking Amazon up into consumer facing Amazon and corporate facing AWS then prime video is dead.
That would be a great shame as Amazon Prime is by an absolute mile the best of the lot.
I dislike Amazon Prime, despite having an account, as it tries to get you to pay for shows on top. Watch something then it suggests something else . . . that you have to pay for, that isn't included on Prime.
I don't want to pay per episode of a TV show. Just no.
Maybe I'm just not using it right, but if it were possible to get a Prime platform that only showed what was included in Prime and hid everything else I'd probably use it more.
You can always buy the series. Or buy one to suck it and see.
And you do know it is not mandatory to watch something suggested by them (albeit it will have been suggested by a sophisticated algorithm and hence be on the money).
Do you buy everything on normal amazon that it says "you might like" or "people who have bought this have bought..."?
New York will be reallocating unused COVID-19 vaccines after more than ten thousand nursing home residents and nearly half of staffers declined the jab, according to Gareth Rhodes, a member of Governor Andrew Cuomo's COVID-19 Response Task Force.
I am not too surprised, nor at the news that some ethnic minorities are refusing here too. I know some doctors and nurses who have declined.
I expect it will be the younger age groups rather than the elderly who do not participate in the main. They are generally reluctant about any health care intervention.
I find the idea of potentially being treated by an unvaccinated doctor or nurse quite alarming. My understanding is that a significant number of all recorded infections actually happen in hospital. The mother of a friend of mine was in hospital, caught Covid there and died 2 days ago. She was elderly and vulnerable but to have her risk increased by unvaccinated front line staff would have been unacceptable.
I think that we are going to have to get a little less tolerant of this nonsense. There should be a range of jobs where you interact with the vulnerable where a Covid vaccination certificate is every bit as necessary as a PVG certificate.
David hi
Just to say...GET BACK ON THE WAGON!!
I read your post the other day about letting things slip a bit this time round and who can blame you (us!). But now Christmas is out of the way, and extra clothes, if necessary can be bought against the weather, it is time to get back into the regime.
Bin off the midweek booze, no snacks (sweet or savoury), and treat yourself at the weekends (otherwise you'd go mad).
Keep us updated and good luck with it.
I'm trying @TOPPING , I'm trying but some virtual drink parties have rather ruined this week.
It doesn't help the pavements around here have been an ice rink for about 10 days now. Very frosty this morning again.
Yes they are conspiring to try to podge us up. But every day is longer and (I hope) less lethally cold!
12 days left of Dry January for me and the missus - 1st Feb is going to be one hell of a party in our house!
It definitely needed to be done though, after the past year of laziness and slobbery sitting at home. Up over 12k steps per day now, thanks to the treadmill, and 6lb down on the start of the month.
Sky and F1 wouldn't be so bad if you didn't also have to the entire sky bundle to get it.
I suspect Sky will offer another F1 season ticket for £200 which I will um and err about and then just watch the C4 highlights.
Mind you I might pay to watch the first race live - so that I can see how the season will play out.
I genuinely loved the C4 coverage, but it was increasingly late in the day and even later when I was starting watching deliberately late to skip adverts. So I watched the back end of the season on my Brother's SkyGo account.
Useful info: SkyGo blocks HDMI out. However, USB-C gets around this if you can hook up to a big screen that way. As I can.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
It is impossible, Netflix was supposed to be that service of having most of everything. Then the media owners realised how much money they were leaving on the table by not having their own service. It's also why Netflix is spending billions per year on original content so they aren't beholden to studios who will withdraw the rights and launch their own platforms.
I could see one or two fall aside, Amazon prime is definitely one of those that I can't see lasting, it's a huge money black hole for returns that might never arrive and if the US gets serious about breaking Amazon up into consumer facing Amazon and corporate facing AWS then prime video is dead.
That would be a great shame as Amazon Prime is by an absolute mile the best of the lot.
I dislike Amazon Prime, despite having an account, as it tries to get you to pay for shows on top. Watch something then it suggests something else . . . that you have to pay for, that isn't included on Prime.
I don't want to pay per episode of a TV show. Just no.
Maybe I'm just not using it right, but if it were possible to get a Prime platform that only showed what was included in Prime and hid everything else I'd probably use it more.
You can set it up so you only see the free stuff, there's a "Free to me" toggle in the interface which filters out all of the premium rental/purchase stuff.
Good to know, is that a global setting that's available permanently so then you go to movies and it shows your included movies etc? Or do you have to go into it every time?
We have a Fire Stick we use for Amazon but find it very unfriendly as far as that's concerned. The other shame is it doesn't integrate as far as I know with Sky, unlike both Netflix and Disney which can both be watched with the Sky remote on the Sky box.
New York will be reallocating unused COVID-19 vaccines after more than ten thousand nursing home residents and nearly half of staffers declined the jab, according to Gareth Rhodes, a member of Governor Andrew Cuomo's COVID-19 Response Task Force.
I am not too surprised, nor at the news that some ethnic minorities are refusing here too. I know some doctors and nurses who have declined.
I expect it will be the younger age groups rather than the elderly who do not participate in the main. They are generally reluctant about any health care intervention.
I find the idea of potentially being treated by an unvaccinated doctor or nurse quite alarming. My understanding is that a significant number of all recorded infections actually happen in hospital. The mother of a friend of mine was in hospital, caught Covid there and died 2 days ago. She was elderly and vulnerable but to have her risk increased by unvaccinated front line staff would have been unacceptable.
I think that we are going to have to get a little less tolerant of this nonsense. There should be a range of jobs where you interact with the vulnerable where a Covid vaccination certificate is every bit as necessary as a PVG certificate.
David hi
Just to say...GET BACK ON THE WAGON!!
I read your post the other day about letting things slip a bit this time round and who can blame you (us!). But now Christmas is out of the way, and extra clothes, if necessary can be bought against the weather, it is time to get back into the regime.
Bin off the midweek booze, no snacks (sweet or savoury), and treat yourself at the weekends (otherwise you'd go mad).
Keep us updated and good luck with it.
I'm trying @TOPPING , I'm trying but some virtual drink parties have rather ruined this week.
It doesn't help the pavements around here have been an ice rink for about 10 days now. Very frosty this morning again.
Yes they are conspiring to try to podge us up. But every day is longer and (I hope) less lethally cold!
12 days left of Dry January for me and the missus - 1st Feb is going to be one hell of a party in our house!
It definitely needed to be done though, after the past year of laziness and slobbery sitting at home. Up over 12k steps per day now, and 6lb down on the start of the month.
Trying to do RED January here ! Aiming for 150k in the month
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
One difference between Spotify and Netflix/Amazon is that the latter have set themselves up to be content creators - in competition with the other rights holders whose content they might want to licence.
I have begun to wonder whether I'd be better off dropping the subscription and spending the money on DVDs.
Idiotic article.The opposite is true.The striking thing about the Tory Right is how few apart from Farage and the journalist Delingpole endorsed Trump to any degree .Inevitable that Cabinet Ministers had to put govt business first.Of course Gove gave a sycophantic interview in january 2017 - what else was he supposed to given the timing? When the House of Commons in 2016/ 2017 had a debate on whether President Trump should be able to come to the UK only a handful of Tory MPs spoke in favour of Trump.It has been noticeable how on mainstream TV so many Tory journalists tried to distance themselves from being linked to Trump on a personal level even if being sympathetic to some of his policies
Yes, Gove is just a victim of circumstance. There was literally no way for him to avoid flying 3,500 miles and crawling up Trump's backside.
Brexiteers and Trump supporters overlap massively in the Venn diagram.
In a slightly different world, Germany's centre-right CDU would be the most natural match as a foreign political party for the Conservative party. Unfortunately the Conservative party isn't really a centre-right party. I guess more Brexiters prefer Trump to Merkel than vice versa.
Conversely, it is sometimes odd how keen UK leftwingers are to praise right-winger Merkel.
I think some in the Conservative party are upset with Trump only for exposing the true nature of the Republican Party, a party they otherwise admire.
I think you need to step out of the old left-right divide. It's no longer a reliable way of dividing ideological camps. Looks at the "blue on blue" flame wars on here in recent days. Internationalism-isolationism is an important dimension too.
Idiotic article.The opposite is true.The striking thing about the Tory Right is how few apart from Farage and the journalist Delingpole endorsed Trump to any degree .Inevitable that Cabinet Ministers had to put govt business first.Of course Gove gave a sycophantic interview in january 2017 - what else was he supposed to given the timing? When the House of Commons in 2016/ 2017 had a debate on whether President Trump should be able to come to the UK only a handful of Tory MPs spoke in favour of Trump.It has been noticeable how on mainstream TV so many Tory journalists tried to distance themselves from being linked to Trump on a personal level even if being sympathetic to some of his policies
Yes, Gove is just a victim of circumstance. There was literally no way for him to avoid flying 3,500 miles and crawling up Trump's backside.
Brexiteers and Trump supporters overlap massively in the Venn diagram.
In a slightly different world, Germany's centre-right CDU would be the most natural match as a foreign political party for the Conservative party. Unfortunately the Conservative party isn't really a centre-right party. I guess more Brexiters prefer Trump to Merkel than vice versa.
Conversely, it is sometimes odd how keen UK leftwingers are to praise right-winger Merkel.
I think some in the Conservative party are upset with Trump only for exposing the true nature of the Republican Party, a party they otherwise admire.
Actually the Conservative Party is a member of the centre right International Democratic Union with both the CDU, the CSU and the Republican Party, they are all sister parties of each other
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
The PL are unlikely to launch their own channel, one of the advantages selling the rights to others is that they get the money via instalments well in advance of the season starting, and the equivalent point of the season. Put it this way they get paid in full for the season by around January.
If they went for a PL subscription model, they'd only get the money linearly throughout the season which would ruin the cashflow of most of the PL clubs.
I can see then doing one or maybe two more deals with Sky/BT but at the same time Sky are looking at cutting their rights bill because Comcast massively overpaid for it and they need to realise savings from sky's running costs which is mostly sports rights.
The DTC model has a lot going for it but it would need two to three years of adjustment for teams. I could see them do a PL streaming service in non European markets rather than rights in the near term and eventually bring that model to non UK European markets and then eventually to the domestic market. They're leaving too much money on the table and the big teams are getting very annoyed by it.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
The PL are unlikely to launch their own channel, one of the advantages selling the rights to others is that they get the money via instalments well in advance of the season starting, and the equivalent point of the season. Put it this way they get paid in full for the season by around January.
If they went for a PL subscription model, they'd only get the money linearly throughout the season which would ruin the cashflow of most of the PL clubs.
Are you suggesting the billionaire owners cant organise very cheap finance against reliable recurring revenues in a world of ultra low interest rates? Very strange.
No, the argument is when in times of economic hardship it'll be easier to cancel the PL channel/streaming subscription than it'll be to cancel Sky/BT Sport.
After the ITV Digital fiasco sports rights holders are pretty strong on securing their money via various forms of parental guarantees, something you can't do when you're selling the product to the consumer direct.
Does anyone know any over 80s who haven't been offered a vaccination?
