Carphone Warehouse buys AOL UK

The Carphone Warehouse has bought AOL UK for £370m which will make the mobile phone retailer's TalkTalk internet servies provider the thrid largest in the world. The company had hoped for a £600m selling price and Orange and Sky were also interested in buying it. 600,000 of AOL UK's customers out of the 1.5m are still using the dial-up connection. In 2006, AOL informed customers that it would be increasing the price of its dial-up access. The increase was part of an effort to migrate the service's remaining dial-up users to broadband, as the increased price was the same price they had been charging for monthly DSL access.

Since its merger with Time Warner, the value of AOL has dropped from its $200 billion high and it has seen similar losses among its subscription rate. It has since attempted to reposition itself as a content provider similar to companies such as Yahoo! as opposed to an Internet service provider which delivered content only to subscribers in what was termed a "walled garden". In 2005, AOL broadcast the Live 8 concert live over the Internet, and thousands of users downloaded clips of the concert over the following months. This was done in order to make up the lost profits and attract more customers. This shows how AOL were trying very hard to regain profits. It even gave away freebies in August 2006 such as xdrive.

I think that Carphone Warehouse buying AOL UK would benefit the customers as it clearly shows the company were not very good at doing this themselves. Although Carphone were bought AOL to help recover their own Broadband losses, maybe this will help to regenerate the Internet service provider.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/city/story/0,,1892842,00.html

Links to Media Institutions: MIRAMAX

The first institution most linked to mine is The Walt Disney Company (which Furzana studied) because they bought Miramax from the Weinsein Brothers on March 30th 2005.

http://media-issues-debates.blogspot.com/2006/09/w-l-t-d-i-s-n-e-y-since-its-founding.html

Another Institution which links to Miramax is Warner Bros. because Miramax used to be on of the top ten film motion picture distribution along with Warner Bros. until oweners Harvey and Bob resigned.

http://balindermed6.blogspot.com/2006/09/warner-bros.html

Paramount Pictures is also linked to Miramax because it is another of the top ten film motion picture distribution.

http://ramneet-ramneet.blogspot.com/2006/09/background-and-history.html

Globalisation
Globalisation is when economic, political, social, technological and cultural changes seen as increasing intergration and interaction between people and companies worldwide.

Globalisation fits in with Media Studies as each of the changes effects the media in terms of growth, dominance, influence and reflection among the social and cltural world we live in. An example of this is 'cultural imperialism' where the current US media domination is the same as the British Empire forcing its values and ideologies on the large proportion of the developing world. The two are the same because the US media forces US culture on us through our media consumption.

Freeview sales mainly for second TVs, research shows

http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,,1887376,00.html

This article is saying how Freeview is not chiefly responsible for households choosing to change over from analogue to digital. Instead, it is the satelite and cable services that are the primary reason. Even though this is not what the Government intended when introducing Freeview in October 2002, it still means that households are going fully digital before the region-by-region analogue switch-off begins in 2008.

My Comments:

Given that there are 46 Tv channels and 27 radio channels, the government is clearly trying to encourage all households as much as they can to change from analogue to digital before 2012. However, the channels provided on sky and cable are proven to be much more favourited compared to the channels on Freeview and i think it is for this reason that households would prefer to pay subscriptions for sky, that provides hudreds of channels, rather than a box set that only gives 46.