Cable Forum - Tivo V6 Talking Pictures run by a father and daughter from his house and garden shed!

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Talking Pictures run by a father and daughter from his house and garden shed!

On Thursday 12 April there was a radio interview about Talking Pictures with Noel Cronin, the man behind the channel.

He revealed some interesting facts about how it operates when the interviewer said that that she was surprised that it was being run from his home and that there weren't the banks of TV monitors that she had expected. He said that they only had one TV and another in the living room, that most of the technical side had been farmed out to third parties and that acquisitions & scheduling were based in the shed!

He says that material has been sourced from all sorts of places, including EBay, and that a lot of material was bought from the BBC after him pestering them for three years. Apparently, it was no longer suited to today's schedules, some was damaged due to age and cost £200,000, which is a lot more than I would have envisaged. His most prized acquisition was Scrooge. The Southern TV material was obtained from his contacts whilst working for Rank, as they were a shareholder, in fact their studios were housed in a former cinema.

They have over a million viewers and are now making a profit, with some viewers watching from dawn until late night. One lady even rang him to say that she had missed the end of the morning film (he deliberately puts on watchable programming on early mornings when the other channels are showing Teleshopping and it's paid off with the number of viewers), so asked him to play it again in the afternoon! He had to explain that schedules are compiled three months ahead, but sorted something out for her. This reminded me of when Peter Kaye said that his mother didn't like pausing live TV as it wasn't fair on the other people watching :D

He's a very pleasant and helpful man from my own personal dealings with him.

They make money from selling DVD's as well as advertising and have moved into profit after only three years and are now on a widespread Freeview mux, Freesat, Virgin Media and Sky.

I wonder how many more channels are now run on shoestring as the world of TV has changed? As audiences fragment within a multi channel environment, even the main channels have cut back. A few months ago I remember a fairly famous actress saying that at one time the cast would be placed altogether in a top hotel, but not anymore. A friend went down to London to be interviewed recently, he had envisaged first class rail travel and a limousine to pick him up as it used to be, but he was given a second class rail ticket and had to share a taxi with other participants.

Anyone who would like to listen to the interview can hear it via the iPlayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09yfqsr#play

Or via a downloadable BBC podcast. It's called 'The Film Programme' from Radio 4, just search for ''BBC podcasts''.