My neighbour's wife hasn't been, she's got mobility problems. He's had his though, hopefully a nurse or some such will come out and do her.
My aunt the same (housebound). Although a District Nurse gave her the flu jab a few weeks ago.
On How to Vaccinate the World yesterday one of the guests said that household vaccinations hadn't begun yet, implying they might at some point. "In the community" apparently means care homes.
New York will be reallocating unused COVID-19 vaccines after more than ten thousand nursing home residents and nearly half of staffers declined the jab, according to Gareth Rhodes, a member of Governor Andrew Cuomo's COVID-19 Response Task Force.
I am not too surprised, nor at the news that some ethnic minorities are refusing here too. I know some doctors and nurses who have declined.
I expect it will be the younger age groups rather than the elderly who do not participate in the main. They are generally reluctant about any health care intervention.
I find the idea of potentially being treated by an unvaccinated doctor or nurse quite alarming. My understanding is that a significant number of all recorded infections actually happen in hospital. The mother of a friend of mine was in hospital, caught Covid there and died 2 days ago. She was elderly and vulnerable but to have her risk increased by unvaccinated front line staff would have been unacceptable.
I think that we are going to have to get a little less tolerant of this nonsense. There should be a range of jobs where you interact with the vulnerable where a Covid vaccination certificate is every bit as necessary as a PVG certificate.
David hi
Just to say...GET BACK ON THE WAGON!!
I read your post the other day about letting things slip a bit this time round and who can blame you (us!). But now Christmas is out of the way, and extra clothes, if necessary can be bought against the weather, it is time to get back into the regime.
Bin off the midweek booze, no snacks (sweet or savoury), and treat yourself at the weekends (otherwise you'd go mad).
Keep us updated and good luck with it.
I'm trying @TOPPING , I'm trying but some virtual drink parties have rather ruined this week.
It doesn't help the pavements around here have been an ice rink for about 10 days now. Very frosty this morning again.
Yes they are conspiring to try to podge us up. But every day is longer and (I hope) less lethally cold!
12 days left of Dry January for me and the missus - 1st Feb is going to be one hell of a party in our house!
It definitely needed to be done though, after the past year of laziness and slobbery sitting at home. Up over 12k steps per day now, thanks to the treadmill, and 6lb down on the start of the month.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
It is impossible, Netflix was supposed to be that service of having most of everything. Then the media owners realised how much money they were leaving on the table by not having their own service. It's also why Netflix is spending billions per year on original content so they aren't beholden to studios who will withdraw the rights and launch their own platforms.
I could see one or two fall aside, Amazon prime is definitely one of those that I can't see lasting, it's a huge money black hole for returns that might never arrive and if the US gets serious about breaking Amazon up into consumer facing Amazon and corporate facing AWS then prime video is dead.
That would be a great shame as Amazon Prime is by an absolute mile the best of the lot.
I dislike Amazon Prime, despite having an account, as it tries to get you to pay for shows on top. Watch something then it suggests something else . . . that you have to pay for, that isn't included on Prime.
I don't want to pay per episode of a TV show. Just no.
Maybe I'm just not using it right, but if it were possible to get a Prime platform that only showed what was included in Prime and hid everything else I'd probably use it more.
You can always buy the series. Or buy one to suck it and see.
And you do know it is not mandatory to watch something suggested by them (albeit it will have been suggested by a sophisticated algorithm and hence be on the money).
Do you buy everything on normal amazon that it says "you might like" or "people who have bought this have bought..."?
Its still frustrating. Its even more frustrating with young children who get excited at seeing a picture of something they'd like to watch and then being told no its not available, which doesn't happen on any other platform we use.
For all the detractors of T20, and I can't say it's my favourite format of the game, India's strength in depth, resilience and ability to chase down a total really came through today.
Economically T20 will end up consuming Test cricket. But before it does so, the skills that the players have developed playing T20 is producing the most exciting Test cricket. Enjoy it while it lasts.
I'm less sceptical about test match future. Most players see it as the pinnacle, but T20 does pay the bills. As has also been posted above, we had half of all the test matches ever played, in just the last 38 years. Partly I guess due to more test nations, but also to mixed summer opponents etc. It wouldn't hurt to back off from this high peak to some extent, as long as the quality is preserved.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
One difference between Spotify and Netflix/Amazon is that the latter have set themselves up to be content creators - in competition with the other rights holders whose content they might want to licence.
I have begun to wonder whether I'd be better off dropping the subscription and spending the money on DVDs.
Spotify’s a weird one. They’re spending millions on getting exclusive podcasts such as a Joe Rogan, but leaving them all on the free service. How are they going to get back the $1m a week they’re paying for JRE if I can watch and listen free with no ads? The takeup of paid subs on the back of that deal is going to be close to zero.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
It is impossible, Netflix was supposed to be that service of having most of everything. Then the media owners realised how much money they were leaving on the table by not having their own service. It's also why Netflix is spending billions per year on original content so they aren't beholden to studios who will withdraw the rights and launch their own platforms.
I could see one or two fall aside, Amazon prime is definitely one of those that I can't see lasting, it's a huge money black hole for returns that might never arrive and if the US gets serious about breaking Amazon up into consumer facing Amazon and corporate facing AWS then prime video is dead.
That would be a great shame as Amazon Prime is by an absolute mile the best of the lot.
I dislike Amazon Prime, despite having an account, as it tries to get you to pay for shows on top. Watch something then it suggests something else . . . that you have to pay for, that isn't included on Prime.
I don't want to pay per episode of a TV show. Just no.
Maybe I'm just not using it right, but if it were possible to get a Prime platform that only showed what was included in Prime and hid everything else I'd probably use it more.
You can set it up so you only see the free stuff, there's a "Free to me" toggle in the interface which filters out all of the premium rental/purchase stuff.
Good to know, is that a global setting that's available permanently so then you go to movies and it shows your included movies etc? Or do you have to go into it every time?
We have a Fire Stick we use for Amazon but find it very unfriendly as far as that's concerned. The other shame is it doesn't integrate as far as I know with Sky, unlike both Netflix and Disney which can both be watched with the Sky remote on the Sky box.
Prime video is available through Sky Q, but it's rolling out in stages, your box may not have received the update yet.
It's a global filter for TVs and movies. It basically makes it like Netflix where you only see what's in the subscription. You only need to set it once.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
The PL are unlikely to launch their own channel, one of the advantages selling the rights to others is that they get the money via instalments well in advance of the season starting, and the equivalent point of the season. Put it this way they get paid in full for the season by around January.
If they went for a PL subscription model, they'd only get the money linearly throughout the season which would ruin the cashflow of most of the PL clubs.
Are you suggesting the billionaire owners cant organise very cheap finance against reliable recurring revenues in a world of ultra low interest rates? Very strange.
No, the argument is when in times of economic hardship it'll be easier to cancel the PL channel/streaming subscription than it'll be to cancel Sky/BT Sport.
After the ITV Digital fiasco sports rights holders are pretty strong on securing their money via various forms of parental guarantees, something you can't do when you're selling the product to the consumer direct.
Thanks that makes more sense, but still way too cautious considering the ownership group of the PL.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
It is impossible, Netflix was supposed to be that service of having most of everything. Then the media owners realised how much money they were leaving on the table by not having their own service. It's also why Netflix is spending billions per year on original content so they aren't beholden to studios who will withdraw the rights and launch their own platforms.
I could see one or two fall aside, Amazon prime is definitely one of those that I can't see lasting, it's a huge money black hole for returns that might never arrive and if the US gets serious about breaking Amazon up into consumer facing Amazon and corporate facing AWS then prime video is dead.
That would be a great shame as Amazon Prime is by an absolute mile the best of the lot.
I dislike Amazon Prime, despite having an account, as it tries to get you to pay for shows on top. Watch something then it suggests something else . . . that you have to pay for, that isn't included on Prime.
I don't want to pay per episode of a TV show. Just no.
Maybe I'm just not using it right, but if it were possible to get a Prime platform that only showed what was included in Prime and hid everything else I'd probably use it more.
You can set it up so you only see the free stuff, there's a "Free to me" toggle in the interface which filters out all of the premium rental/purchase stuff.
Good to know, is that a global setting that's available permanently so then you go to movies and it shows your included movies etc? Or do you have to go into it every time?
We have a Fire Stick we use for Amazon but find it very unfriendly as far as that's concerned. The other shame is it doesn't integrate as far as I know with Sky, unlike both Netflix and Disney which can both be watched with the Sky remote on the Sky box.
Prime video is available through Sky Q, but it's rolling out in stages, your box may not have received the update yet.
It's a global filter for TVs and movies. It basically makes it like Netflix where you only see what's in the subscription. You only need to set it once.
Oh fantastic, those are both very good news. May actually start using them then.
New York will be reallocating unused COVID-19 vaccines after more than ten thousand nursing home residents and nearly half of staffers declined the jab, according to Gareth Rhodes, a member of Governor Andrew Cuomo's COVID-19 Response Task Force.
I am not too surprised, nor at the news that some ethnic minorities are refusing here too. I know some doctors and nurses who have declined.
I expect it will be the younger age groups rather than the elderly who do not participate in the main. They are generally reluctant about any health care intervention.
I find the idea of potentially being treated by an unvaccinated doctor or nurse quite alarming. My understanding is that a significant number of all recorded infections actually happen in hospital. The mother of a friend of mine was in hospital, caught Covid there and died 2 days ago. She was elderly and vulnerable but to have her risk increased by unvaccinated front line staff would have been unacceptable.
I think that we are going to have to get a little less tolerant of this nonsense. There should be a range of jobs where you interact with the vulnerable where a Covid vaccination certificate is every bit as necessary as a PVG certificate.
David hi
Just to say...GET BACK ON THE WAGON!!
I read your post the other day about letting things slip a bit this time round and who can blame you (us!). But now Christmas is out of the way, and extra clothes, if necessary can be bought against the weather, it is time to get back into the regime.
Bin off the midweek booze, no snacks (sweet or savoury), and treat yourself at the weekends (otherwise you'd go mad).
Keep us updated and good luck with it.
I'm trying @TOPPING , I'm trying but some virtual drink parties have rather ruined this week.
It doesn't help the pavements around here have been an ice rink for about 10 days now. Very frosty this morning again.
Yes they are conspiring to try to podge us up. But every day is longer and (I hope) less lethally cold!
12 days left of Dry January for me and the missus - 1st Feb is going to be one hell of a party in our house!
It definitely needed to be done though, after the past year of laziness and slobbery sitting at home. Up over 12k steps per day now, and 6lb down on the start of the month.
Trying to do RED January here ! Aiming for 150k in the month
How? January's weather has either been freezing or a monsoon. I've done several 15k walks taking it very gingerly despite DMs and grips due to ice. The rest of the time indoors looking at the bloody awful weather. Forecast is now relentless rain for 48 hours - I'm not going out to do steps in that
re not wanting to get treatment from someone who is not vaccinated?
Huh?
As we are aware to date, the vaccines don't affect transmission, apart from the decrease in viral load from an asymptomatic carrier (less, if any coughing, sneezing, etc).
So what is the difference between someone who has the virus, has been jabbed and is asymptomatic and someone who has the virus, hasn't been jabbed and is asymptomatic?
