Andy's Blog

It's fairly obvious that "Pick" - formerly PickTV - is the Sky-run freeview channel; Wikipedia confirms my suspicion that it is simply a rebranded Sky 3. I wonder why they changed the name? I guess either "Sky 3" tested poorly - people thought it was third-class or third-rate or just generally offcuts - or they wanted to trick people into watching what they thought was an independent channel so they could bombard them with adverts for other fine Sky products at a discount rate. And wow, what does it say about the broadcasting industry that it is cheaper to buy your own channel than it is to buy advertising space on somebody else's? Anyway, I only mention this because they've recently been pushing this thing called "Moonfleet". I don't know anything else about the show. I believe it involves boats. An advert in my news feed suggests it contains Ray Winstone. Whatever. The important thing is it's called Moonfleet. Moooooonfleeet.

This announcement  kind of highlights a lot of what is wrong inside the heads of the people behind Facebook. They're going to start autoplaying video adverts, initially without sound (as they apparently have been with user videos, though I haven't seen any). The idea is that the brightly-coloured movement will attract your eye, and after a moment of staring at it you'll naturally want to click to activate sound. Because of course, the best way to watch a video is always mute for the first twenty seconds. But as you read this press release, you realise it's not a new mechanism for getting adverts in front of your eyeballs so Facebook employees can pay their bills. It's "a New Way for Marketers to Tell Stories", a "richer storytelling format for advertisers".  It's not just for the benefit of marketers, it's "for people who will discover more great content". And after the video is over, they want to make it "easy to dis