Section:GDN 1N PaGe:9 Edition Date:190807 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/8/2019 20:40 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Wednesday 7 August 2019 The Guardian •
National^9
Mark Sweney
The scale of the challenge facing UK
broadcasters in the streaming era has
been thrown into stark relief with a
new report estimating that 34 extra
series of the BBC hit Bodyguard – or 14
more Love Island s – would have been
needed to air last year to make up for
the drop in traditional TV viewing, as
audiences fl ock to online rivals such as
Netfl ix, Amazon and YouTube.
The report by the media regulator
Ofcom highlights a rapid growth in the
popularity of streaming services in the
UK. The number of subscribers to the
three most popular – Netfl ix, Amazon
and Sky’s Now TV – rose almost a
quarter last year to 19.1 million.
Nearly half of all UK homes now
have a subscription streaming service ,
with many paying for two or more, a
signifi cant increase on the 39% that
did in 2017.
Meanwhile the popularity of
traditional TV viewing is eroding.
The average Briton now watches three
hours and 12 minutes of TV a day , a
drop of 20 minutes a day in the last
two years and almost an hour less than
in 2010.
The UK’s public service broad-
casters, the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and
Channel 5, still provide the country’s
water-cooler moments. More than
12 million people tuned into the
fi nal episode of Line of Duty earlier
this year, and 14 million caught the
conclusion of Bodyguard last year
making it 2018’s most watched drama.
However, Ofcom’s report, entitled
Traditional
channels
need 35
Bodyguards
to restore
lost ratings
14m
Number of people who watched the
fi nal episode of Bodyguard, making
it the most-watched drama of 201815
Number of
extra Love
Island series
that would have
been needed
last year to
retrieve TV’s
lost audience“winter” edition shot in South Africa,
in a n attempt to bolster its audiences.
Love Island is the most popular
show on TV among those aged 16- 34 ,
who are switching off traditional linear
television at the fastest rate.
Ofcom’s report shows that the
amount of traditional TV watched by
16- 24-year-olds has halved since 2010,
from 169 minutes a day to 85 minutes
a day last year. There has been a 39%
decline in viewing among the 25- 34 age
group , from 199 minutes to 122 min-
utes a day, in the same time period.
The report shows that the main
beneficiaries have been paid-for
streaming services such as Netfl ix.However, the report also found
that the Silicon Valley streamers
have a paucity of UK content. British
public service broadcasters spent
almost £2.6bn making 32,188 hours
of original programming last year,
compared with just 221 hours of UK-
made original productions made
available by the subscription video-
on-demand services.
Netfl ix and Amazon are estimated
to spend just a few hundred million
pounds of their combined $20bn
(£16bn) annual global programming
budgets in the UK.
“Public service broadcasters are still
important in meeting viewers’ desire
for UK content,” said Ofcom. “UK
audiences want original, UK- produced
and UK-specifi c programmes. The vast
majority of subscription video-on-
demand programmes are US-made
productions, designed to play out in
multiple countries.”
Last year, subscription video-on-
demand services, primarily Netfl ix
and Amazon, became the most popular
form of pay-TV in the UK. Ofcom said
the low-cost nature of the new stream-
ing rivals compared with pay-TV
packages ha d widened the gap mark-
edly over the last year.Whaley Bridge residents are told dam could
take years to fi x as they start to return home
Nazia Parveen
North of England correspondent
It could take years to rebuild the
damaged dam above the Derbyshire
town of Whaley Bridge, residents were
told yesterday, as some of the 1,
evacuated were promised they would
now be allowed to go home.
At a community meeting , police
said that residents of one part of the
town could begin to go back after water
levels in Toddbrook reservoir dropped
rapidly. But some have to wait for an
inspection today to be certain that
their homes are safe.
A spokesman for the Environment
Agency at the meeting in nearby
Chapel-en-le-F rith said it was hard
to know how long the reconstruction
of the dam would take. “We are very
much in the emergency phase now
and we are currently repairing and car-
rying out construction work,” he said.