This is still the unanswered trillion dollar question on which our economy depends. Can those who have been vaccinated transmit the virus even if they don't get ill themselves? If they can we are in trouble, all sorts of trouble.
No trial or test has been done to say they don't. But there is much less coughing and sneezing so with that decrease in viral load transmission the virus will gradually die out.
All over Down Under. Described as one of India's greatest wins.
It must be over thirty years since Oz lost at Brisbane. And that was not an easy chase on an easy pitch. That was just - wow. Wow. Wow. Gill, Pujara and Pant, what a performance.
Edit - and BT TV are officially bastards for having the exclusive rights so nobody in the UK could watch it.
Err, I just watched it on Virgin.
And this was the last year of BT’s five year deal. The host sells the rights to the highest bidder.
Ultimately Sky have slashed their secondary rights to save their Premier League first picks. Things have calmed down a bit so Sky might try to get the Aussie rights back.
So have this winter's Ashes rights been sold?
Hopefully they go back to Sky. I'd sooner stream than pay for BT.
No they haven't been sold - and I don't know if the tender has gone out yet. I don't mind BT actually. I left the Sky platform when they lost the Champions League in 2015 and put up my bill by £4 a year. I then had a couple of years on the BT platform from which I could still get Sky Sports 1 and 2 for a reasonable sum of money.
But then Sky shafted BT by coming up with the Main Event channel. Essentially Sky have to offer certain content (pretty much PL football matches) to all platforms and the Main Event channel does that. Given that is essentially a PL channel and then whatever they feel like showing when there isn't a game on (could be cricket, but might not be), I left BT for Virgin. Of the three platforms, I think Virgin is probably the best, though I don't know what Sky's like these days.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
It is impossible, Netflix was supposed to be that service of having most of everything. Then the media owners realised how much money they were leaving on the table by not having their own service. It's also why Netflix is spending billions per year on original content so they aren't beholden to studios who will withdraw the rights and launch their own platforms.
I could see one or two fall aside, Amazon prime is definitely one of those that I can't see lasting, it's a huge money black hole for returns that might never arrive and if the US gets serious about breaking Amazon up into consumer facing Amazon and corporate facing AWS then prime video is dead.
That would be a great shame as Amazon Prime is by an absolute mile the best of the lot.
I dislike Amazon Prime, despite having an account, as it tries to get you to pay for shows on top. Watch something then it suggests something else . . . that you have to pay for, that isn't included on Prime.
I don't want to pay per episode of a TV show. Just no.
Maybe I'm just not using it right, but if it were possible to get a Prime platform that only showed what was included in Prime and hid everything else I'd probably use it more.
You can always buy the series. Or buy one to suck it and see.
And you do know it is not mandatory to watch something suggested by them (albeit it will have been suggested by a sophisticated algorithm and hence be on the money).
Do you buy everything on normal amazon that it says "you might like" or "people who have bought this have bought..."?
Its still frustrating. Its even more frustrating with young children who get excited at seeing a picture of something they'd like to watch and then being told no its not available, which doesn't happen on any other platform we use.
I like it. There are the Amazon originals - Sneaky Pete, This is Us (amazing), Hustlers (not for your children, mind), Jack Ryan, The Boys, American Gods...plus stuff to hire (ie I have BT as a system and would always rent a film from Amazon rather than BT Player as I think you get longer to watch it).
As for the suggestions, marketing people gotta be marketing people. Like having chocolate oranges at the supermarket checkout.
re not wanting to get treatment from someone who is not vaccinated?
Huh?
As we are aware to date, the vaccines don't affect transmission, apart from the decrease in viral load from an asymptomatic carrier (less, if any coughing, sneezing, etc).
So what is the difference between someone who has the virus, has been jabbed and is asymptomatic and someone who has the virus, hasn't been jabbed and is asymptomatic?
This is still the unanswered trillion dollar question on which our economy depends. Can those who have been vaccinated transmit the virus even if they don't get ill themselves? If they can we are in trouble, all sorts of trouble.
No trial or test has been done to say they don't. But there is much less coughing and sneezing so with that decrease in viral load transmission the virus will gradually die out.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
The PL are unlikely to launch their own channel, one of the advantages selling the rights to others is that they get the money via instalments well in advance of the season starting, and the equivalent point of the season. Put it this way they get paid in full for the season by around January.
If they went for a PL subscription model, they'd only get the money linearly throughout the season which would ruin the cashflow of most of the PL clubs.
I can see then doing one or maybe two more deals with Sky/BT but at the same time Sky are looking at cutting their rights bill because Comcast massively overpaid for it and they need to realise savings from sky's running costs which is mostly sports rights.
The DTC model has a lot going for it but it would need two to three years of adjustment for teams. I could see them do a PL streaming service in non European markets rather than rights in the near term and eventually bring that model to non UK European markets and then eventually to the domestic market. They're leaving too much money on the table and the big teams are getting very annoyed by it.
The PL are launching a PL streaming service in Singapore from 2022 onwards.
There's a couple more in the pipeline.
The biggest threat to the PL in the next few years is
1) A European Super League or the Champs League going Swiss style qualifcation.
2) The CL moving to the weekend, one of the successes of the PL is that they've got the Asian markets hooked, by scheduling CL matches on Tues/Wed evenings Europe time doesn't work for Asia, 8 different kick off times over the weekend might allow UEFA to get even more money for themselves (and the top clubs other than the PL clubs)
New York will be reallocating unused COVID-19 vaccines after more than ten thousand nursing home residents and nearly half of staffers declined the jab, according to Gareth Rhodes, a member of Governor Andrew Cuomo's COVID-19 Response Task Force.
I am not too surprised, nor at the news that some ethnic minorities are refusing here too. I know some doctors and nurses who have declined.
I expect it will be the younger age groups rather than the elderly who do not participate in the main. They are generally reluctant about any health care intervention.
I find the idea of potentially being treated by an unvaccinated doctor or nurse quite alarming. My understanding is that a significant number of all recorded infections actually happen in hospital. The mother of a friend of mine was in hospital, caught Covid there and died 2 days ago. She was elderly and vulnerable but to have her risk increased by unvaccinated front line staff would have been unacceptable.
I think that we are going to have to get a little less tolerant of this nonsense. There should be a range of jobs where you interact with the vulnerable where a Covid vaccination certificate is every bit as necessary as a PVG certificate.
David hi
Just to say...GET BACK ON THE WAGON!!
I read your post the other day about letting things slip a bit this time round and who can blame you (us!). But now Christmas is out of the way, and extra clothes, if necessary can be bought against the weather, it is time to get back into the regime.
Bin off the midweek booze, no snacks (sweet or savoury), and treat yourself at the weekends (otherwise you'd go mad).
Keep us updated and good luck with it.
I'm trying @TOPPING , I'm trying but some virtual drink parties have rather ruined this week.
It doesn't help the pavements around here have been an ice rink for about 10 days now. Very frosty this morning again.
Yes they are conspiring to try to podge us up. But every day is longer and (I hope) less lethally cold!
12 days left of Dry January for me and the missus - 1st Feb is going to be one hell of a party in our house!
It definitely needed to be done though, after the past year of laziness and slobbery sitting at home. Up over 12k steps per day now, and 6lb down on the start of the month.
Trying to do RED January here ! Aiming for 150k in the month
re not wanting to get treatment from someone who is not vaccinated?
Huh?
As we are aware to date, the vaccines don't affect transmission, apart from the decrease in viral load from an asymptomatic carrier (less, if any coughing, sneezing, etc).
So what is the difference between someone who has the virus, has been jabbed and is asymptomatic and someone who has the virus, hasn't been jabbed and is asymptomatic?
This is still the unanswered trillion dollar question on which our economy depends. Can those who have been vaccinated transmit the virus even if they don't get ill themselves? If they can we are in trouble, all sorts of trouble.
No trial or test has been done to say they don't. But there is much less coughing and sneezing so with that decrease in viral load transmission the virus will gradually die out.
Idiotic article.The opposite is true.The striking thing about the Tory Right is how few apart from Farage and the journalist Delingpole endorsed Trump to any degree .Inevitable that Cabinet Ministers had to put govt business first.Of course Gove gave a sycophantic interview in january 2017 - what else was he supposed to given the timing? When the House of Commons in 2016/ 2017 had a debate on whether President Trump should be able to come to the UK only a handful of Tory MPs spoke in favour of Trump.It has been noticeable how on mainstream TV so many Tory journalists tried to distance themselves from being linked to Trump on a personal level even if being sympathetic to some of his policies
Yes, Gove is just a victim of circumstance. There was literally no way for him to avoid flying 3,500 miles and crawling up Trump's backside.
Brexiteers and Trump supporters overlap massively in the Venn diagram.
In a slightly different world, Germany's centre-right CDU would be the most natural match as a foreign political party for the Conservative party. Unfortunately the Conservative party isn't really a centre-right party. I guess more Brexiters prefer Trump to Merkel than vice versa.
Conversely, it is sometimes odd how keen UK leftwingers are to praise right-winger Merkel.
I think some in the Conservative party are upset with Trump only for exposing the true nature of the Republican Party, a party they otherwise admire.
Actually the Conservative Party is a member of the centre right International Democratic Union with both the CDU, the CSU and the Republican Party, they are all sister parties of each other
And yet Gove is the one who crawled up Trump's arse, whereas CDU politicians have mostly retained a little bit of dignity. To describe the US Republican Party as "centre right" is absurd, no matter what international clubs they are members of.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
re not wanting to get treatment from someone who is not vaccinated?
Huh?
As we are aware to date, the vaccines don't affect transmission, apart from the decrease in viral load from an asymptomatic carrier (less, if any coughing, sneezing, etc).
So what is the difference between someone who has the virus, has been jabbed and is asymptomatic and someone who has the virus, hasn't been jabbed and is asymptomatic?
This is still the unanswered trillion dollar question on which our economy depends. Can those who have been vaccinated transmit the virus even if they don't get ill themselves? If they can we are in trouble, all sorts of trouble.
No trial or test has been done to say they don't. But there is much less coughing and sneezing so with that decrease in viral load transmission the virus will gradually die out.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
I'm near the M1 stretch which has become the death blackspot for smart motorways.
Before the pandemic we stopped driving on that stretch as much as we could, we've seen so many near misses and accidents because people don't understand them.
Whoever thought putting smart motorways next to a two lane flyover has never driven a car.
Edit - Said two lane flyover is also next to one the UK's largest shopping centres, so double bravo.
re not wanting to get treatment from someone who is not vaccinated?
Huh?
As we are aware to date, the vaccines don't affect transmission, apart from the decrease in viral load from an asymptomatic carrier (less, if any coughing, sneezing, etc).
So what is the difference between someone who has the virus, has been jabbed and is asymptomatic and someone who has the virus, hasn't been jabbed and is asymptomatic?
This is still the unanswered trillion dollar question on which our economy depends. Can those who have been vaccinated transmit the virus even if they don't get ill themselves? If they can we are in trouble, all sorts of trouble.
