Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/334259338?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Thursday, October 17, 2013
U.K. TV Indie Giants Merge to Create Regional Powerhouse
YouTube
"Splash" is a Twofour Broadcast production.
LONDON – Plymouth-based indie production giant Twofour is merging with former BBC One controller Lorraine Heggessey and Huw Eurig Davies' year-old production venture Boom Pictures in Cardiff.
The merger will create what the duo claim will be a "major new nations and regions player" in indie media production.
The deal sees Twofour Group's global business -- comprising Twofour Broadcast, Twofour Rights and Twofour Digital -- joining Boom Pictures, with its senior executives taking key roles in the enlarged Boom Pictures group.
This merger fuels the growth of Boom Pictures in line with plans set out by co-founders Heggessey and Davies when they launched the group in July 2012.
Twofour greatly expands Boom's network programming, moving the company into key genres such as entertainment and features. The deal also brings in international distribution for output with Twofour Rights, and a growing production presence in the U.S. In addition, Twofour's thriving digital arm serves blue chip brand clients and a growing hub in Abu Dhabi.
The merger has been supported by U.K. private equity firm LDC, which invested in the creation and development of Boom Pictures in 2012.
The merging of the two businesses puts Boom Pictures group firmly among the top 10 U.K. indie production outfits.
The freshly merged entity will operate from Boom's Cardiff headquarters and Twofour's headquarters in Plymouth.
Heggessey, executive chair and co-founder of Boom Pictures, said: "We're on an exciting journey and it's the right time for us to join up with such an excellent creative and executive team who have already built a hugely successful company. Boom and Twofour fit together perfectly and have a similar positive culture, firmly rooted in the nations and regions."
Twofour Group founder and CEO Charles Wace said: "In looking at the future of Twofour's business, the attraction was the backing of LDC, one of the U.K.'s leading and most experienced private equity firms, combined with Lorraine's leadership and vision. This ambitious partnership is the ideal platform to help take Twofour to the next stage in its life."
Davies, deputy chair and co-founder of Boom Pictures added: "The strategic value of this deal, at this stage in our development, is that it fulfills several key business growth ambitions. It gives us real scale, a base from which to grow in the U.S. and brings distribution in-house so we can benefit from the rights that come from our creativity."
Twofour Broadcast has produced over 200 hours of original broadcast programming across all major U.K. broadcasters with shows such as ITV's hit Splash! and the forthcoming The Alpine Games (w/t) for Channel 4.
It also brings successful factual entertainment titles including Alex Polizzi's The Hotel Inspector and The Fixer as well as fixed-rig factual hit Educating Yorkshire.
The inclusion of Twofour Digital with its blue chip clients including DuPont/Ogilvy Entertainment and the award-winning Horizons series on BBC Global News, will build on Boom Pictures' digital and branded content expertise.
Boom group currently boasts award-winning work with major brands through the Boomerang label, which produces GT Academy for Nissan and Playstation and The Clare Balding Show for U.K. telecom giant TV venture BT Sport.
Twofour's postproduction banners in Plymouth will complement Boom Pictures' own offering through Cardiff-based Gorilla and The Joint in Soho, London, expanding the group's ability to keep its post-production in-house.
The deal also gives Boom Pictures a greater international footprint and global reach.
Twofour Rights, which launched in 2012, becomes the group's in-house distribution arm, Twofour Broadcast's Los Angeles office gives Boom Pictures a base in the U.S. from which to build on its relationships with American networks and cable channels.
Twofour Digital's Abu Dhabi office adds a presence in the growing Middle East market.
The Twofour labels will retain their names and branding, with the senior management continuing in their current roles or taking on Boom Pictures Group roles.
The management changes will include Wace stepping back from his role as CEO of Twofour Group "to pursue other interests," but he will remain involved through his new roles on the Boom Pictures board as nonexecutive chairman of Twofour and a nonexecutive director of Boom Pictures.
Melanie Leach will continue in her role as managing director of Twofour Broadcast, and will become an exec director of Boom Pictures with a seat on the board.
Leach said: "Twofour's slate has continued to strengthen under the current management team and we're excited to work alongside Lorraine and Huw as we build what we hope will become one of the U.K.'s most admired media groups."
Boom Pictures launched with a strategy "to support the organic growth of the companies within the group, to attract leading creative talent, to back startups, and to acquire companies that extend the group's portfolio and capabilities."
The first Boom deal was with Graham Linehan and producer Richard Boden for comedy label Delightful Industries, and this was followed in January 2013 by the backing of former ITV drama heads Laura Mackie and Sally Haynes' new company Mainstreet Pictures.
Boom Pictures companies also include Boom Pictures Cymru, which produces over 400 hours of Welsh language programming for S4C, Boomerang, Oxford Scientific Films and Indus Films.
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Wednesday, October 16, 2013
What Does Giuliana Rancic Think About Having Twins?
Is the #Twinning idea a winner for Giuliana Rancic? Having a baby times three (baby Duke is still a little one, you know!) seems like a lot to handle, but Giuliana isn’t totally opposed to the idea of having two little babes arrive at once. Would it be work? Most definitely. But the always cheery celeb who just celebrated her son’s 1st birthday explains why it’d be OK.
OK! News: How Will Giuliana and Bill Celebrate Baby Duke’s First Birthday?
