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Nice picture of the new head office for Chinese Central Television (CCTV) elsewhere. Read more about television and the media in China, not from me but from the BBC:
'With more than one billion viewers, television is a popular source for news and the sector is competitive, especially in urban areas. China is also becoming a major market for pay-TV; it is forecast to have 128 million subscribers by 2010. State-run Chinese Central TV, provincial and municipal stations offer a total of around 2,100 channels.
The availability of non-domestic TV is limited. Agreements are in place which allow selected channels - including stations run by AOL Time Warner, News Corp and the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV - to transmit via cable in Guangdong province. In exchange, Chinese Central TV's English-language network is made available to satellite TV viewers in the US and UK.
Beijing says it will only allow relays of foreign broadcasts which do not threaten "national security" or "political stability". Of late, it has been reining in the activities and investments of foreign media groups. The media regulator - the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television - has warned local stations that foreign-made TV programmes must be approved before broadcast.
The internet scene in China is thriving, though controlled. Beijing routinely blocks access to sites run by the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong, rights groups and some foreign news organisations. It has moved to curb postings by a small but growing number of bloggers.
An international group of academics concluded in 2005 that China has "the most extensive and effective legal and technological systems for internet censorship and surveillance in the world".
The media rights group Reporters Without Borders describes the country as the world's "largest prison for journalists".'
And yes, it even affects music blogs.
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'Marcuse has shown how mass culture tends to be anticulture - to stifle creative work by the sheer volume of what is "produced," or reproduced. In which case poetry, for example, must start with an awareness of this contradiction and use it - as anti-poetry - which freely draws on the material of superabundant nonsense at its disposal. One no longer has to parody, it is enough to quote - and feed back quotations into the mass consumption of pseudoculture' - The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions ISBN 0811205703)
More Thomas Merton here.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
'The BBC yesterday unveiled its long-awaited iPlayer catch-up service, hailing it as the biggest change in the way we watch television since the introduction of colour 40 years ago. After more than three years in development, the corporation said the free catch-up service for all BBC programmes would launch on July 27.
After installing the iPlayer on a PC, viewers will be able to download almost any programme from the previous seven days at will and store it on the computer for up to 30 days, after which it will be automatically deleted. Viewers will be able to search for their favourite shows via a linear schedule, genre or channel. Links to the iPlayer will also be scattered liberally around the BBC website and flagged up after BBC shows.
BBC Vision director Jana Bennett predicted the iPlayer would revolutionise the way we watch television, allowing more people to participate in drama "water cooler" events while at the same time allowing them to discover lesser-watched shows. The BBC's director of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield, said it would become the default means of accessing its programmes on demand as technological advances allowed viewers to watch television "any time, any place, anyhow". He predicted the service would have 1 million users within a year' ~ reports today's Guardian.
But classical music isn't going to be on tap from the digital water cooler. As was revealed On An Overgrown Path in January classical music will be excluded from the BBC's download services because, according to the BBC Trust, "there is a potential negative market impact if the BBC allows listeners to build an extensive library of classical music that will serve as a close substitute for commercially available downloads or CDs." Which means the future of serious music broadcasting lies with the long-tail of radio made accessible by tools like the Radeo internet player.
Lots of interesting back links flow from my headline, including Martini music making and music like water
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