No trial or test has been done to say they don't. But there is much less coughing and sneezing so with that decrease in viral load transmission the virus will gradually die out.
Every day on here there are posters from the right getting extremely upset about trivialities. The Spectator is setting up a witch hunt to find obscure examples of wokeness to rage over.
Does anyone know any over 80s who haven't been offered a vaccination?
Don't know anyone personally, but the local surgery are having trouble contacting a few. According to the local F/b page. They're asking friends/relatives to contact them.
On topic, Alastair should have added this to his piece.
John Redwood penning an open letter to Joe Biden after the US election lecturing him on Brexit, and Owen Paterson meeting Donald Trump when he came to Britain and celebrating renewing links between North Shropshire and the White House ("The meeting has been brewing for some time now").
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
TBH thats not a smart motorway thing, thats a southerners driving thing. Dahn Sarf people are kind enough to have a "northerners only" lane. For whatever reason Lane 1 - or lanes 1 AND 2 when its D4 - is a no go zone on southern motorways.
Its a good progressive way to travel - a steady 65 or so passing underneath two busy lanes bunching to your right.
It was weird, but I'm still surprised they've apologised. The BBC has apologised for the original headline in its reporting of the death of the convicted murderer Phil Spector.
The first version on the breaking news story on the BBC News website carried the headline: "Talented but flawed producer Phil Spector dies aged 81".
Does anyone know any over 80s who haven't been offered a vaccination?
My neighbour's wife hasn't been, she's got mobility problems. He's had his though, hopefully a nurse or some such will come out and do her.
My aunt the same (housebound). Although a District Nurse gave her the flu jab a few weeks ago.
On How to Vaccinate the World yesterday one of the guests said that household vaccinations hadn't begun yet, implying they might at some point. "In the community" apparently means care homes.
Can't do it with the Pfizer one. Need the AZN. (or another one down the track which doesn't need deep refrigeration.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
Oh wow, really?
That’s what being away for a while does to you, I’d assumed they were all like the M42, which worked pretty well once people were used to it. The difficulties arose at the junctions, where the hard shoulder was often a must exit lane, so there was a bit of shuffling as people moved right to stay on the motorway.
The problems come with people who don’t do 50k miles a year as I used to, and are not comfortable with the changes compared to a standard motorway. Foreign lorries were always a problem, as they never knew which lane to be in. I imagine there’s a lot more of them around now, than there were 15 years ago when I was pounding the motorways.
If the smart motorways are to work safely, they need to be properly lit up, with CCTV everywhere, the control room quick to respond to incidents, and plenty of recovery trucks around to scrape up breakdowns.
It was weird, but I'm still surprised they've apologised. The BBC has apologised for the original headline in its reporting of the death of the convicted murderer Phil Spector.
The first version on the breaking news story on the BBC News website carried the headline: "Talented but flawed producer Phil Spector dies aged 81".
Idiotic article.The opposite is true.The striking thing about the Tory Right is how few apart from Farage and the journalist Delingpole endorsed Trump to any degree .Inevitable that Cabinet Ministers had to put govt business first.Of course Gove gave a sycophantic interview in january 2017 - what else was he supposed to given the timing? When the House of Commons in 2016/ 2017 had a debate on whether President Trump should be able to come to the UK only a handful of Tory MPs spoke in favour of Trump.It has been noticeable how on mainstream TV so many Tory journalists tried to distance themselves from being linked to Trump on a personal level even if being sympathetic to some of his policies
Yes, Gove is just a victim of circumstance. There was literally no way for him to avoid flying 3,500 miles and crawling up Trump's backside.
Brexiteers and Trump supporters overlap massively in the Venn diagram.
In a slightly different world, Germany's centre-right CDU would be the most natural match as a foreign political party for the Conservative party. Unfortunately the Conservative party isn't really a centre-right party. I guess more Brexiters prefer Trump to Merkel than vice versa.
Conversely, it is sometimes odd how keen UK leftwingers are to praise right-winger Merkel.
I think some in the Conservative party are upset with Trump only for exposing the true nature of the Republican Party, a party they otherwise admire.
Actually the Conservative Party is a member of the centre right International Democratic Union with both the CDU, the CSU and the Republican Party, they are all sister parties of each other
And yet Gove is the one who crawled up Trump's arse, whereas CDU politicians have mostly retained a little bit of dignity. To describe the US Republican Party as "centre right" is absurd, no matter what international clubs they are members of.
I wonder what Gove and Macron discussed while they were both up that particular orifice?
Idiotic article.The opposite is true.The striking thing about the Tory Right is how few apart from Farage and the journalist Delingpole endorsed Trump to any degree .Inevitable that Cabinet Ministers had to put govt business first.Of course Gove gave a sycophantic interview in january 2017 - what else was he supposed to given the timing? When the House of Commons in 2016/ 2017 had a debate on whether President Trump should be able to come to the UK only a handful of Tory MPs spoke in favour of Trump.It has been noticeable how on mainstream TV so many Tory journalists tried to distance themselves from being linked to Trump on a personal level even if being sympathetic to some of his policies
Yes, Gove is just a victim of circumstance. There was literally no way for him to avoid flying 3,500 miles and crawling up Trump's backside.
Brexiteers and Trump supporters overlap massively in the Venn diagram.
In a slightly different world, Germany's centre-right CDU would be the most natural match as a foreign political party for the Conservative party. Unfortunately the Conservative party isn't really a centre-right party. I guess more Brexiters prefer Trump to Merkel than vice versa.
Conversely, it is sometimes odd how keen UK leftwingers are to praise right-winger Merkel.
I think some in the Conservative party are upset with Trump only for exposing the true nature of the Republican Party, a party they otherwise admire.
Merkel is the kind of moderate and pragmatic centre right leader that I wouldn't vote for but wouldn't lose any sleep over and I would trust to run the country in the interests of the population as a whole. The last time the Tories had a leader like that was 1997. The Republicans haven't been in that kind of place since the Ford administration.
It was weird, but I'm still surprised they've apologised. The BBC has apologised for the original headline in its reporting of the death of the convicted murderer Phil Spector.
The first version on the breaking news story on the BBC News website carried the headline: "Talented but flawed producer Phil Spector dies aged 81".
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
I'm near the M1 stretch which has become the death blackspot for smart motorways.
Before the pandemic we stopped driving on that stretch as much as we could, we've seen so many near misses and accidents because people don't understand them.
Whoever thought putting smart motorways next to a two lane flyover has never driven a car.
Edit - Said two lane flyover is also next to one the UK's largest shopping centres, so double bravo.
Yep. This is one of the widened on the cheap schemes thats a bloody menace. Yes, more capacity is needed in the peak. So fit the kind of smart motorway that has switchable hard shoulders.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
TBH thats not a smart motorway thing, thats a southerners driving thing. Dahn Sarf people are kind enough to have a "northerners only" lane. For whatever reason Lane 1 - or lanes 1 AND 2 when its D4 - is a no go zone on southern motorways.
Its a good progressive way to travel - a steady 65 or so passing underneath two busy lanes bunching to your right.
For which you can be prosecuted if the police are feeling so inclined.
From the Driving test:
"Rule 268 of the Highway Code states – do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right."
This is generally interpreted to be only at low speeds such as in congestion.
120 million children's books given away and counting. A legend in every sense.
I am no fan of country music, hate it in fact and I am no fan of Dolly Parton's artistic output, but boy is she an example of what people of great wealth can do to improve humanity.
I've gained a little weight recently. Who knows, maybe I'll break through the 9st barrier this year
There’s a thinly veiled boast in there somewhere! I’m 12st 3lb now, got to nearly 13 at one point last year thanks to a combination of WFH, beer and pizza!
3lb to go in the next 12 days. Must not eat junk food and must walk every day...
Every day on here there are posters from the right getting extremely upset about trivialities. The Spectator is setting up a witch hunt to find obscure examples of wokeness to rage over.
It is clear who the real snowflakes are.
The article is pretty balanced on that. Though the US woke left have yet to attempt the illegal overthrow of a newly elected President...
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
The PL are unlikely to launch their own channel, one of the advantages selling the rights to others is that they get the money via instalments well in advance of the season starting, and the equivalent point of the season. Put it this way they get paid in full for the season by around January.
If they went for a PL subscription model, they'd only get the money linearly throughout the season which would ruin the cashflow of most of the PL clubs.
Are you suggesting the billionaire owners cant organise very cheap finance against reliable recurring revenues in a world of ultra low interest rates? Very strange.
No, the argument is when in times of economic hardship it'll be easier to cancel the PL channel/streaming subscription than it'll be to cancel Sky/BT Sport.
After the ITV Digital fiasco sports rights holders are pretty strong on securing their money via various forms of parental guarantees, something you can't do when you're selling the product to the consumer direct.
Thanks that makes more sense, but still way too cautious considering the ownership group of the PL.
You only have to look to France this season what happens when you change your model.
re not wanting to get treatment from someone who is not vaccinated?
Huh?
As we are aware to date, the vaccines don't affect transmission, apart from the decrease in viral load from an asymptomatic carrier (less, if any coughing, sneezing, etc).
So what is the difference between someone who has the virus, has been jabbed and is asymptomatic and someone who has the virus, hasn't been jabbed and is asymptomatic?
This is still the unanswered trillion dollar question on which our economy depends. Can those who have been vaccinated transmit the virus even if they don't get ill themselves? If they can we are in trouble, all sorts of trouble.
No trial or test has been done to say they don't. But there is much less coughing and sneezing so with that decrease in viral load transmission the virus will gradually die out.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
Oh wow, really?
That’s what being away for a while does to you, I’d assumed they were all like the M42, which worked pretty well once people were used to it. The difficulties arose at the junctions, where the hard shoulder was often a must exit lane, so there was a bit of shuffling as people moved right to stay on the motorway.
The problems come with people who don’t do 50k miles a year as I used to, and are not comfortable with the changes compared to a standard motorway. Foreign lorries were always a problem, as they never knew which lane to be in. I imagine there’s a lot more of them around now, than there were 15 years ago when I was pounding the motorways.
If the smart motorways are to work safely, they need to be properly lit up, with CCTV everywhere, the control room quick to respond to incidents, and plenty of recovery trucks around to scrape up breakdowns.
Take a look at this stretch of the M1 as highlighted by @TheScreamingEagles . This is a mile north of the Meadowhall junction, a suburban motorway carrying long distance as well as local traffic. No hard shoulder. No lights. No gantry signs. Whats more its inbetween two exits all of 2.5 miles apart.
To the south is J34. Major weaving southbound to the Meadowhall exit which queues back onto the carriageway when something happens on one of the roundabouts. Northbound joining traffic at runs up a steep long 2 lane slip which merges into 1 lane which becomes lane 1. On a blind brow as steep uphill becomes steep downhill.
In short its a death trap. No shoulder. No lights. Minimal cameras and signs. No emergency refuges. And they call it "Smart"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-55710528 Oxford University is opening a new research institute dedicated to tackling resistance to antibiotics. The university says this is one of the the biggest rising threats to global health, already causing 1.5 million deaths per year worldwide. The institute will be funded by £100m donated by the Ineos chemical company...
re not wanting to get treatment from someone who is not vaccinated?