Watch: Giuliana and Bill’s Cutest Family Moments
The celeb recently opened up to Your Tango about parenting, love, and how her husband Bill helped her through her battle with breast cancer. When asked if she’d “freak out” if she had twins, she responded, “I mean … yeah. I used to always want twins and then I had one and went, ‘Whoa, that was hard.’ I don’t know how people with twins do it, but they find a way. To me, the more the merrier. So if we heard we were having twins, we’d high-five and then go, ‘Oh crap. What are we going to do now?’”
Click here to read the rest of the report from Your Tango!
Do you watch Giuliana and Bill’s show? Tweet @OKMagazine and leave a comment below!
More From Our Friends at Your Tango:
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Good Cop, Bad Cop Routine Gets A Result For Obama And Reid
President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., shared the same goals but had notable stylistic differences in their approaches to the fiscal fight.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., shared the same goals but had notable stylistic differences in their approaches to the fiscal fight.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
Since the start of the fiscal standoff that led to a government shutdown and a flirtation with a historic debt default, Democrats have been led by the tag team of President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
At times, their tactics resembled the good cop, bad cop routine where one officer offers the suspect a cup of coffee and the other smacks it from the suspect's lips. Reid, of course, is the smacker.
Obama played the good cop, inviting all 232 members of the House Republican Conference to the White House so they could just sit down and reason together. (GOP leadership ended up paring that list way back to just the leaders.)
And Obama hasn't publicly gone to great lengths to undermine Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. About the roughest thing Obama has said about Boehner and House Republicans overall is that they are being overly influenced by "extremists" in the conference.
Reid, by contrast, has very publicly — and repeatedly — branded the House GOP's Tea Party wing as "anarchists." He's also called them "wacky" and "weird." Reid later conceded to CNN's Dana Bash that perhaps he overstepped with "weird." But he would keep throwing around the term anarchists.
The Nevada Democrat, who will never be accused of subtlety, has also repeatedly thrown Boehner under the bus. First, he alleged that Boehner had reneged on a deal for legislation to keep the government open without any attached policy riders.
Then Reid's office leaked emails that arguably made Boehner look hypocritical. The emails between his office and the speaker's office seemed to show that Boehner worked behind the scenes to ensure that members of Congress and their staffs got an employer contribution to health care — a provision that the GOP conference later opposed and made an issue in the fiscal fight.
None of this is to suggest that Obama and Reid, while stylistically different, have varied on ultimate goals. Indeed, most observers have noted how much Democrats, who once were known for disunity, have stuck together in recent weeks.
"The entire Democratic Party said 'enough is enough,' " said William Galston, a scholar with the center-left Brookings Institution who was a Clinton White House policy adviser. "The White House and the congressional Democrats decided pretty early on not to give any appreciable ground, and they were fortified" by the sense that the Tea Party strategy would only continue if Democrats made significant concessions as they had in past fiscal fights.
In the battles surrounding the fiscal cliff in 2012 and the debt ceiling in 2011, it was Vice President Biden, not Reid, who played a central role in getting deals done.
But Biden was viewed by many Democrats, including Reid, as having given away too much in the fiscal cliff deal — especially by agreeing to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for more high-income taxpayers than Obama had originally proposed.
This time it was Reid, not Biden, at the table in the end. And he appeared to get results Wednesday. Reid and Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, announced a bipartisan agreement to end — for now at least — the shutdown and debt ceiling impasse. House Republicans got little of what they demanded when the fight started.
Asked what Reid's contribution to the Obama-Reid tandem was, Rodell Mollineau, president of American Bridge political action committee and a former senior aide to Reid, told me: "Sen. Reid is a tactician. He is a master of the Senate and its workings. ...
"Also, Sen. Reid can be very blunt, both in the way he speaks and the way he does his work," Mollineau said. "And while that might not always come out publicly as him being a great orator, I think it makes him a very effective legislator and I think there are many people in the Senate who appreciate his bluntness." Reid is a legislative workhorse who gets results like the economic stimulus and the Affordable Care Act.
For his part, Obama offered the more diplomatic approach, Mollineau said.
"And while sometimes that can be frustrating to Democratic insiders, congressmen, senators ... I think it has served the president well in certain cases because he's been able to make a case to the American people that he's the one being reasonable, he's the one being rational."
And for those frustrated Democrats who wanted to see more belligerence from their side, there was always Reid.
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Curiosity confirms origins of Martian meteorites
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Earth's most eminent emissary to Mars has just proven that those rare Martian visitors that sometimes drop in on Earth -- a.k.a. Martian meteorites -- really are from the Red Planet. A key new measurement of Mars' atmosphere by NASA's Curiosity rover provides the most definitive evidence yet of the origins of Mars meteorites while at the same time providing a way to rule out Martian origins of other meteorites.Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131016134028.htm
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Michael Fassbender Talks About His Longest Relationship With GQ!
Michael Fassbender looks like a God among insects on the cover of GQ, and never let anyone tell you differently!
We all know Fassy has a huge, long…helmet whenever he plays Magneto (always wear protection), but the metal bending actor (who can manipulate our hard objects) talked about the longest relationship he's had:
“I think the longest relationship that I’ve been in was two years. I started doing this when I was 17, so I guess in my dating, adult life, that kind of covers it.”
Wow, Michael might be in 12 Years a Slave, but he's only been 2 years a boyfriend tops! What a Shame!
We hope one day Michael share the rest of his days of future past with the love of his life! He's so mutantly charming!
[Image via Peggy Sirota/GQ.]
Tags: 2, dating, gq, interview, longest, magneto, michael fassbender, relationship, two, women, years
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