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Cyber-attacks – coming to a TV screen near you

By Jacqui Booker

As an avid fan of the small screen, I like to be in the know about the latest and greatest shows on TV.  True, I was somewhat late to the party in catching on to Homeland, Downton and House – but who’s judging?  Contrary to form though, I appear to be one step ahead, this week discovering a show – ‘Blackout’ – that is yet to be broadcast and no-one in the JK office had heard about. 

Now why, you might ask, am I writing about a new Channel 4 show on a tech PR blog?  Well, my cynical friends, docudrama ‘Blackout’ looks at the after effects of a cyber-attack on the UK national grid.  This programme has it all – drama, chaos, heartache – and has all the makings of a small screen replication of Die Hard 4.0. Bruce Willis it may not be, but it still sounds amazing. 

Over the past few years, numerous stories have hit the headlines highlighting the real and very present threat of cyber-attacks.  The discovery of Stuxnet and Flame viruses and the devastating impact these could have on critical infrastructure if poor security practices were in place, acted as eye openers for the industry.  The threat isn’t just to our digital data any more, it’s now so sophisticated that it can impact the physical world as well and that’s something the industry needs to take note of. 

The creation of this one off programme is sure to highlight this and I hope will have the positive effect of making society and industry more aware of the dangers of cyber-threats out there.  In the meantime, make sure you set your timers for what is sure to be an epic programme.  I know I have!

Is it Candy Crush vs consoles?

By Hannah Townsend

According to a new report, the mobile gaming market will grow 19 percent per year until 2016. This isn’t much of a surprise as mobile gaming continues to transform the industry, however many are claiming traditional console gaming is dying as a result. Personally, I don’t think you can compare the two – they are completely different experiences. One involves complete immersion into a game that can last hours at a time; the other is casual, short and requires no real commitment. Console gamers are simply not going to stop because they have a new game on their iPhone. If console gaming is declining maybe it’s more to do with the disappointing updates, lack of focus and £429 price tag, as seen with the recent Xbox One launch?

What will happen, if it hasn’t already, is that mobile will become the number one gaming hardware of choice. This isn’t down to consoles being abandoned, but because the mobile gaming market essentially includes anyone under the age of 35. While the Wii broke age and gender barriers, mobile gaming is going one step further by making gaming that much more accessible for time-fraught wannabe gamers (like me).

Candy Crush is a perfect example of the growing mobile gaming phenomenon. It’s a game that is suddenly hard to miss – if you aren’t playing it on your daily commute, friends are sharing lives on Facebook and office chat is revolving around which level you are on. No wonder King is raking in $230 million a year when 45 million players play the game 600 million times a day – quite a feat considering it launched just over a year ago.

What will be interesting is how this evolves over the next ten years. Will Angry Birds have completely replaced traditional games? Will 3D be a feature? Will motion control be brought to mobile? One thing I’m sure of is, if console gaming is still struggling, it will be due to a lack of customer satisfaction rather than mobile gaming advancements.

Check out the most popular gaming apps on iTunes here.

Oversharing is killing my inbox

By Claire Ayles

We all know how annoying it is when people share mundane posts about their cat or upload photos of their dinner on Facebook?  Well this problem of ‘oversharing’ has now hit the business world.

I’m signed up to various collaboration tools like Box, Basecamp and Huddle, and they’re undeniably useful for sharing documents, especially with clients and other agencies.  But there is a downside. I’m now drowning in their email notifications.

While I used to get emails with documents handily attached, I now get the same number of slightly less useful emails telling me to go somewhere else on the internet to find a document that’s been slightly altered.  And that document might not even be relevant to me.  To put it into context, I’ve had 25 such messages overnight.

I appreciate that receiving an extra 25 messages is your quintessential first world problem, and as I said before, these platforms do make life easier, but it does strike me as slightly ironic, considering these tools have always been heralded as the answer to email overload.

Now if only someone could tell me how to turn off the email notifications…

Television, the drug of the nation

By Mike King

Yesterday’s Ofcom report on the UK communications market includes an analysis of TV viewing habits and reveals some surprising trends, particularly in relation to the amount of time spent watching TV. 

While the report covers a lot of obvious ground (like the massive growth in tablet and smart phone use) it is an increase in the average time spent watching TV that struck me as most surprising.  

According to Ofcom’s figures, the average person in the UK watches TV for just over four hours a day; that’s 15 minutes more than in 2008. 

On top of that, 90% of TV viewed in 2012 was live (i.e. viewed as it was broadcast) rather than from a recording or from an on-demand service.

Based on my own experiences, I’d have expected the opposite - a drop in viewing times and a much lower percentage of TV being watched live.  In my household viewing levels have plummeted over the past few years and the TV content that is watched tends to fall almost exclusively between live sporting events and on-demand programmes.  

The explanation, according to the report, is that we’re becoming a nation of digital multi-taskers so although we have more ways to consume digital media than ever (including, of course, multiple devices for internet access) there is an increasing tendency for people to use these devices at the same time, such as tablets or smart phones while watching TV. 

So people are watching more TV but are not really watching it properly because they are doing something else at the same time. 

While TV viewing figures are up, the number of TVs per household has dropped (41% of households had just one TV in 2012 compared with 35% in 2002) driven, in part, by the increased use of tablets for viewing TV content.  As a result, Ofcom claims, “families are gathering in the living room to watch TV just as they were in the 1950s”.  Though I imagine the difference today is that the family members are largely ignoring each other as they media multi-task and struggle with feelings of depression.  

More detail on the Ofcom report can be found here.