| 1999 |
 Chronomedia index
Numbers after entries link to the list of references. |
links and notes |
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Cultural highlights | Predictions made this year |
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| February 1 |
Morse code distress signal SOS is abandoned by the International Maritime Organisation on the adoption of the Global Maritime Distress Safety System. |
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| February 27 18:00 |
First pay-per-view (PPV) television coverage of a football match in the UK is of the FIrst Division game between Oxford and Sunderland. BSkyB, which offers the match for £7.95, plans a series of six 'screen tests' before the end of the season in May. The Football League says the reason is to gauge fans' reactions [generally unfavourable] and to quantify the value of PPV coverage. |
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| March |
Nielsen//NetRatings begins measuring Internet traffic. |
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| March |
Media Metrix Europe (MMXI Europe) begins measuring Internet traffic in France, Germany and the UK. |
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| April 23 |
UK's Independent Television Commission (ITC) revokes the broadcasting licence of Kurdish-language Med TV for broadcasting incitements to acts of political violence and for failure to comply with previous warnings. |
> July 31 |
| April |
Sweden begins digital terrestrial television (DTT) transmissions. |
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| June 12 |
Producer David O Selznick's 1940 Academy Award for Best Film, presented for Gone With the Wind, is sold at auction by Sotheby's in New York for $1.54m to the popular singer Michael Jackson. [Since 1950, recipients have been required by the Academy to sign an undertaking that they will not sell their Oscars.] Clark Gable's annotated script for the same film sells for $46,000 and a dress worn by Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara fetches $90,500. The jacket worn by Elvis Presley for his first television appearance sells for just under $60,000 and $57,750 is paid for a signed copy of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. |
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| June 17 |
Digital Video Express abandons marketing of its Divx pay-per-transaction DVD video scheme because it failed 'to obtain adequate support from studios and other retailers' despite 'strong consumer interest in the Divx feature'. |
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| July 1 |
Cable & Wireless Communications introduces digital cable television services on its networks in North-west England. |
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| July 31 |
Medya TV, a Kurdish-language channel based in Paris and aimed principally at the Kurdish community in Turkey, begins transmissions, one day after a test transmission via Eutelsat. It is effectively the successor to Med TV, whose broadcasting licence has been revoked in the UK. |
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| August 23 |
Pyra Labs launches Blogger as a means of publishing personal websites. |
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| September 9 |
Sega Dreamcast games console is launched in the US. |
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| September 21 |
Warner Home Video releases The Matrix film trilogy on DVD in the US. Out of a pressing of 1.5m copies, 780,000 sell within the first week. |
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| September |
Icelandic television service Channel 8 changes its name to Popp tíví. [0066] |
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| October 14 |
Sega Dreamcast games console is launched in Europe. |
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| October 14 |
Use of the phrase 'shit happens' in an episode of Chicago Hope on CBS is (believed to be) the first time the word 'shit' has been used in a scripted prime-time network programme in the US. |
< 1965 November 13 |
| November 15 |
First digital radio (DAB) transmitter in the UK comes into service. |
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| November 24 |
Walt Disney's Toy Story 2 is the first commercial film to be released simultaneously for conventional theatrical presentation and electronic projection (e-cinema), showing at six e-cinemas in California, Texas and Florida. |
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| • |
UK's five national television channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel Four, Five) account for 86 per cent of viewing time. Other channels, with the remaining 14 per cent, take £361m in advertising revenue. The national channels (excluding the BBC) take £2.7bn from advertising sales. |
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| • |
Netherlands Institute for the Classification of Audio-visual Media (NICAM) is established to work towards self-regulation in media classification and censorship. |
> 2001 February 22 |
