The settings seem more claustrophobic than high-budget, but Suddenly delivers a surprisingly taut thriller. Frank Sinatra, fresh off a best supporting actor Oscar the year before, stars as the leader of a group of assassins who terrorize one family’s house as they wait for the President to pass by.
Leonard Maltin gave this slice of film noir 3½ (of 4) stars, helping it move up the chart on the Internet Archive Top 100.
Yesterday, I wondered what drove Sling to withdraw from Channel Master’s over-the-air receivers. There’s no official reason yet, but Jeff Baumgartner pointed to a new device from Sling’s AirTV. Unlike the device Sling launched at CES 2017, the AirTV Player, this new one is called just, uh, AirTV.
The Player accepts an optional (though recommended) OTA adapter for local channels and streams Sling TV, Netflix, YouTube, and everything else that works on an Android TV. The new AirTV doesn’t have any streaming; instead it works a lot like SiliconDust’s HDHomeRun, taking an OTA antenna input and making it available throughout the house via WiFi. The differences are that the AirTV integrates with the SlingTV viewer app (and its own AirTV app) and makes those locals available from anywhere.
Another way to look at the AirTV is that it’s like a Tablo with no DVR, which is the most conspicuous omission for the AirTV Player as well. In a marketplace where a sub-$40 digital converter box can pause and record OTA, it seems like a no-brainer for AirTV to add it. Maybe I’ll learn more about it at CES next month.
Sling just sent out an email to subscribers, presumably just those who watch on a Channel Master DVR+, which began, “The time has come for us to bid farewell to one of our devices. Soon, Sling TV will no longer be supported on Channel Master.”
That was all the useful information the note provided about this change, so while I await responses to my inquiries to Sling and Channel Master, it’s a good thing that I have enough questions and speculation to fill the gap.
When is soon? The end of the year is a natural, but it might also align with …
Does this have anything to do with Channel Master’s Stream+? It’s supposed to launch at CES 2018, which is pretty soon, and it shares some characteristics and a common source (Technicolor) with Sling’s AirTV Player. When Sling jumped on the DVR+ at CES 2016, it was hungry for subscribers and didn’t have its own device. Maybe now Sling sees Channel Master as a competitor? Which leads to …
Who initiated this change? Is Channel Master just shifting Sling viewers to the Sling Android TV app, which I would presume to be available on the Stream+? (Apparently not, see update below.) Did Sling want to make changes that wouldn’t fit on the DVR+? Or for some truly wild speculation, will Sling use CES 2018 to announce a local OTA DVR for AirTV?
I doubt that we’ll get all of those answers before next month, but I’ll update this as soon as I hear anything more.
Update: Channel Master emailed me to say that Sling initiated its removal from the DVR+. CM wrote, “Unfortunately, we do not have a reason behind their decision to pull the support.” I’m sorry to see it go.
In Which We Serve is the first movie in the Internet Archive Top 100 list with a perfect 4-star rating from Leonard Maltin. (Or the last, if you’re reading them 1 to 100.) It was nominated for Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay (Noel Coward). Coward, who also scored, co-directed and starred, won an honorary Academy Award for his “outstanding production achievement”. The New York Film Critics Circle and National Board of Review both named it the best film of 1942.
Maltin wrote, “Unlike many WW2 films, this masterpiece doesn’t date one bit”. It’s the story of the crew of a British destroyer, told in flashback. If you’ve never seen it before, this is your chance.
Probably because all the cool kids run pay-TV services, T-Mobile will acquire Level3 TV, as recounted by Jeff Baumgartner of Multichannel News. T-Mobile said it will “launch a disruptive new TV service in 2018.” With all the other over-the-top services in place, I can’t imagine a niche in which T-Mobile would outperform the incumbents. But I’ve been wrong before.
In a similar vein, Stephanie Prange at Home Media Magazine described the relaunch of Redbox on Demand. It won’t be like the service that it shut down in 2014, instead providing options that remind me a lot of Vudu’s – short-term rentals or digital purchases. Redbox doesn’t have Vudu’s head start, but it’s got plenty of existing kiosk customers. But if your customers already rent new DVDs for less than $2 at kiosks, then how do you pitch the idea that they should stay home and pay $4 to rent the same movies online?
And Bloomberg’s Kyle Stock examines why it’s so hard to find Christmas classic films on streaming services. It’s because they’re not the fresh content that pay services crave and they’re not the long-tail losers that a studio might be willing to license on the cheap. “Of the 25 greatest holiday movies as ranked by American Movie Classics, only five are available for streaming on Amazon.com, Hulu or Netflix this season.” That’s one reason my holiday tradition is the cartoon Christmas Comes But Once a Year. It’s always free at the Internet Archive.