Huh?
As we are aware to date, the vaccines don't affect transmission, apart from the decrease in viral load from an asymptomatic carrier (less, if any coughing, sneezing, etc).
So what is the difference between someone who has the virus, has been jabbed and is asymptomatic and someone who has the virus, hasn't been jabbed and is asymptomatic?
This is still the unanswered trillion dollar question on which our economy depends. Can those who have been vaccinated transmit the virus even if they don't get ill themselves? If they can we are in trouble, all sorts of trouble.
No trial or test has been done to say they don't. But there is much less coughing and sneezing so with that decrease in viral load transmission the virus will gradually die out.
It's not confirmed, it's just the opinion of Professor Gili Regev-Yohai 'that people who received both doses of the vaccine will most likely not become carriers'.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
One difference between Spotify and Netflix/Amazon is that the latter have set themselves up to be content creators - in competition with the other rights holders whose content they might want to licence.
I have begun to wonder whether I'd be better off dropping the subscription and spending the money on DVDs.
Spotify’s a weird one. They’re spending millions on getting exclusive podcasts such as a Joe Rogan, but leaving them all on the free service. How are they going to get back the $1m a week they’re paying for JRE if I can watch and listen free with no ads? The takeup of paid subs on the back of that deal is going to be close to zero.
It is owned by the major labels. The major labels 'negotiated' a deal with Spotify that is beneficial to the labels and very bad for the artists.
Spotify "loses" money but it is "losing" money to it's owners. The fact that Spotify is losing money is used as a reason not to increase streaming rates for artists.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
Oh wow, really?
That’s what being away for a while does to you, I’d assumed they were all like the M42, which worked pretty well once people were used to it. The difficulties arose at the junctions, where the hard shoulder was often a must exit lane, so there was a bit of shuffling as people moved right to stay on the motorway.
The problems come with people who don’t do 50k miles a year as I used to, and are not comfortable with the changes compared to a standard motorway. Foreign lorries were always a problem, as they never knew which lane to be in. I imagine there’s a lot more of them around now, than there were 15 years ago when I was pounding the motorways.
If the smart motorways are to work safely, they need to be properly lit up, with CCTV everywhere, the control room quick to respond to incidents, and plenty of recovery trucks around to scrape up breakdowns.
Take a look at this stretch of the M1 as highlighted by @TheScreamingEagles . This is a mile north of the Meadowhall junction, a suburban motorway carrying long distance as well as local traffic. No hard shoulder. No lights. No gantry signs. Whats more its inbetween two exits all of 2.5 miles apart.
To the south is J34. Major weaving southbound to the Meadowhall exit which queues back onto the carriageway when something happens on one of the roundabouts. Northbound joining traffic at runs up a steep long 2 lane slip which merges into 1 lane which becomes lane 1. On a blind brow as steep uphill becomes steep downhill.
In short its a death trap. No shoulder. No lights. Minimal cameras and signs. No emergency refuges. And they call it "Smart"
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
TBH thats not a smart motorway thing, thats a southerners driving thing. Dahn Sarf people are kind enough to have a "northerners only" lane. For whatever reason Lane 1 - or lanes 1 AND 2 when its D4 - is a no go zone on southern motorways.
Its a good progressive way to travel - a steady 65 or so passing underneath two busy lanes bunching to your right.
For which you can be prosecuted if the police are feeling so inclined.
From the Driving test:
"Rule 268 of the Highway Code states – do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right."
This is generally interpreted to be only at low speeds such as in congestion.
And those are the conditions I describe. Congested traffic lanes speeding up and slowing down. Our lane doing a nice steady speed with comfortable braking gaps. Should plod be around I would expect them to be pulling the lunatics driving inches off each other's bumpers in the other lanes.
What is the alternative? That I also disobey the law requiring me to drive in the left hand lane unless overtaking? That I sit in lanes 3 and 4 with tailgating wazzocks? Or sit in lane 1 or two and brake every time traffic to my right brakes because they're all tailgating each other?
This isn't a phenomenon I see much on northern motorways. Southerners don't know how to drive on motorways.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
Oh wow, really?
That’s what being away for a while does to you, I’d assumed they were all like the M42, which worked pretty well once people were used to it. The difficulties arose at the junctions, where the hard shoulder was often a must exit lane, so there was a bit of shuffling as people moved right to stay on the motorway.
The problems come with people who don’t do 50k miles a year as I used to, and are not comfortable with the changes compared to a standard motorway. Foreign lorries were always a problem, as they never knew which lane to be in. I imagine there’s a lot more of them around now, than there were 15 years ago when I was pounding the motorways.
If the smart motorways are to work safely, they need to be properly lit up, with CCTV everywhere, the control room quick to respond to incidents, and plenty of recovery trucks around to scrape up breakdowns.
Take a look at this stretch of the M1 as highlighted by @TheScreamingEagles . This is a mile north of the Meadowhall junction, a suburban motorway carrying long distance as well as local traffic. No hard shoulder. No lights. No gantry signs. Whats more its inbetween two exits all of 2.5 miles apart.
To the south is J34. Major weaving southbound to the Meadowhall exit which queues back onto the carriageway when something happens on one of the roundabouts. Northbound joining traffic at runs up a steep long 2 lane slip which merges into 1 lane which becomes lane 1. On a blind brow as steep uphill becomes steep downhill.
In short its a death trap. No shoulder. No lights. Minimal cameras and signs. No emergency refuges. And they call it "Smart"
I try to avoid the M1; go M11, A14 and A1 when heading north. M1 just makes me uncomfortable.
The A1 is worse, especially at night. Have had too many near misses to even think of doing it at night any more. And the A14 between A1 and M11 was practically psychotic until they built the new new A14(notM) to bypass it. Happily our impending move to Scotland means that I will never again have to drive to the mother in law's in Essicks on a Friday night with the kids asleep in the back.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
TBH thats not a smart motorway thing, thats a southerners driving thing. Dahn Sarf people are kind enough to have a "northerners only" lane. For whatever reason Lane 1 - or lanes 1 AND 2 when its D4 - is a no go zone on southern motorways.
Its a good progressive way to travel - a steady 65 or so passing underneath two busy lanes bunching to your right.
For which you can be prosecuted if the police are feeling so inclined.
From the Driving test:
"Rule 268 of the Highway Code states – do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right."
This is generally interpreted to be only at low speeds such as in congestion.
And those are the conditions I describe. Congested traffic lanes speeding up and slowing down. Our lane doing a nice steady speed with comfortable braking gaps. Should plod be around I would expect them to be pulling the lunatics driving inches off each other's bumpers in the other lanes.
What is the alternative? That I also disobey the law requiring me to drive in the left hand lane unless overtaking? That I sit in lanes 3 and 4 with tailgating wazzocks? Or sit in lane 1 or two and brake every time traffic to my right brakes because they're all tailgating each other?
This isn't a phenomenon I see much on northern motorways. Southerners don't know how to drive on motorways.
Driving on southern motorways is an object lesson in the Lake Wobegone Effect. 75% of drivers think they're faster than average. Watching them all queue up in the outside lanes is baffling.
So this confirms that Cockney Covid is more infectious than the previous strains, no wonder they were worried about R going up a lot.
The proportion of the population testing positive for Covid-19 antibodies almost doubled between October and December 2020, according to Office for National Statistics estimates.
Approximately one in 10 people had antibodies against the virus across the UK in December, with England topping the list at one in eight people or about 12% of the population.
That equates to 5.4 million people over the age of 16.
120 million children's books given away and counting. A legend in every sense.
I am no fan of country music, hate it in fact and I am no fan of Dolly Parton's artistic output, but boy is she an example of what people of great wealth can do to improve humanity.
She has never forgotten the abject poverty of her one-room cabin beginnings in Tennessee. From the Coat of Many Colors to being an international treasure. Is there a better example of the American Dream?
Think I may have mentioned this story before. The good lady wife wrote a song that Dolly loved. They went to the recording studio in Nashville (my wife at that time was the only female music producer in the world) with a full band. But every time they got to the chorus Dolly broke down. Something in the lyric triggered a memory for her. So it never did get recorded.
Mr. Sandpit, ha, I wasn't in a boastful mood a year or so ago when, as it's wont to do, my body decided dropping a stone would be a sensible move. Happily it stopped at a skinny rather than skeletal level, but (from the other end of the scale) I can appreciate how hard it can be to get to the right weight.
Interestingly, and annoyingly, what I eat, and how much I exercise seems to have sod all impact. Even when I used my exercise bike regularly, or when I tried eating more than I wanted to*, it made no difference.
*For health reasons, I started eating more snacks when my weight kept on sliding off. I'll reduce it if I get past 9st, and stop at 9.5st, I think.
Idiotic article.The opposite is true.The striking thing about the Tory Right is how few apart from Farage and the journalist Delingpole endorsed Trump to any degree .Inevitable that Cabinet Ministers had to put govt business first.Of course Gove gave a sycophantic interview in january 2017 - what else was he supposed to given the timing? When the House of Commons in 2016/ 2017 had a debate on whether President Trump should be able to come to the UK only a handful of Tory MPs spoke in favour of Trump.It has been noticeable how on mainstream TV so many Tory journalists tried to distance themselves from being linked to Trump on a personal level even if being sympathetic to some of his policies
and yet in the ConHome poll before the election 56% would have voted for Trump. However ConHome has become more UKIP-lite than Tory these days.
I think the stronger correlation is actually between UKIP/Brexit Party/Farage fans and support for Trump and I can quite understand why some would find that embarrassing.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
Oh wow, really?
That’s what being away for a while does to you, I’d assumed they were all like the M42, which worked pretty well once people were used to it. The difficulties arose at the junctions, where the hard shoulder was often a must exit lane, so there was a bit of shuffling as people moved right to stay on the motorway.
The problems come with people who don’t do 50k miles a year as I used to, and are not comfortable with the changes compared to a standard motorway. Foreign lorries were always a problem, as they never knew which lane to be in. I imagine there’s a lot more of them around now, than there were 15 years ago when I was pounding the motorways.
If the smart motorways are to work safely, they need to be properly lit up, with CCTV everywhere, the control room quick to respond to incidents, and plenty of recovery trucks around to scrape up breakdowns.
Take a look at this stretch of the M1 as highlighted by @TheScreamingEagles . This is a mile north of the Meadowhall junction, a suburban motorway carrying long distance as well as local traffic. No hard shoulder. No lights. No gantry signs. Whats more its inbetween two exits all of 2.5 miles apart.
To the south is J34. Major weaving southbound to the Meadowhall exit which queues back onto the carriageway when something happens on one of the roundabouts. Northbound joining traffic at runs up a steep long 2 lane slip which merges into 1 lane which becomes lane 1. On a blind brow as steep uphill becomes steep downhill.
In short its a death trap. No shoulder. No lights. Minimal cameras and signs. No emergency refuges. And they call it "Smart"
I try to avoid the M1; go M11, A14 and A1 when heading north. M1 just makes me uncomfortable.
The A1 is surely even worse? You can have tractors and all sorts of stuff on there, the sight lines aren't great, and some of the slip roads are ridiculously short.
