Sky, via their spokesman Jonathan Ross was for a while all over our screens, and all manner of outdoor sites promoting the wonders of the Sky catch-up service. Actually I haven\u2019t seen him for months but as this is a new blog I\u2019m playing catch-up too.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Another first \u2013 the catch-up blog.<\/p>\n
Ross made the point that these days it\u2019s easy to watch Sky on all sorts of devices \u2013 laptops, tablets, phones. Stuck on a train? Lucky enough to have remembered your headphones? Foresightful enough to have charged your device? Then you\u2019re in luck! Turn on, tune in, enjoy. Just don\u2019t react in such a way that disturbs your fellow passengers \u2013 that would never do.<\/p>\n
All of this is very impressive, but the bit in the TV ad that caught my attention and made me look up from the 2nd<\/sup>, 3rd<\/sup> and 4th<\/sup> screens balanced respectively on my knees, the sofa and the dog\u2019s head was Ross\u2019 point that you no longer have to watch your favourite shows on a little itsy-bitsy screen \u2013 now, with Sky catch-up you can (I paraphrase, and these are my italics) \u2018snuggle up with your family and watch the whole thing together on the big screen\u2019<\/i><\/b>.<\/p>\n Hang on. I thought that these days TV was all about individual viewing. The audience locked away in individual bedrooms or studies with their own TV\u2019s or monitors watching different things at the same time. I thought the days of the TV as a purveyor of shared experiences was long gone. What about all those charts from all those people banging on about personal viewing experiences? What about all those images of teenagers\u2019 bedrooms kitted out with every electronic device known to man?<\/p>\n And yet \u2013 yesterday (we can do \u2018current\u2019 in this blog too you see) 17.3 million (at the peak) watched Andy Murray at Wimbledon. And I bet most of them were watching via the good old TV. Anyone watch Wimbledon on Twitter? Thought not.<\/p>\n Yes family members might be engaged to a greater or lesser degree. Yes they might be tweeting, on Facebook, whatever. But this was always true. Substitute the words \u2018reading a magazine\u2019 for tweeting and nothing much has changed when it comes to paying attention to what\u2019s on the big screen.<\/p>\n But the family watching catch-up TV together as a unit? Sky has reintroduced us to family viewing and has brought an iota of communal civilisation back into a world dominated increasingly by personal electronic devices.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sky, via their spokesman Jonathan Ross was for a while all over our screens, and all manner of outdoor sites promoting the wonders of the Sky catch-up service. Actually I haven\u2019t seen him for months but as this is a new blog I\u2019m playing catch-up too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}