“It is a long-term construction
project, but we will not have started
from scratch. It could take 18 months,
two years, three years, who knows?”
The deputy chief constable of
Derbyshire constabulary, Rachel
Swann told the meeting that residents
of Horwich End could return home.
“I have got a meeting at 12pm
tomorrow where I am expecting we
will have good news,” she said. “We
have obviously been pumping the
water out and it has gone down at afast speed. It is now beyond 9.5 metres.
We will keep draining the water until
it is safe to stop.”
Earlier, emergency crews who had
pumped 1.2m tonnes of water from the
damaged reservoir were told they had
reached their target.
The Canal and River Trust had said
it needed to drop the water level byeight metres and confi rmed the level
was now down to 8.4 metres. The trust
said: “The water has been pumped out
at a controlled rate and good progress
is being made.”
The reservoir level currently stands
at 25% of its holding capacity. But
Derbyshire fi re and rescue service
warned that work was continuing at
the dam and “nowhere have we said
that the dam is safe”.
“Work is ongoing, and road closures
and evacuations are still in place to
preserve life,” it said. “We will open
roads and let people return home as
soon as we can .”
Fire crews have been using dozens
of high-volume pumps to remove
the reservoir’s water since part of itsspillway collapsed on Thursday after
days of heavy rain.
As residents were evacuated, an
RAF Chinook helicopter was drafted
in and began to drop hundreds of bags
of sand and aggregate to shore up the
slipped pieces of concrete.
Since then seven tonnes of water a
minute have been pumped out of the
structure, built in 1831, drastically
lowering the threat of fl ooding across
the valley down towards the towns
and villages of the High Peak.
The water taken out of the reservoir
has been directed into a sluice channel
before being dropped into the River
Goyt. The Environment Agency con-
fi rmed it was monitoring water levels
in the river. Work on the damaged dam
was hampered by subsi dence on Mon-
day night.
Tonnes of gravel and stone which
had been loaded into the damaged
section since Friday had “settled”
resulting in the Chinook having to
return and drop a further 50 tonnes
of aggregate into the repair.‘It could take 18
months, two , three
years, who knows?’Environment Agency
spokesmanUK Becomes a Nation of Streamers ,
highlights the struggle traditional
broadcasters face.
“A few popular drama and enter-
tainment programmes are not enough
on their own to stem the overall decline
in broadcast TV viewing,” said Ofcom.
Last month, ITV announced that
from next year it is to air two series of
Love Island annually , with a second▲ Dr Natalie Christopher is said to
have gone for an early morning runHelicopter joins
search for British
woman missing
on Greek island
Helena Smith
NicosiaGreek authorities are searching for a
British woman missing after an early
morning run on the island of Ikaria.
More than 24 hours after Dr Natalie
Christopher, 34, was reported missing,
the quest to locate her intensifi ed as
Athens offi cials dispatched a helicop-
ter equipped with infrared cameras.
Police said the land, air and sea
search “includes members of Ikaria’s
fi refi ghting service , volunteers, mem-
bers of the coastguard and a helicopter
from the civil protection agency ”.
The Anglo-Cypriot astrophysicist,
who is based in Cyprus , was reported
missing by her Cypriot partner – with
whom she was on holiday – on Monday.
He told police that Christopher, an
avid runner and rock climber, failed to
return several hours after going for a
run, and was no t answering her phone.
By late yesterday, police said they
were investigating samples of blood
discovered on bedsheets in their hotel
room in Kerame, a mountainous area.
Theodoris Theodorakis, the hotel
owner , was quoted describing the
droplets as “typical of a nosebleed ”.
Police said the linen had been sent
to a laboratory for DNA testing.
“We are gathering evidence and
taking witness statements from
everyone,” said police spokesman
Theodoros Chronopoulos.РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS