by ·Comments Off on IA #100: Gulliver’s Travels (1939)

Gulliver's Travels (1939) on IMDb 

We start the list (or finish it, if you’re reading 1 to 100) with a longtime staple of public domain movie sellers. Gulliver’s Travels, produced by Fleischer Studios, was just the second full-length animated film and was clearly inspired by the first, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The animation, music, and all the technical aspects are competent enough, but there aren’t any characters to root for. Gabby is too annoying to be sympathetic, and Gulliver is too wooden to be interesting. In short, this sneaks onto the IA Top 100 for its Technicolor dazzle (especially for 1939!) but there are easily 99 movies in the Internet Archive that are better.

by ·Comments Off on The Top 100 Feature Films On Archive.org

Internet Archive logoOver the coming months, I’m going to share a treat with you. I’ve often written about the Internet Archive; for years I embedded an IA cartoon of the week on this blog. It’s a wonderful organization for many reasons, but the one that matters here is its amazing wealth of freely available movies and other video. About the only thing IA lacks is systemic curation. I’m launching this series to correct one small part of that.

It took weeks of research and sorting, and now it’s ready. Over the coming months, I’ll list the Top 100 scripted, English-language, sound entries in the IA Feature Film collection. (I’m making lists of excellent silent films and documentaries to share later.) The rankings are strongly informed by IMDb user ratings but also include consideration from Leonard Maltin’s ratings and a few nudges from me. When you disagree, please leave a comment with some reasons why. Have fun!

by ·Comments Off on Dish Stops Lool From Selling Someone Else’s Channels
Lool IPTV box with antennas

The “2017 LOOL Arabic Gold IPTV Box,” as currently advertised on eBay

Dish Network and NagraStar shut down a different kind of pirate this week. According to Advanced Television, the two won a court order against Lool Tech Co. and a partner over the Lool IPTV box, which streamed mostly Arabic channels.

Dish and Nagra had been on a tear, picking off distributors and even end users of the NFPS IKS service, which streamed pay-TV channels that apparently originated from Dish. But Lool looks like it’s different. Lool boasts over 700 Arabic channels, which is more than Dish handles, so at least some of them must be from other sources. The Advanced Television story mentioned instead that “the Lool defendants retransmitted channels in which DISH holds exclusive rights”.

This reminds me a lot more of our dear departed NimbleTV, which was built with the goal of facilitating overseas pay-TV subscriptions to be viewed in the US. Every channel was paid for by the US subscriber, but Dish really didn’t like it, and Nimble soon shut down. Dish has the US rights to certain foreign channels, so there’s no good way to provide them otherwise.

There are still web sites such as wwiTV.com that provide links to hundreds of IP-delivered channels, originating all over the world. I guess it’s when you build them into a box or sell them as a service that Dish thinks you’ve gone too far.

by ·Comments Off on Cheddar Will Give Away Antennas in OTA Push

According to an article in Bloomberg today, the “live and on demand video news network” Cheddar plans to give away small over-the-air UHF antennas. Cheddar is renting broadcast space from DTV America in five markets and will partner with advertiser Dunkin Donuts to give away antennas in those markets.

Jon Steinberg, founder of Cheddar, said that the number of broadcast-only homes is rising. “Anywhere we can provide a stream that replicates that cable news viewing experience is where we’re going to be,” he said.

Cheddar’s eight-hour programming day is available on Sling TV and as a separate app. “It also has a second feed — two to three hours a day of original content plus archived programming — that’s carried on Facebook and will air on the broadcast stations.”

It’s great to see another entry into the universe of digital sub-channels. I hope that more OTA choices will lead to more OTA viewers, which then lead to more OTA choices.

by ·Comments Off on Two Months Later, AirTV Integrates OTA
Air TV channel guide window

Now on Air TV, the OTA channels begin to the right of where the Sling TV channels end.

As I wrote when I first received my AirTV a couple of months ago, it came without all of the functionality that I saw at its demo at CES. Over-the-air channels were pushed aside, not integrated, and it took several clicks just to get over to them.

It’s taken a long time, even longer than promised, but AirTV has fixed the problem. I suspect the delay may have had something to do with a change in direction; instead of choosing a few favorite OTA channels to join the Sling TV crowd, they’re all integrated in the same channel guide bar complete with logos.

AirTV is still without a DVR, although Sling offers a lot of on-demand programming from its networks. With my Sling app on my Android phone and tablet, I can record most OTT network programs, but there’s no OTA channel support. I’m guessing it’ll be a long time before Sling/Air can straddle that divide, all the more reason to keep my Tablo and Channel Master DVR+ around.