by ·Comments Off on Wednesday Notes

A wall of multi-colored sticky notesDarren Rovell at ESPN says that Fox bought the rights to the next five years’ worth of Thursday Night Football from the NFL for over $60 million per game. He points out that players hate playing on Thursdays because that doesn’t give them enough time to heal from the previous Sunday’s game, but NFL commissioner Goodell said, “We will continue to work with the NFLPA to make the shorter week more attractive in a way that is better for our players.” The obvious answer is to only play on a Thursday when it’s after a bye week. Anyway, it’s great to see some content stay freely available on over-the-air TV, unlike …

Star Trek: Discovery hasn’t driven enough subscribers to the CBS All Access OTT service, if you believe the numbers crunched by Colin Dixon of nScreenMedia (which isn’t a typo, honest). He points out that Discovery is the least-viewed Star Trek series ever, writing “CBS’s decision to release the show through All Access appears to have deprived it of most of its audience.” (Although with the general decline of OTA ratings since ST: Enterprise ended in May 2005, that might have been true even if it had stayed on CBS.) All Access seems unlikely to make its goal of 8 million subscribers by 2020.

Finally, Chris Johnston of BBC News wrote last week that pay-TV provider Sky was going to make all its channels and content available online. Despite the article’s title, “Sky signals the end of the satellite dish”, the company said it didn’t plan to stop broadcasting by satellite. And I would add, yet. Satellites are darned expensive compared to internet delivery, so if the latter improves, we might see less and less of the former.

by ·Comments Off on IA #6: The Lady Vanishes (1938)

The Lady Vanishes (1938) on IMDb

Here is the Best Picture of 1938 according to the The New York Times. Alfred Hitchcock directed the story of a woman who befriends an elderly lady during an unplanned stopover on a train trip across Europe. Soon after resuming the journey, the woman can’t find her new friend, and everyone she asks tells her they have no memory of any such old woman.

The Lady Vanishes has several elements in common with other movies in the Internet Archive Top 100. (Spoilers ahead if you’re reading this countdown backwards from 1 to 100.) The characters Charters and Caldicott (played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) were so popular that they returned in Night Train to Munich (#67). The brief shot of an English Channel ferry also appears as an Irish Sea ferry in Oh, Mr. Porter! (#33). And of course there’s another cameo by Hitchcock, who made similar appearances in The 39 Steps (#18), Young and Innocent (#89), and Sabotage (#93).

by ·Comments Off on FCC Commissioner Targets Children’s Programming Rules

FCC logoFCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly added a post to the official FCC Blog last Friday to support the view that “the Commission needs to reconsider the ineffective and burdensome requirements currently imposed on our nation’s broadcasters to air a certain amount of educational and informational (E/I) children’s programming on a weekly basis”. In short, he’s going after the three hours a week of E/I shows that over-the-air TV stations are required to broadcast.

Since O’Rielly is one of the commissioners who voted against Net Neutrality, my knee-jerk reaction is that he has only corporate interests at heart and anything he backs must be bad for viewers. But it turns out that O’Reilly makes some good points.

Well, maybe just one good point. O’Reilly noted that each E/I show must currently run for a half hour or longer. He correctly points out that shorter times can lead to better lesson retention and implies that shorter programs could be scheduled with better flexibility. I don’t see that four 15-minute E/I shows would be worse than two half-hours.

I thought that another good point was on its way when he suggested that the current requirements focus too much on the quantity of programming. I thought he might pivot to a way to improve E/I quality, because some of it today is cheap trash. For one show, I puzzled over its disjointed narrative and emphasis on theme parks until I realized that it was made with 100% publicity footage. An hour of Schoolhouse Rock! would be much better than three hours of stock video. But he didn’t go there.

Another good point that I thought he was going to make would have been after he pointed out that the requirement had been expanded in 2004 to include multicast TV channels, which I’ve been calling diginets. I might have nodded my head if O’Reilly had said that the E/I mandate might only apply to the primary channel, or if he had suggested it might be reapportioned between a channel’s diginets. But he didn’t go there either.

Instead, O’Reilly pointed to PBS,  the internet, and pay-TV networks in saying: “Great Children’s Programming Exists Elsewhere”. (There was also a tortured argument that most locals couldn’t possibly find a free half-hour every weekday, so it gets dumped in a three-hour block on Saturday mornings, and that could preempt sports on the west coast sometimes.) I’ll spare you the inventory of children’s programming available through these alternatives and jump to the conclusion: “The question that must be asked is where is the market failure to warrant the continuation of the FCC’s Kid Vid mandates?”

No, that’s not the question. The children’s educational TV requirement is supposed to be a part of a station’s service to the public, whose airwaves provide the commercial broadcaster with the means to a handsome profit. It’s not supposed to be an educational lifeline for the suburban kid with 300 cable channels and unlimited internet access. It’s there to serve the single, working mom who can’t afford pay TV. It’s the scintilla of good in a shopping channel’s schedule. It’s the legacy of broadcasters working to improve the life of every viewer.

Market-based regulations are an oxymoron. Government regulations should balance the benefits to the public with the need to ensure that commercial TV stations remain healthy and prosperous. Nobody’s turning off the lights just because of their E/I obligations.

by ·Comments Off on Diginet Quest Debuts Tonight

Quest logoA new over-the-air digital subchannel network is scheduled to begin service this evening. According to Wikipedia, Quest will carry travel, historical, science and adventure-focused documentary and reality series aimed at adults between the ages of 25 and 54.

In its first week, Quest will show old episodes of Dogfights, Modern Marvels, and Ice Road Truckers (which all first aired on the History Channel), Swamp Loggers, Storm Chasers, Flying Wild Alaska, and Auction Kings (Discovery Channel), and Most Daring (TruTV). They’ll be packaged as eight-hour segments repeated three times each weekday, which was how Decades rolled when it launched before it shifted to a more typical programming day.

These were the kind of shows that I used to watch with my kid after coming home from grade school a decade ago. In fact, considering their age, these might be some of the actual episodes we watched. It’s nice to have another free TV network with a fresh approach. Now if we can just get someone to resurrect The Tube.

by ·Comments Off on IA #7: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead (1968) on IMDb

Not only is Night of the Living Dead one of the highest-rated movies in the Internet Archive Top 100, it’s also the most downloaded movie in the Archive’s Feature Films collection. It was to be released as Night of the Flesh Eaters, but when the title changed, the original theatrical distributor accidentally left off the film’s copyright notice. Under US copyright law at the time, this caused the movie to go directly into the public domain.

Despite the lack of copyright, the movie is one of the most profitable ever made, earning over $12 million on a budget of less than 1% of that amount. Its public-domain status also helped make it so influential, as it effectively wrote the rules on zombies as reanimated, flesh-eating cannibals. The explicit gore surprised and repelled original audiences, but there’s no denying Night of the Living Dead’s endurance.