Advanced Television

Advanced Television is a UK-based television industry news service, published from London at advanced-television.com, that reports daily on broadcasting, streaming and media technology for the professionals who run the TV business. Its archive stretches back well over a decade and a half — stories from 2008 and 2009 sit alongside this week's output — and its pages follow the industry's transformation from the digital-switchover era of 3D TV experiments and widget televisions to today's world of global streamers, FAST channels and debates about the future of terrestrial broadcasting itself. Its senior editorial voice is Colin Mann, whose byline fronts much of its London reporting, alongside long-standing contributors such as Chris Forrester on satellite and space. For the trade reader, it is a wire of record: short, fast, sourced stories on deals, regulation, research and technology, filed from London, Amsterdam's IBC and wherever the industry gathers.

A daily wire for the television business

The defining feature of Advanced Television is cadence. Its output on any given day ranges across the whole map of the modern TV industry: audience data such as Barb's quarterly figures for streaming services in UK homes, rights deals like DAZN's football agreements or SkyShowtime partnerships, platform launches from JioHotstar in Singapore to HBO Max arrangements in Japan, and regulatory moves from South Africa's ICASA on satellite licensing to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority. That mixture — British stories at the core, international stories wherever British companies, formats and executives are involved — mirrors the industry itself, in which a London executive's working day spans Hollywood studios, European regulators and Asian platforms. The service's categorisation tells the same story: broadcast, broadband, OTT and a research library recur as organising tags, reflecting its view that television can no longer be covered apart from the networks and internet services that deliver it.

Colin Mann and the editorial voice

Much of Advanced Television's reporting carries the byline of Colin Mann, writing from London and from industry events — "From Colin Mann in Amsterdam" is a recurring dateline from IBC, the broadcast technology convention where the sector's annual agenda is set. Mann's role extends beyond daily news: he has contributed a chapter to The Generation Game, a Bite Size Books collection of essays asking whether the BBC can win over today's young audience, alongside contributors such as former digital minister Ed Vaizey — evidence of the service's standing in the UK's media-policy conversation. His reporting style is that of the classic trade wire: the announcement, the numbers, the context and the implication, filed quickly and attributed clearly, whether the subject is Openreach's stop-sell programme for copper services, a Broadcast 2040+ poll on the BBC's future funding, or a European Commission research release.

Covering the policy battles: the BBC, Freeview and 2034

Advanced Television's recent coverage illustrates its value on the biggest structural question in British television: what happens when the current guarantee for digital terrestrial television — Freeview — runs out in 2034, and viewing migrates to internet delivery. Reporting polling for the Broadcast 2040+ coalition in October 2026, the service set out findings that public attitudes to a possible universal household levy for the BBC are tied to that distribution question: 82 per cent agreed that if every household must pay, the BBC must ensure every household can watch; forecasts cited suggested around 5.4 million households would still use Freeview as their main way of watching live TV in 2034. The story wove together the Culture, Media and Sport Committee's advice to ministers, the government's Watch this Space green paper and the BBC's own positioning — the kind of multi-strand policy synthesis that general news titles rarely have space for, and that trade readers need in full. The service has followed this debate since its beginnings: its 2009 coverage of the government's Digital Britain report — with its plans for universal broadband, digital radio upgrade and a revised remit for Channel 4 — reads today as the opening chapter of the same argument.

From 3D TV to FAST: chronicling the technology cycle

The archive is a history of the industry's enthusiasms and corrections. In 2009 the service reported Fox Sports chairman David Hill warning IBC that broadcasters would not invest in 3D television until it paid, and that implementation typically cost ten times the budget — a sceptical note at the height of the 3D hype, and a fair sample of the service's editorial instinct for the business case over the press release. It reported Strategy Analytics research at IBC 2008 showing nearly half of under-25s in Europe's five major markets regularly streaming TV from broadcaster websites — the OTT era arriving in the data before it arrived in the living room. By 2026 its associated Euromedia magazine was rounding up research on FAST channels — free ad-supported streaming television — as an established part of the landscape. Following a service like Advanced Television across those years is to watch satellite, cable, catch-up, OTT, UHD and FAST succeed one another, each covered in the same factual register.

Euromedia and the print companion

Advanced Television is associated with Euromedia, a magazine whose issues — such as the May/June 2026 edition — carry longer-form analysis by its journalists, including Colin Mann's round-ups of recent research on phenomena such as the growth of FAST channels in a historically poor advertising market. The pairing of a fast daily web wire with a periodic magazine is a traditional trade-publishing structure: the wire wins the day, the magazine wins the argument. It also signals the audience: senior industry readers who still take a curated, edited publication as the considered view, alongside the alerts and headlines they scan each morning.

Research, data and the industry's numbers

A large share of Advanced Television's output consists of reporting the industry's research — Barb audience measurement, analysts' forecasts, consumer surveys and market studies — into concise news stories. Its 2010 report on Motorola's European Media Engagement Barometer, for example, distilled a survey into the findings that 87 per cent of UK consumers shared content across devices at home, that 70 per cent watched live television weekly, and that majorities were already streaming internet video — data points that marked the multi-screen transition. This research-reporting function is a genuine agency service: dozens of research firms issue studies each week, and the trade wire's job is to select, verify and summarise them for readers who cannot read everything. Its research-library categorisation acknowledges that readers use it as a reference archive as much as a news feed.

Who reads it, and why it matters

The readership is the television industry itself: broadcasters and platform operators, rights holders and producers, technology vendors, regulators, analysts and investors, in the UK and across the international market that converges on London and Amsterdam. For this directory, Advanced Television represents the UK's deep bench of trade journalism — publications little known to the public whose reporting nonetheless sets the information agenda inside an industry. When a streaming service changes strategy, a regulator consults on spectrum, or a new distribution technology claims the future, the first complete account is likely to be a trade wire story of exactly the kind Advanced Television has filed, day after day, since the digital switchover era.

Standing in the trade press landscape

Advanced Television competes in a crowded field of broadcast trade titles, but its longevity, its recognisable bylines and its blend of news, research reporting and magazine analysis give it a distinct identity. It is British in base and sensibility — the BBC, Freeview, Ofcom and Barb are home territory — and international in outlook, as the global television business requires. In a sector being rebuilt by streaming economics, that steady, sourced, daily record is the service its readers are paying attention to, and the reason it earns its place among the UK's news services.