Question of the week: what do you think of ‘event’ scheduling?

4 May 2011 Rob Buckley UK TV 6 Comments

So the latest wheeze in TV scheduling is ‘event’ scheduling. With so many other competing channels and media to deal with, and the iPlayer and catch-up TV systems making conventional scheduling almost redundant, schedulers need to find a way to make people sit up and take notice of their programmes. So they’re now scheduling TV shows as ‘events’, clearing the schedules and stripping them across a number of days in one week rather than an episode a week for a month or so.

So this week, the BBC ran Exile over three nights and ITV ran Case Sensitive over two nights. I was going to watch Exile, but my PVR decided not to bother with the third episode. I was going to watch Case Sensitive but I thought the next episode was going to be on next week so I missed it. The only time I have to watch most TV is when I’m commuting so will I be using either the iPlayer or the ITV Player to watch them? No. But I might do if I there were more time between episodes for me to catch up with them. 

In other words, event scheduling actually stops me watching programmes I might have watched, not makes me watch them.

Your mileage may vary of course, so this week’s question is:

Does event scheduling make you more or less inclined to watch a TV series?

Answers below or a link to your response on your own blog, please

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

    View all posts