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:
“So by all means let’s have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn’t it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)