At least they've removed the cross junctions, I suppose.
From the M62 north is it much improved though. The North Yorkshire section used to be exciting in the dark.
re not wanting to get treatment from someone who is not vaccinated?
Huh?
As we are aware to date, the vaccines don't affect transmission, apart from the decrease in viral load from an asymptomatic carrier (less, if any coughing, sneezing, etc).
So what is the difference between someone who has the virus, has been jabbed and is asymptomatic and someone who has the virus, hasn't been jabbed and is asymptomatic?
This is still the unanswered trillion dollar question on which our economy depends. Can those who have been vaccinated transmit the virus even if they don't get ill themselves? If they can we are in trouble, all sorts of trouble.
No trial or test has been done to say they don't. But there is much less coughing and sneezing so with that decrease in viral load transmission the virus will gradually die out.
So let`s say that 75% of the UK population is vaccinated and therefore very unlikely to transmit to others. Travelling internationally should not then be an issue for the vaccinated ones because they are not putting themselves at risk or putting others at risk. But what about non-Brits seeking to come to UK who have NOT been vaccinated? They could be putting UK non-vaccinated Brits at risk (i.e. the 25%).
This will get widely discussed when the time comes. My feeling that you turn down a vaccination against Covid at your own peril.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
The PL are unlikely to launch their own channel, one of the advantages selling the rights to others is that they get the money via instalments well in advance of the season starting, and the equivalent point of the season. Put it this way they get paid in full for the season by around January.
If they went for a PL subscription model, they'd only get the money linearly throughout the season which would ruin the cashflow of most of the PL clubs.
Are you suggesting the billionaire owners cant organise very cheap finance against reliable recurring revenues in a world of ultra low interest rates? Very strange.
No, the argument is when in times of economic hardship it'll be easier to cancel the PL channel/streaming subscription than it'll be to cancel Sky/BT Sport.
After the ITV Digital fiasco sports rights holders are pretty strong on securing their money via various forms of parental guarantees, something you can't do when you're selling the product to the consumer direct.
Thanks that makes more sense, but still way too cautious considering the ownership group of the PL.
You only have to look to France this season what happens when you change your model.
Comparing the finances of Ligue 1 to the Premier League is like comparing Accrington Stanley and Barcelona. The lessons from Ligue 1 might be applicable to a degree for the Championship or the SPL but not the Prem.
re not wanting to get treatment from someone who is not vaccinated?
Huh?
As we are aware to date, the vaccines don't affect transmission, apart from the decrease in viral load from an asymptomatic carrier (less, if any coughing, sneezing, etc).
So what is the difference between someone who has the virus, has been jabbed and is asymptomatic and someone who has the virus, hasn't been jabbed and is asymptomatic?
This is still the unanswered trillion dollar question on which our economy depends. Can those who have been vaccinated transmit the virus even if they don't get ill themselves? If they can we are in trouble, all sorts of trouble.
No trial or test has been done to say they don't. But there is much less coughing and sneezing so with that decrease in viral load transmission the virus will gradually die out.
It's not confirmed, it's just the opinion of Professor Gili Regev-Yohai 'that people who received both doses of the vaccine will most likely not become carriers'.
Nudging towards confirmation then. I will be shocked and disappointed if the vaccine does not reduce spread and I think it's reasonable to proceed with that assumption in place.
You really can tell a Meeks article by the title. Only on Planet Meeks would a country disengage from a relationship with the leader of America. I remember when Blair restrained Bush from his excesses - the sensible if not successful course of action for our national interest was to engage as best as possible.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
Oh wow, really?
That’s what being away for a while does to you, I’d assumed they were all like the M42, which worked pretty well once people were used to it. The difficulties arose at the junctions, where the hard shoulder was often a must exit lane, so there was a bit of shuffling as people moved right to stay on the motorway.
The problems come with people who don’t do 50k miles a year as I used to, and are not comfortable with the changes compared to a standard motorway. Foreign lorries were always a problem, as they never knew which lane to be in. I imagine there’s a lot more of them around now, than there were 15 years ago when I was pounding the motorways.
If the smart motorways are to work safely, they need to be properly lit up, with CCTV everywhere, the control room quick to respond to incidents, and plenty of recovery trucks around to scrape up breakdowns.
Take a look at this stretch of the M1 as highlighted by @TheScreamingEagles . This is a mile north of the Meadowhall junction, a suburban motorway carrying long distance as well as local traffic. No hard shoulder. No lights. No gantry signs. Whats more its inbetween two exits all of 2.5 miles apart.
To the south is J34. Major weaving southbound to the Meadowhall exit which queues back onto the carriageway when something happens on one of the roundabouts. Northbound joining traffic at runs up a steep long 2 lane slip which merges into 1 lane which becomes lane 1. On a blind brow as steep uphill becomes steep downhill.
In short its a death trap. No shoulder. No lights. Minimal cameras and signs. No emergency refuges. And they call it "Smart"
I try to avoid the M1; go M11, A14 and A1 when heading north. M1 just makes me uncomfortable.
The A1 is surely even worse? You can have tractors and all sorts of stuff on there, the sight lines aren't great, and some of the slip roads are ridiculously short.
At least they've removed the cross junctions, I suppose.
From the M62 north is it much improved though. The North Yorkshire section used to be exciting in the dark.
And the West Yorkshire section - there was a terrifying kink north of Wetherby on the northbound, a left right left slalom with a blind summit in the middle. There's still similar stupidity in Lincolnshire - the Foston junction is still unsighted southbound, the roller coaster section south of Colsterworth - two batshit unimproved sections that needed fixing more than the minor tweaking they had.
Then we have the new junctions. OK, so they removed roundabouts and replaced with free flow junctions. But they all seem to be absurdly tight with almost no merge in area so that a truck has to do a gentle 20mph round the spiral and is then dumped directly into lane 1...
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
One difference between Spotify and Netflix/Amazon is that the latter have set themselves up to be content creators - in competition with the other rights holders whose content they might want to licence.
I have begun to wonder whether I'd be better off dropping the subscription and spending the money on DVDs.
Spotify’s a weird one. They’re spending millions on getting exclusive podcasts such as a Joe Rogan, but leaving them all on the free service. How are they going to get back the $1m a week they’re paying for JRE if I can watch and listen free with no ads? The takeup of paid subs on the back of that deal is going to be close to zero.
It is owned by the major labels. The major labels 'negotiated' a deal with Spotify that is beneficial to the labels and very bad for the artists.
Spotify "loses" money but it is "losing" money to it's owners. The fact that Spotify is losing money is used as a reason not to increase streaming rates for artists.
So they’re paying Rogan $100m so they can renegotiate with music labels for their ‘unprofitable’ service? That does sound rather scammy.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
TBH thats not a smart motorway thing, thats a southerners driving thing. Dahn Sarf people are kind enough to have a "northerners only" lane. For whatever reason Lane 1 - or lanes 1 AND 2 when its D4 - is a no go zone on southern motorways.
Its a good progressive way to travel - a steady 65 or so passing underneath two busy lanes bunching to your right.
For which you can be prosecuted if the police are feeling so inclined.
From the Driving test:
"Rule 268 of the Highway Code states – do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right."
This is generally interpreted to be only at low speeds such as in congestion.
And those are the conditions I describe. Congested traffic lanes speeding up and slowing down. Our lane doing a nice steady speed with comfortable braking gaps. Should plod be around I would expect them to be pulling the lunatics driving inches off each other's bumpers in the other lanes.
What is the alternative? That I also disobey the law requiring me to drive in the left hand lane unless overtaking? That I sit in lanes 3 and 4 with tailgating wazzocks? Or sit in lane 1 or two and brake every time traffic to my right brakes because they're all tailgating each other?
This isn't a phenomenon I see much on northern motorways. Southerners don't know how to drive on motorways.
Driving on southern motorways is an object lesson in the Lake Wobegone Effect. 75% of drivers think they're faster than average. Watching them all queue up in the outside lanes is baffling.
If I drive from Devon to London, the outside lane of the M5/M4 is often a solid slab of cars doing 90-95. Because
- you get there faster and - there is virtually no chance of a mobile speed trap seeing your number plate
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
Oh wow, really?
That’s what being away for a while does to you, I’d assumed they were all like the M42, which worked pretty well once people were used to it. The difficulties arose at the junctions, where the hard shoulder was often a must exit lane, so there was a bit of shuffling as people moved right to stay on the motorway.
The problems come with people who don’t do 50k miles a year as I used to, and are not comfortable with the changes compared to a standard motorway. Foreign lorries were always a problem, as they never knew which lane to be in. I imagine there’s a lot more of them around now, than there were 15 years ago when I was pounding the motorways.
If the smart motorways are to work safely, they need to be properly lit up, with CCTV everywhere, the control room quick to respond to incidents, and plenty of recovery trucks around to scrape up breakdowns.
Take a look at this stretch of the M1 as highlighted by @TheScreamingEagles . This is a mile north of the Meadowhall junction, a suburban motorway carrying long distance as well as local traffic. No hard shoulder. No lights. No gantry signs. Whats more its inbetween two exits all of 2.5 miles apart.
To the south is J34. Major weaving southbound to the Meadowhall exit which queues back onto the carriageway when something happens on one of the roundabouts. Northbound joining traffic at runs up a steep long 2 lane slip which merges into 1 lane which becomes lane 1. On a blind brow as steep uphill becomes steep downhill.
In short its a death trap. No shoulder. No lights. Minimal cameras and signs. No emergency refuges. And they call it "Smart"
We want the hard shoulder back. Nothing makes our hearts sink faster than looking town the slip road on the way to an incident than seeing 4 fully stationary lanes on a 3 lane motorway.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
The PL are unlikely to launch their own channel, one of the advantages selling the rights to others is that they get the money via instalments well in advance of the season starting, and the equivalent point of the season. Put it this way they get paid in full for the season by around January.
If they went for a PL subscription model, they'd only get the money linearly throughout the season which would ruin the cashflow of most of the PL clubs.
Are you suggesting the billionaire owners cant organise very cheap finance against reliable recurring revenues in a world of ultra low interest rates? Very strange.
No, the argument is when in times of economic hardship it'll be easier to cancel the PL channel/streaming subscription than it'll be to cancel Sky/BT Sport.
After the ITV Digital fiasco sports rights holders are pretty strong on securing their money via various forms of parental guarantees, something you can't do when you're selling the product to the consumer direct.
Thanks that makes more sense, but still way too cautious considering the ownership group of the PL.
You only have to look to France this season what happens when you change your model.
Comparing the finances of Ligue 1 to the Premier League is like comparing Accrington Stanley and Barcelona. The lessons from Ligue 1 might be applicable to a degree for the Championship or the SPL but not the Prem.
The principle is the same, in this Covid-19 era world, plenty of them are going to stick with an established broadcast partner rather than sign up with something new and snazzy offer untold riches.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
One difference between Spotify and Netflix/Amazon is that the latter have set themselves up to be content creators - in competition with the other rights holders whose content they might want to licence.
I have begun to wonder whether I'd be better off dropping the subscription and spending the money on DVDs.
