GEO FOCUS UK Fight For Your (Copy) Rights >>> UK MEDIA MARKET
THE UK’S media market and content creators have been making headlines in recent months thanks to an increased drive to save the industry from the blight of online piracy. In response to issues raised by
groups such as the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), a High Court ruling now requires UK internet service providers (ISPs) to block the IPs of sites that host copyrighted material.
In an interview with the BBC, a
spokesperson from the BPI commented: “BPI removes around one million links every week to music hosted on the internet without the artist's knowledge or permission. "This process is one of many initiatives undertaken by the industry to help to create breathing space for more than 70 legal music services in the UK that strive to promote and reward musicians."
>>> LIVE PRODUCTION COMPANY
Britannia Row Productions Moves Home
For the 2013 UK concert season, event organisers faced audiences who expected the best sound possible thanks largely to the memory of last summer’s massive productions such as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert. Rising to the occasion, Britannia Row Productions, one of the UK’s biggest live production companies, has been employed by a number of events to provide bespoke sound reinforcement solutions. Britannia Row recently moved
from its home for the past 21 years in Wandsworth to premises in Twickenham. The new location has three loading bays and parking for
28 September 2013
six trucks with 45ft trailers, plus parking for an additional 50 cars. The move made it an easy trip for
the production company, which recently supplied equipment for the Sound for Change concert at Twickenham stadium, which was presented by the Chime for Change campaign – a global effort to raise funds for and awareness of girls’ and women’s empowerment. During the one-day event, for which Britannia Row is nominated for a Pro Sound Award, 17 of the company’s sound engineers, system technicians, radio technicians, and audio technicians were employed to cover sets by Beyoncé, Florence and
the Machine, Jennifer Lopez, and others. For the event Britannia Row
deployed a large L-Acoustics K1 main system in the stadium, which was zoned and controlled with 11 TC Lake processors in
combination with L-Acoustics LA-8 amplifiers. During the production 360 microphones and 24 handheld radio mics were used along with a variety of consoles from Midas, Avid, Digico, and Yamaha.
www.britanniarow.com
www.audiomedia.com
The ever-growing list of sites that have been blocked range from The Pirate Bay, Fenopy, and KickassTorrents, to, most recently, EZTV, YIFY Torrents, and Sweden- based
FirstRow1.eu – a popular football streaming website, which was recently blocked after legal action was taken by the Premier League. This last example is important as it marks the first time a site facilitating access to streaming sites – rather than hosting streams themselves – has been blocked. According to the High Court
verdict, sites like KickassTorrents profit massively from facilitating ‘mass online copyright infringement’ and bring in an estimated annual revenue of between approximately £7.7 million and £14 million. Yet despite the anxiety of content
producers and the pressure placed on ISPs by the government to protect
POPULATION: 62.74 MILLION
them, the media market in the UK is still flourishing. According to the 2012 Deloitte
report TV:Why? 54.2 million people in the UK tune in to TV programmes each week with households dedicating six billions hours to watching TV every month. Excluding those under the age of four, these numbers are equivalent to a reach of about 95 percent of the population. On the film side of things, the UK has an incredibly film-friendly government and support infrastructure with globally competitive production costs. Studios such as Pinewood and Shepperton are regarded as some of the best- equipped facilities in the world and have been used for films ranging from the Academy-award winning Les Misérables to the most recent James Bond film, Skyfall. According to the British Film
Institute (BFI), the UK film industry directly employees 44,000 people and earns over £1.3 billion in export income from film rights and film production services. Audiences are similarly supportive of the industry with the overall territory box office gross for the UK and the Republic of Ireland exceeding £1 billion for the first time in 2009. However, a recent £200 million plan to increase Pinewood’s facilities by 100,000sqm, including new studios, stages, and streetscapes, was turned down by South Bucks District Council on the grounds that it was an ‘inappropriate’ expansion into green belt land. The decision marks the second time that the studio’s expansion plans have been denied by the council after a similarly priced 2009 plan was also turned down for the same reasons.
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