Friday, 23 March 2012

Do not adjust your sets

One thing I hate is people who say, "One thing I hate," because there are of course lots of things they hate. For instance, shark attacks are hateful.
Leaving sharks aside for a mo, one of the many things I hate are corporate press releases which say that so-and-so is 'excited' about such-and-such. There are usually plenty of better things to be excited about. But here at Fieldsports Channel, there is a lot to make us jiggle about in annoying way:
* YouTube has accepted our flagship programme Fieldsports Britain for 'YouTube Shows'. Fieldsports Britain is now listed alongside the BBC's Top Gear and Channel 5's Fifth Gear.
* Fieldsports Channel has broken through half-a-million monthly views on YouTube, making us one of the biggest hunting websites in the world. We have nearly 250,000 unique monthly viewers on YouTube, more than ten times thenumber of people who buy the popular British hunting magazine Shooting Times.
* We have signed with multi channel network Base79.com, which is chaired by former Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie and counts Mr Bean, Ministry of Sound and the Football Association among its talent. We bring with us a number of YouTube's most popular hunting/shooting/fishing channels, taking monthly YouTube views in this sector to around 1 million. Our own YouTube site www.youtube.com/fieldsportschannel is now a hub for fieldsports. We aim to make it a must-see channel for anyone interested in our world, who plans their evening TV entertainment around YouTube. Hollywood can provide 'the big film' - we are 'the big game'.
* We are about to launch our first foreign language programming, in German, French, Italian and Spanish. This is backed by a number of new overseas sponsors.
* We have a raft of new main sponsors to add to a gang that includes the Countryside Alliance and Browning. We welcome Zeiss, Team Wild including Realtree, and Archant magazines.
* We are launching new programmes across YouTube for Team Wild and Archant, and we are delighted that the UK hunting magazine publishers have at last woken up to YouTube. We are helping them all with content, including IPCMedia and Blaze Publishing. As the consumer press collapses, before it undoubtedly re-emerges smaller and better, YouTube beats the blog sites as top destination for its writers and its readers to go.
People often ask why we don't go on to proper UK telly. Well, look at the figures. This is proper telly. The TV executive sleeping beauties from the big networks who are trying to save their jobs with 100ft-high 'walled gardens' such as YouView can only regard YouTube with envy. Over the last 60 years, BBC sport and light entertainment has successfully replaced the fireplace as the focal point in Britain's front rooms. Now it's time for us to replace the BBC.
When I am thrown to the sharks for daring to say 'the one thing I hate', the last words you hear from me will be: "Go community".

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