Spotify’s a weird one. They’re spending millions on getting exclusive podcasts such as a Joe Rogan, but leaving them all on the free service. How are they going to get back the $1m a week they’re paying for JRE if I can watch and listen free with no ads? The takeup of paid subs on the back of that deal is going to be close to zero.
It is owned by the major labels. The major labels 'negotiated' a deal with Spotify that is beneficial to the labels and very bad for the artists.
Spotify "loses" money but it is "losing" money to it's owners. The fact that Spotify is losing money is used as a reason not to increase streaming rates for artists.
That's not true. Sony Music and UMG used to own a fairly reasonable holding, but both have drawn them down to less than half of what they previously had. Their joint shareholding is pretty low now. I think they're at about 3% each at the last declaration.
Does this mean that BT are going to have the exclusive rights to the Ashes this winter?
I believe so.
Stupid, stupid decision. Even worse than taking it off Free to Air in the first place.
I might view it differently had it been decided that the rights for at least some matches had to be free to air, but they didn’t do that.
It's not that difficult to use a VPN and stream it from other sites ...
Just saying.
The TV industry is shooting itself repeatedly in the head at the moment. Pay to stream is getting ridiculous, as every content provider says "I'll have a piece of that".
Put content up on Sky or Netflix for a rights fee? No, lets launch our own platform and keep all the revenue! So the question is how much £ can punters stump up. I pay for BBC, Virgin Media, Netflix, Disney, Prime. I'm on the free trial of Britbox and did the same for Apple TV. I am forced to "borrow" a friend's connection to watch stuff on Sky. Sports fans may need Sky Sports AND BT Sport AND Prime just to cover football.
Which is why, as you point out, pirate VPN streaming is so popular. Once we move north in a few weeks we'll review our packages, but it is frustrating and increasingly unsustainable for yet more things to be put behind yet another bloody paywall. One paywall to rule them all would be fine. But there isn't one. Rights have gone all over the place.
Let me give you an example. Shitbox claims to have all classic British TV in one place. Its clear that they have assembled them from a variety of sources - watching Cracker the aspect ratio jumps from original 4:3 to cropped widescreen to 4:3 within a 3 part story. And classics like Hi-De-Hi? They have the odd episode, but the streaming rights are held by Amazon. Not for free to Prime subscribers, on a pay per season basis.
It is unsustainable. People object to the license fee for understandable reasons and that will have to go. As will the plethora of salami sliced platforms - people will stop paying the money for the stuff they don't have to have, Britbox etc will fail, and content will start coalescing around A platform. Same with Football - one pay platform not three which each at the same price as the original one platform used to be.
You're wrong. Unfortunately media rights for TV are becoming ever more fragmented with each major studio deciding that they want their own streaming service. The US market is a disaster because of this, they have:
Netflix Amazon prime D+ (Disney) Apple TV Peacock (NBC universal) CBS all access (Paramount) Hulu (Fox, owned by Disney) HBO Max (WB) Bravia Core (SPE/Columbia launching in March)
This is coming here too and the market will become more fragmented, not less.
What's interesting is that for sports rights I could see the PL selling their own subscription package soon, maybe £250 per season for all of the televised matches. F1 already does this with F1TV and there's no monopoly concerns. With football to match the income that the PL gets from Sky/BT they would need around 6m subscribers at £250 per season. It also opens up models such as choosing which club you support and having a proportion of your subscription go to them, I know something like that has been looked at previously.
When digital music first took off the market was very fragmented until universal streaming services like Spotify took over. It's not impossible that the same could end up happening with TV.
One difference between Spotify and Netflix/Amazon is that the latter have set themselves up to be content creators - in competition with the other rights holders whose content they might want to licence.
I have begun to wonder whether I'd be better off dropping the subscription and spending the money on DVDs.
Spotify’s a weird one. They’re spending millions on getting exclusive podcasts such as a Joe Rogan, but leaving them all on the free service. How are they going to get back the $1m a week they’re paying for JRE if I can watch and listen free with no ads? The takeup of paid subs on the back of that deal is going to be close to zero.
It is owned by the major labels. The major labels 'negotiated' a deal with Spotify that is beneficial to the labels and very bad for the artists.
Spotify "loses" money but it is "losing" money to it's owners. The fact that Spotify is losing money is used as a reason not to increase streaming rates for artists.
So they’re paying Rogan $100m so they can renegotiate with music labels for their ‘unprofitable’ service? That does sound rather scammy.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
Oh wow, really?
That’s what being away for a while does to you, I’d assumed they were all like the M42, which worked pretty well once people were used to it. The difficulties arose at the junctions, where the hard shoulder was often a must exit lane, so there was a bit of shuffling as people moved right to stay on the motorway.
The problems come with people who don’t do 50k miles a year as I used to, and are not comfortable with the changes compared to a standard motorway. Foreign lorries were always a problem, as they never knew which lane to be in. I imagine there’s a lot more of them around now, than there were 15 years ago when I was pounding the motorways.
If the smart motorways are to work safely, they need to be properly lit up, with CCTV everywhere, the control room quick to respond to incidents, and plenty of recovery trucks around to scrape up breakdowns.
Take a look at this stretch of the M1 as highlighted by @TheScreamingEagles . This is a mile north of the Meadowhall junction, a suburban motorway carrying long distance as well as local traffic. No hard shoulder. No lights. No gantry signs. Whats more its inbetween two exits all of 2.5 miles apart.
To the south is J34. Major weaving southbound to the Meadowhall exit which queues back onto the carriageway when something happens on one of the roundabouts. Northbound joining traffic at runs up a steep long 2 lane slip which merges into 1 lane which becomes lane 1. On a blind brow as steep uphill becomes steep downhill.
In short its a death trap. No shoulder. No lights. Minimal cameras and signs. No emergency refuges. And they call it "Smart"
Yes. The original "smart motorway" idea wasn’t completely insane - you accept that motoways without a hard shoulder are worth the extra risk & compensate for that risk by sprinkling gantries everywhere & have live video feeds so that the moment there’s a blockage the traffic behind can be warned. Oh, and you install safety refuges every so often as well. Prime example - the M42 round Birmingham.
Then the DoT decided that doing this was such a great success that they could get rid of all the compensating work & just use the hard shoulders everywhere, with the inevitable result that we now see.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
TBH thats not a smart motorway thing, thats a southerners driving thing. Dahn Sarf people are kind enough to have a "northerners only" lane. For whatever reason Lane 1 - or lanes 1 AND 2 when its D4 - is a no go zone on southern motorways.
Its a good progressive way to travel - a steady 65 or so passing underneath two busy lanes bunching to your right.
For which you can be prosecuted if the police are feeling so inclined.
From the Driving test:
"Rule 268 of the Highway Code states – do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right."
This is generally interpreted to be only at low speeds such as in congestion.
And those are the conditions I describe. Congested traffic lanes speeding up and slowing down. Our lane doing a nice steady speed with comfortable braking gaps. Should plod be around I would expect them to be pulling the lunatics driving inches off each other's bumpers in the other lanes.
What is the alternative? That I also disobey the law requiring me to drive in the left hand lane unless overtaking? That I sit in lanes 3 and 4 with tailgating wazzocks? Or sit in lane 1 or two and brake every time traffic to my right brakes because they're all tailgating each other?
This isn't a phenomenon I see much on northern motorways. Southerners don't know how to drive on motorways.
Agreed, the rule is similar speeds not low speeds. In congested traffic on southern motorways the inside lanes are (generally) the value.
As of Daughter's troubles are not enough, now youngest son has caught Covid from a colleague at work. He lives with brother and Dad. So they'll probably catch it too now.
Nearly a year the family has survived without catching this blasted pox and now this. FFS!
And I can't do anything but worry.
I am so fed up.
Bad luck Cyclefree!
My niece, who has been nursing Covid patients since the outset has now caught Covid from my sister, who she lives with. We wait with bated breath for news of the other 3 members of the household.
I fear with the new variant the prospects of not catching Covid from people you are living with are poor. With the original version this seemed to happen quite a lot but it is now much more infectious.
That is what worries me. Husband will be 60 this year. No underlying health conditions but could do with losing weight. So the thought of him getting it worries me. Who is going to look after them?
At least all the Brexit stores will come in handy.
And there is thick mist and rain here today. Cannot see out of windows. Nice of the weather to so precisely echo my mood.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
TBH thats not a smart motorway thing, thats a southerners driving thing. Dahn Sarf people are kind enough to have a "northerners only" lane. For whatever reason Lane 1 - or lanes 1 AND 2 when its D4 - is a no go zone on southern motorways.
Its a good progressive way to travel - a steady 65 or so passing underneath two busy lanes bunching to your right.
For which you can be prosecuted if the police are feeling so inclined.
From the Driving test:
"Rule 268 of the Highway Code states – do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right."
This is generally interpreted to be only at low speeds such as in congestion.
The Highway Code also says to keep left unless overtaking.
In over twenty years of driving I've never once seen either law be enforced. 🤷🏻♂️
It is owned by the major labels. The major labels 'negotiated' a deal with Spotify that is beneficial to the labels and very bad for the artists.
Spotify "loses" money but it is "losing" money to it's owners. The fact that Spotify is losing money is used as a reason not to increase streaming rates for artists.
That's not true. Sony Music and UMG used to own a fairly reasonable holding, but both have drawn them down to less than half of what they previously had. Their joint shareholding is pretty low now. I think they're at about 3% each at the last declaration.
Spotify works. Spotify works on any platform. Spotify has HQ audio. Spotify has an extensive library. Its bloody marvellous.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
I travel daily on the M3 (when I'm not working at home right now), and people just don't understand them. The still seem to think that the 'old' hard shoulder isn't a lane, and so pootle in the 2nd or third land under the speed limit. That causes a great deal more undertaking than would be normal, so increases the risk.
TBH thats not a smart motorway thing, thats a southerners driving thing. Dahn Sarf people are kind enough to have a "northerners only" lane. For whatever reason Lane 1 - or lanes 1 AND 2 when its D4 - is a no go zone on southern motorways.
Its a good progressive way to travel - a steady 65 or so passing underneath two busy lanes bunching to your right.
For which you can be prosecuted if the police are feeling so inclined.
From the Driving test:
"Rule 268 of the Highway Code states – do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right."
This is generally interpreted to be only at low speeds such as in congestion.
And those are the conditions I describe. Congested traffic lanes speeding up and slowing down. Our lane doing a nice steady speed with comfortable braking gaps. Should plod be around I would expect them to be pulling the lunatics driving inches off each other's bumpers in the other lanes.
What is the alternative? That I also disobey the law requiring me to drive in the left hand lane unless overtaking? That I sit in lanes 3 and 4 with tailgating wazzocks? Or sit in lane 1 or two and brake every time traffic to my right brakes because they're all tailgating each other?
This isn't a phenomenon I see much on northern motorways. Southerners don't know how to drive on motorways.
Driving on southern motorways is an object lesson in the Lake Wobegone Effect. 75% of drivers think they're faster than average. Watching them all queue up in the outside lanes is baffling.
