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As we continue the FTABlog summer of 80s music videos, we turn to the early days of MTV and a video that answered one of my nagging questions: When a love song is sung in harmony, by a group, how does that work? I mean, you never hear the lyric “we love you,” but that’s what’s going on, right?

Huey Lewis and the News had been bouncing around the San Francisco Bay Area in one form or another for a decade before they became an overnight success. They took a song written by their former producer “Mutt” Lange, tweaked the lyrics a bit, then shot an innovative video. The whole band sings while under the covers with the target of their love song, Do You Believe In Love. It’s absurd, and it made me nod my head. Yup, that’s what a harmonized love song should look like.

With heavy airplay from MTV, the video was the first of a long string of 80s hits. In a decade full of earnest performances, it was fun to have at least one band that didn’t take itself too seriously.

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After too long of a break, FTABlog returns to its important coverage of 1980s music video. Let’s see how many we can fit in before real TV news returns.

I first got cable in 1981, and it’s hard to overstate the effect it had on my TV viewing. Cable back then included about 30 channels of live TV. (The first system carried 36 channels, but some of them were informational filler, like community calendars and the slow-scanned news photos of the Satellite Program Network, whose name prompted ESPN to add the E. But I digress.) For prime-time viewers, that meant 30 choices instead of six over-the-air channels. The difference for me was more dramatic. I worked at a morning newspaper, arriving home around 2 AM. For me, cable meant about 20 choices instead of exactly one OTA channel, the only one that broadcast through the night.

(One more digression: At the newspaper, a copy boy who worked the same shift mentioned watching Marcus Welby reruns when he got home. “I don’t like Marcus Welby,” he said, “but it’s the only thing on.”)

Back then, HBO would run little filler programs between movies, and one of them was the Video Jukebox, which showed a music video or two. Before MTV caught on, this was the widest method of exposure for music videos in the US. Anyway, I’ll always remember one night when the video was the ubiquitous hit Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes. I thought I was incredibly lucky to get this big hit from whatever random video list HBO used; I didn’t recognize that the network carefully chose every interstitial feature. It’s fun to remember when I was young and stupid in different ways than I am now.

Well, hey, Carnes got something wrong too. The original version as recorded in 1974 by Jackie DeShannon suggested that Davis could “make a crow blush” but Carnes’ version misspeaks that lyric as “make a pro blush”. DeShannon’s version made a lot more sense, although Carnes’ did spend nine weeks at #1 on the Billboard charts. At least DeShannon, with Donna Weiss, got some composer royalties out of it.

by ·Comments Off on OTA DVR race heats up
Tablo TV with program grid.

What the Tablo program grid looks like on a TV with Roku.

At first I was going to brag about my new gigabit internet access, then I remembered that you’d want to know who was providing it (CenturyLink) and how the installation process went (pretty badly), so I skipped it. Anyway, there’s just too much over-the-air TV DVR news to ignore.

First I’ll tip my hat again to ZatzNotFunny, which reported that TiVo has a limited-time offer of lifetime service for its Roamio OTA DVR if you can purchase it for $300. As ZatzNotFunny’s commenters noticed, that special URL won’t always load, but repeatedly clicking the link (not just refreshing the unwanted landing page) has worked for some folks, including me. TiVo has long been the gold standard in DVRs, and this removes the Roamio OTA’s main competitive disadvantage – its really high monthly fees. At $300, it’s still a little expensive to recommend wholeheartedly, but now I would at least consider choosing the Roamio OTA.

That’s even truer given the second bit of news. As first reported by ZDNet over the weekend, the next major version of Microsoft Windows will not include Windows Media Center. In fact, WMC will be incompatible with Windows 10, so there would be no way to add it as an extra feature as with Windows 8. As the ZDNet article describes, this won’t mean much to existing Windows 7 computers running WMC, except that they now have a sunset date of 2020, when Microsoft will probably stop supporting that operating system. Computers running Windows 8.1 with the WMC add-on will be supported to 2023. Too bad WMC is fading just as cord-cutting is getting popular.

Over at Tablo, they’re celebrating a Best of Show Award from the recent NAB Show. Tablo was pitching to internet service providers and similar folks that could add an OTA antenna and some Tablo equipment during an installation to give their customers local channels. Tablo is also opening its Roku grid preview for all Tablo owners; it’s a decent implementation of a program grid considering that it has to be pushed through a restrictive Roku device.

And I’ll close with some good news: The HDHomeRun DVR Kickstarter that I wrote about last time has met its goal weeks in advance. Not only is the DVR funded, but they’re also closing in on the stretch goal of adding support for Kodi (until recently called XBMC). I look forward to getting a chance to try it out.

