Television
In 1982, W H Smith bought a significant minority stake in the ITV company Yorkshire Television, following changes in the latter's share structure and ownership.
It also founded two of the UK's earliest cable television channels, Lifestyle and Screensport through its WHSTV division, which were carried on almost every cable system in the UK and Ireland prior to the start of Sky Television. Both channels moved to the Astra 1A satellite used by Sky in 1989 and later floundered due to the increased cable competition. Screensport merged with Eurosport at its relaunch as part of the TF1 Group, a group, formed after TF1 was privatised in 1987, and Lifestyle was closed down.
Their current television advertising campaign features well known TV personalities doing voice overs for products on sale. The Ads strap line is "Think (e.g. books) ... Think WH Smith".
Read more about this topic: W H Smith
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“Photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“... there is no reason to confuse television news with journalism.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)