If I drive from Devon to London, the outside lane of the M5/M4 is often a solid slab of cars doing 90-95. Because
- you get there faster and - there is virtually no chance of a mobile speed trap seeing your number plate
until they reach a bit where someone is in the outside lane doing 65 because someone else is in the middle lane overtaking nothing at all at 60.
Changing topic slightly, LBC discussing Smart Motorways. There have been a number of horror smashes on these, and frankly it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone other than the DfT and ministers.
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
Oh wow, really?
That’s what being away for a while does to you, I’d assumed they were all like the M42, which worked pretty well once people were used to it. The difficulties arose at the junctions, where the hard shoulder was often a must exit lane, so there was a bit of shuffling as people moved right to stay on the motorway.
The problems come with people who don’t do 50k miles a year as I used to, and are not comfortable with the changes compared to a standard motorway. Foreign lorries were always a problem, as they never knew which lane to be in. I imagine there’s a lot more of them around now, than there were 15 years ago when I was pounding the motorways.
If the smart motorways are to work safely, they need to be properly lit up, with CCTV everywhere, the control room quick to respond to incidents, and plenty of recovery trucks around to scrape up breakdowns.
Take a look at this stretch of the M1 as highlighted by @TheScreamingEagles . This is a mile north of the Meadowhall junction, a suburban motorway carrying long distance as well as local traffic. No hard shoulder. No lights. No gantry signs. Whats more its inbetween two exits all of 2.5 miles apart.
To the south is J34. Major weaving southbound to the Meadowhall exit which queues back onto the carriageway when something happens on one of the roundabouts. Northbound joining traffic at runs up a steep long 2 lane slip which merges into 1 lane which becomes lane 1. On a blind brow as steep uphill becomes steep downhill.
In short its a death trap. No shoulder. No lights. Minimal cameras and signs. No emergency refuges. And they call it "Smart"
Wow. Four running lanes, no shoulder, unlit, only one emergency lay-by between 34 and 35, only two full width gantries, whole road curving and with elevation changes. What a huge mess.
Comments
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1323645393419313155?s=20
97% of Remain voters saw Biden as the legitimate winner of the election but only 75% of Leave voters.
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1325825589249531905?s=20
And you do know it is not mandatory to watch something suggested by them (albeit it will have been suggested by a sophisticated algorithm and hence be on the money).
Do you buy everything on normal amazon that it says "you might like" or "people who have bought this have bought..."?
It definitely needed to be done though, after the past year of laziness and slobbery sitting at home. Up over 12k steps per day now, thanks to the treadmill, and 6lb down on the start of the month.
Useful info: SkyGo blocks HDMI out. However, USB-C gets around this if you can hook up to a big screen that way. As I can.
We have a Fire Stick we use for Amazon but find it very unfriendly as far as that's concerned. The other shame is it doesn't integrate as far as I know with Sky, unlike both Netflix and Disney which can both be watched with the Sky remote on the Sky box.
I have begun to wonder whether I'd be better off dropping the subscription and spending the money on DVDs.
https://www.idu.org/members/
The DTC model has a lot going for it but it would need two to three years of adjustment for teams. I could see them do a PL streaming service in non European markets rather than rights in the near term and eventually bring that model to non UK European markets and then eventually to the domestic market. They're leaving too much money on the table and the big teams are getting very annoyed by it.
After the ITV Digital fiasco sports rights holders are pretty strong on securing their money via various forms of parental guarantees, something you can't do when you're selling the product to the consumer direct.
On How to Vaccinate the World yesterday one of the guests said that household vaccinations hadn't begun yet, implying they might at some point. "In the community" apparently means care homes.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/spotifys-big-bet-on-podcasts-is-failing-citi-says.html
When they trialled the concept on the M42 there was a switchable hard shoulder - a solid white line which was turned into a live lane when busy. A lot of cameras, signs on regular gantries. And its lit. Reasonably safe.
And yet the concept has been used and abused to become cheap widening so that as an example the M1 goes from dual 3 plus hard shoulders to dual 4 without shoulders. Had they used the original system (as they have on the M62 in West Yorkshire) and had a switchable hard shoulder then they would be safer.
The danger is when you have 4 running lanes, few refuges, no lights and no overhead signs. They could make a MASSIVE improvement to safety by painting a solid line back in. Psychologically people will not drive in that lane without the signs saying its open, which only happens when its really busy and when there aren't broken down vehicles...
It's a global filter for TVs and movies. It basically makes it like Netflix where you only see what's in the subscription. You only need to set it once.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/19/pfizer-vaccine-may-prevent-transmission-coronavirus-others-israeli/
But then Sky shafted BT by coming up with the Main Event channel. Essentially Sky have to offer certain content (pretty much PL football matches) to all platforms and the Main Event channel does that. Given that is essentially a PL channel and then whatever they feel like showing when there isn't a game on (could be cricket, but might not be), I left BT for Virgin. Of the three platforms, I think Virgin is probably the best, though I don't know what Sky's like these days.
As for the suggestions, marketing people gotta be marketing people. Like having chocolate oranges at the supermarket checkout.
There's a couple more in the pipeline.
The biggest threat to the PL in the next few years is
1) A European Super League or the Champs League going Swiss style qualifcation.
2) The CL moving to the weekend, one of the successes of the PL is that they've got the Asian markets hooked, by scheduling CL matches on Tues/Wed evenings Europe time doesn't work for Asia, 8 different kick off times over the weekend might allow UEFA to get even more money for themselves (and the top clubs other than the PL clubs)
To describe the US Republican Party as "centre right" is absurd, no matter what international clubs they are members of.
Who’s the Snowflake Now?
If the right likes to call out left-wing theatrical exaggerations, it has also learned from them and in the past weeks* has emulated them
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/01/right-fragility-trumpists-adopt-woke-habits/617712/
(*several years, actually)
Before the pandemic we stopped driving on that stretch as much as we could, we've seen so many near misses and accidents because people don't understand them.
Whoever thought putting smart motorways next to a two lane flyover has never driven a car.
Edit - Said two lane flyover is also next to one the UK's largest shopping centres, so double bravo.
It is clear who the real snowflakes are.
John Redwood penning an open letter to Joe Biden after the US election lecturing him on Brexit, and Owen Paterson meeting Donald Trump when he came to Britain and celebrating renewing links between North Shropshire and the White House ("The meeting has been brewing for some time now").
https://johnredwoodsdiary.com/2020/11/08/letter-to-mr-biden/
https://www.shropshirestar.com/news/local-hubs/north-shropshire/2019/06/04/north-shropshire-mp-owen-paterson-confirms-meeting-with-president-trump/
Its a good progressive way to travel - a steady 65 or so passing underneath two busy lanes bunching to your right.
That’s what being away for a while does to you, I’d assumed they were all like the M42, which worked pretty well once people were used to it. The difficulties arose at the junctions, where the hard shoulder was often a must exit lane, so there was a bit of shuffling as people moved right to stay on the motorway.
The problems come with people who don’t do 50k miles a year as I used to, and are not comfortable with the changes compared to a standard motorway. Foreign lorries were always a problem, as they never knew which lane to be in. I imagine there’s a lot more of them around now, than there were 15 years ago when I was pounding the motorways.
If the smart motorways are to work safely, they need to be properly lit up, with CCTV everywhere, the control room quick to respond to incidents, and plenty of recovery trucks around to scrape up breakdowns.
120 million children's books given away and counting. A legend in every sense.
I've gained a little weight recently. Who knows, maybe I'll break through the 9st barrier this year
From the Driving test:
"Rule 268 of the Highway Code states – do not overtake on the left or move to a lane on your left to overtake. In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right."
This is generally interpreted to be only at low speeds such as in congestion.
3lb to go in the next 12 days. Must not eat junk food and must walk every day...
Though the US woke left have yet to attempt the illegal overthrow of a newly elected President...
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/dec/15/ligue-1-clubs-stare-financial-abyss-tv-deal-collapses-mediapro
To the south is J34. Major weaving southbound to the Meadowhall exit which queues back onto the carriageway when something happens on one of the roundabouts. Northbound joining traffic at runs up a steep long 2 lane slip which merges into 1 lane which becomes lane 1. On a blind brow as steep uphill becomes steep downhill.
In short its a death trap. No shoulder. No lights. Minimal cameras and signs. No emergency refuges. And they call it "Smart"
https://tinyurl.com/y4g6sy76
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-55710528
Oxford University is opening a new research institute dedicated to tackling resistance to antibiotics.
The university says this is one of the the biggest rising threats to global health, already causing 1.5 million deaths per year worldwide.
The institute will be funded by £100m donated by the Ineos chemical company...
It is owned by the major labels. The major labels 'negotiated' a deal with Spotify that is beneficial to the labels and very bad for the artists.
Spotify "loses" money but it is "losing" money to it's owners. The fact that Spotify is losing money is used as a reason not to increase streaming rates for artists.
What is the alternative? That I also disobey the law requiring me to drive in the left hand lane unless overtaking? That I sit in lanes 3 and 4 with tailgating wazzocks? Or sit in lane 1 or two and brake every time traffic to my right brakes because they're all tailgating each other?
This isn't a phenomenon I see much on northern motorways. Southerners don't know how to drive on motorways.
The proportion of the population testing positive for Covid-19 antibodies almost doubled between October and December 2020, according to Office for National Statistics estimates.
Approximately one in 10 people had antibodies against the virus across the UK in December, with England topping the list at one in eight people or about 12% of the population.
That equates to 5.4 million people over the age of 16.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-55715793
Think I may have mentioned this story before. The good lady wife wrote a song that Dolly loved. They went to the recording studio in Nashville (my wife at that time was the only female music producer in the world) with a full band. But every time they got to the chorus Dolly broke down. Something in the lyric triggered a memory for her. So it never did get recorded.
One of the wife's biggest ever disappointments.
Interestingly, and annoyingly, what I eat, and how much I exercise seems to have sod all impact. Even when I used my exercise bike regularly, or when I tried eating more than I wanted to*, it made no difference.
*For health reasons, I started eating more snacks when my weight kept on sliding off. I'll reduce it if I get past 9st, and stop at 9.5st, I think.
I think the stronger correlation is actually between UKIP/Brexit Party/Farage fans and support for Trump and I can quite understand why some would find that embarrassing.
At least they've removed the cross junctions, I suppose.
From the M62 north is it much improved though. The North Yorkshire section used to be exciting in the dark.
This will get widely discussed when the time comes. My feeling that you turn down a vaccination against Covid at your own peril.
Then we have the new junctions. OK, so they removed roundabouts and replaced with free flow junctions. But they all seem to be absurdly tight with almost no merge in area so that a truck has to do a gentle 20mph round the spiral and is then dumped directly into lane 1...
- you get there faster and
- there is virtually no chance of a mobile speed trap seeing your number plate
Then the DoT decided that doing this was such a great success that they could get rid of all the compensating work & just use the hard shoulders everywhere, with the inevitable result that we now see.
Idiots.
At least all the Brexit stores will come in handy.
And there is thick mist and rain here today. Cannot see out of windows. Nice of the weather to so precisely echo my mood.
In over twenty years of driving I've never once seen either law be enforced. 🤷🏻♂️