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A computer screen showing how HDHomeRun's proposed DVR might look

How HDHomeRun’s proposed DVR might look

Just when I think I’ve caught up on all of the news about DVRs for over-the-air TV, something new comes up. In this case, two somethings.

Over at Dave Zatz’s amazing blog, Zatz Not Funny!, Zatz broke the news that TiVo was pitching its service in a special email to former Aereo customers. (Or at least to some of them. I’m a former Aereo subscriber and I never saw it. But I digress.) TiVo, which purchased the Aereo’s customer list during the latter’s bankruptcy sale, offered its Roamio OTA DVR plus its Stream unit for sending a TV stream outside the home network plus its guide service, all for $19.95/month for two years. After those two years, guide service is $14.95/month, a cost that’s head and shoulders above any other OTA DVR.

I have so many happy menus of TiVo, which was my first DVR. The peanut-shaped remote felt great in my hand. The DVR filled any empty space by quietly recording shows I might like. The TiVo’s great design gave it unmatched, pioneering usability. Its monthly guide fee was a little high, but a lifetime subscription took away some of the sting.

Now the TiVo still offers a great user experience, but I can’t recommend that deal. Subtract the guide price and you’re paying only $120 over two years for hardware that’s worth twice that, but spending almost $180/year for guide data will get old fast.

Let’s turn from the original DVR to the newest – so new that it isn’t here yet. Silicondust, the makers of HDHomeRun, the amazing little OTA tuner for home networks, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund its own DVR. Based on that Kickstarter page, the HDHomeRun DVR will allow recording to an always-on PC or a network attached storage (NAS) drive. Adding the NAS capability should reduce electricity consumption compared to, for example, my HDHomeRun-connected Windows Media Center PC.

Guide data will cost a reasonable $30/year, and Kickstarter backers at $30 or more will get a year free. HDHomeRun’s viewing apps already work great, so I have high expectations for its DVR software. The Kickstarter notes suggest that Silicondust already has most of it running but hopes use pledge proceeds to add programmers to add support for protected content. If the project gets enough support, Silicondust may also create an iOS app, filling the most obvious gap in its current ecosystem.

From all I’ve seen and heard, Silicondust is made of good people who make products that work well. All Kickstarter projects involve risk, but I think I’ll make a $30 or $60 bet on the HDHomeRun DVR.

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Luc Tomasino, TabletTV CMO, describes his product at the NAB Show.

Luc Tomasino, TabletTV CMO, describes his product at the NAB Show.

I’ve about recovered from the annual National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas, held this week. Its organizers announced that over 100,000 people attended this year, a slight increase over last year, but the general mood was just a little quieter.

Before the show opened, Multichannel News hit the stands with a cover story on over-the-air TV: Threat From the Skies. You should read the whole thing, but the main idea was that pay TV should be concerned about OTA, especially OTA DVRs such as TiVo’s Roamio OTA and Channel Master’s DVR+, which is pictured in the article.

Despite this heightened awareness, not much actually happened with those OTA DVRs. The DVR+ displayed some recent integrated online video sources in its program grid, but Channel Master representatives expected to have bigger news in a few weeks. Simple.TV didn’t make a public appearance, although news came during the show that it had raised another $5.1 million. Tablo issued a press release that said it was trying to lure regional broadband operators to add its service. TabletTV hosted a conference session for low-power TV broadcasters to point out that in an OTA program grid, the LPTV listings are just as prominent as the full-power guys’.

There just wasn’t much news from this group in Las Vegas, but I expect to hear a lot more soon.

Other notes:

  • NAB President Gordon Smith’s keynote was genial and relaxed. For example, he said that in contrast to cable TV news, local TV news is important because it’s “where Americans turn when they want just the facts with no yelling, screaming and finger-pointing.” Smith is a sharp guy celebrating five years of satisfying the disparate audiences within the association, but this particular speech sounded a lot like a fireside chat from SCTV’s Mayor Tommy Shanks.
  • Features of the next-generation broadcasting standard, ATSC 3.0, found their way into several exhibitors’ displays, which demonstrated text-based emergency alerts, seamless mobile reception, 4K resolution, and many other wish-list items. What’s still uncertain is exactly which of those features will be included in the finalized version of ATSC 3.0, which will then require a whole new generation of TV sets to view it. Expect at least another decade with the status quo.
  • Camera drones were a big topic of conversion and demonstration. Brian Holl, VP of Strategy and Outreach for the Small UAV Coalition, showed off a small multi-rotor flier and discussed the FAA’s rules against commercial use of such devices. Holl said that his organization is focusing on Congress to change the law to allow responsible piloting of camera drones. While it might not happen soon, Holl believed that it was inevitable; as he put it, “Technology always wins.”