Jeremy Clarkson strike outburst retailer claims DVD sales boost
HMV says sales of Clarkson’s Powered Up have soared after he said public sector strikers should be shot
- John Plunkett
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 December 2011 16.34 GMT
Jeremy Clarkson said striking public sector workers should be shot in front of their families when he appeared on The One Show last week. Photograph: Jon Furniss
Take one high-profile TV presenter, a new DVD released in time for Christmas and some opportune outrageous remarks that kicked up the BBC’s biggest stink since “Sachsgate”.
Result: bumper sales for Jeremy Clarkson’s Powered Up DVD following his controversial appearance on BBC1’s The One Show last Wednesday, according to one high street retailer.
HMV said sales of Powered Up, in which Clarkson relocates with the Stig to the south of France to find his “favourite car of the Year”, doubled on Thursday and saw a similar jump on Friday.
This DVD sales forecasting is, however, an inexact science. The retailer would have expected sales of the title, along with man other DVDs, to spike in the runup to Christmas.
But industry sources suggested that the Clarkson controversy and ensuing media coverage would have been responsible for as much as a 25% to 50% increase across high street and online sales.
An HMV spokesman said: “We’ve found in the past that controversy involving artists, with all the media coverage this generates, can often boost sales of their products.
“Clarkson is one of those ‘Marmite’ personalities that you probably either love or hate, and the chances are that many of the public he upset weren’t likely to be among his fans in the first place, while people who do appreciate his sense of humour and follow him on TV may have felt prompted to go out and buy his Powered Up DVD over the weekend.”
Powered Up is currently ranked 26th in Amazon’s top-selling TV DVDs, a list topped by the second series of ITV1’s Downton Abbey.
Buyers were split over the merits of the title, with four five-star ratings and four one-star verdicts. Read more…
Spam texts ‘concern or distress nine out of 10 people’
Study finds messages offering accident compensation are most common nuisance texts, as watchdog continues crackdown
Britons are ‘concerned or distressed’ about receiving unsolicited text messages. Photograph: Jay Directo/AFP/Getty Images
Nine out of 10 Britons are “concerned or distressed” about receiving unsolicited text messages offering bogus compensation schemes, according to a survey by the information commissioner.
The study of 1,000 people found that messages offering accident compensation are the most common nuisance texts.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) warned that some people still fall for the scams, but that its crackdown on the firms behind the messages had made “significant progress”.
Research for the Direct Marketing Association suggests more than 8m unsolicited texts are sent every day, offering anything from insurance claims to loans.
The ICO launched an investigation into the plague of spam messages earlier this year in a bid to discover who is behind the bogus texts and how they obtain millions of people’s mobile phone numbers. The data protection body said it had recently raided a house in north England as part of its investigation, and that visits had been made to a number of other addresses. The ICO said it had seen a slight drop in the number of complaints reported to its office. Read more…
Growth in online TV viewing habits slows according to Barb study
There was only a 0.5% rise in those who said they watched television on a PC, laptop or tablet computer compared with 2010
The growth in online TV viewing habits has slowed according to the latest Barb study. Photograph: David J Green/Alamy
The growth of online TV viewing in the UK is slowing, according to new figures from the broadcasting industry’s audience measurement body, Barb.
Almost 15% of respondents to Barb’s biannual study, which tracked viewing habits over a week in November 2011, said they watched TV on a PC, laptop or tablet computer during that period – a rise of only 0.5% compared to November 2010.
The study of about 4,000 viewers saw online watching rise from 11.2% in November 2009 to 14.4% the following year.
Barb said the “plateau” in online viewing could be attributed to the rise in digital set-top boxes and the boom in popularity of catch-up services on internet connected TVs, such as Sky+ and Virgin TV On Demand.
The study found that viewing on mobile devices continued to rise – almost doubling in use among young adults, year on year – as Britons rushed to buy smartphones in the second half of 2011.
Almost 3% of respondents claimed to have watched TV on their mobile phone during the tracking period last year, up from 1.9% in November 2010 and 1.1% in November 2009.
Unsurprisingly, the biggest growth in mobile TV viewers was among those aged 15 to 34: 9.8% said they had watched TV on their handheld device in November last year, compared with 5.8% in 2010.
The proportion of all adults who claimed to have watched TV on their PC, laptop or tablet computer reached 36.2% at the end of 2011, a rise of 5.1% year on year.
Google+ saw 67m visits in November with 2.7m from UK says ComScore
Search engine’s social network has its most followers in US but looks like a bigger hit per capita in Canada and France
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Google+: visits worldwide in November totalled 67m, with 2.7m from the UK
Google+ attracted 2.6 million visitors in the UK in November last year, according to the first UK traffic estimates since the social network launched publicly in September.
Figures released by online metrics firm ComScore show that worldwide visitors to Google’s social network rose to 67 million in November, up from 20 million in the three weeks after its invitation-only launch in July last year.
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Inside the secret world of hackers
Computer hackers are frequently denigrated as mere digital pranksters. But some are now finding they have the power to change the world for good. By Heather Brooke
The Chaos Computer Club’s annual conference attracts an international audience of hackers, scientists, artists and utopians. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
Hackerspaces are the digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment coffee houses. They are places open to all, indifferent to social status, and where ideas and knowledge hold primary value. In 17th-century England, the social equality and merit-ocracy of coffee houses was so deeply troubling to those in power that King Charles II tried to suppress them for being “places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers”. It was in the coffee houses that information previously held in secret and by elites was shared with an emerging middle class. They were held responsible for many of the social reforms of the 18th century, when English public life was transformed. Read more…
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