by ·Comments Off on IA #26: A Star Is Born (1937)

A Star Is Born (1937) on IMDb

In this Technicolor blockbuster,  Janet Gaynor stars as an aspiring Hollywood actress, and Fredric March as a fading movie star who helps launch her career. From all accounts, A Star Is Born was fairly faithful to the true state of Hollywood at the time, and its deeply resonant themes of achievement and personal sacrifice led to two major remakes with a third in production for 2018.

Some film historians believe that the marriage of Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay was the film’s real-life inspiration. John Bowers has also been identified as inspiration for the Norman Maine character given his similar fate. Wherever it came from, this slice of film industry life is an excellent choice for the Internet Archive Top 100.

by ·Comments Off on Donated “Zombie” Licenses May Benefit Public TV
Zombie hand coming out of his grave from TV

© Nomadsoul1 / Depositphotos

Looking for something more cheerful than anything going on in Washington right now? Then let’s talk about zombies. That’s what Scott Fybush at Current did yesterday, writing an extensive article about donations of commercial TV licenses that turned into “zombies” after their owners cashed out the value of their spectrum.

Those donated licenses are just low-power commercial digital TV, and their public broadcasting recipients – WGBH Boston, WNET New York, and WPBT Miami – are still deciding what to do with them. Meanwhile, their previous owners, who had sold their spectrum rights in the FCC auction earlier this year, get a tax write-off.

Fybush wrote that the FCC called these licenses “zombies” because, although they aren’t in active use, they can be resurrected if another broadcaster is willing to lend some of its own channel capacity to get them back on the air. Since they’re commercial licenses, the public stations could use them for commercial side projects, such as ATSC 3.0 sandboxes. Piggybacking on strong, existing UHF public TV channels could give the former low-power stations a wider reach than they ever had in their first lives.

It’s all a lot more complicated than I want to recap here, so you really ought to go over to Current and go read it!

 

by ·Comments Off on Free TV Sports Sighted In A Weird Market
Screen shot of a basketball game

University of Kansas basketball, as seen on KMCI TV

Thanksgiving Weekend often means travel time at FreeTVBlog World Headquarters, and this time the trip was to Kansas City MO to see relatives. An application of my mobile TV scanner revealed something I hadn’t noticed before: there are live sports available on independent over-the-air stations in KC.

There is nothing remarkable in a local affiliate simply carrying nationally broadcast sports, so I don’t get excited about games on the major networks or Stadium, the diginet formerly known as American Sports Network. Besides those outlets, there were two independent stations with regional sporting events over at least the couple of weeks after Thanksgiving. KMCI had games from Missouri State, Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Kansas (twice). KSMO (technically a My Network affiliate) had another Missouri-Kansas City game plus part of its season-long coverage of the Kansas City Mavericks minor-league hockey team.

I think that Kansas City’s unusual situation has helped create this OTA opportunity. It’s not its size; Kansas City is the number 33 TV market, below Raleigh NC and Indianapolis, for example. Yet neither Raleigh nor Indianapolis have any non-network college basketball scheduled for the next couple of weeks.

My guess is that the answer is either its geography or its pay-TV regional sports network. Since the Kansas City market is split between Missouri and Kansas, it has twice as many schools to show. And Kansas City’s feed of Fox Sports Midwest gives them a lot of St. Louis Blues and Oklahoma City Thunder, neither of which is a big draw in KC.

For whatever reason, I’m thankful that there is another place where everyone with an antenna can watch the type of occasional local sports that I grew up with. It would be great if more stations could follow its example.

by ·Comments Off on Wednesday Notes

You know all those promises by internet service providers that they don’t need any silly Title II rules to behave themselves? Those rules haven’t been repealed quite yet, but Charter is already using the likely FCC decision to argue its case against New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. As Daniel Frankel writes at FierceCable, “In its letter to the judge, Charter discussed how the FCC’s proposed ‘light-touch’ regimen dispenses of rules governing paid prioritization, thus damaging Schneiderman’s case regarding Netflix throttling.” Which leaves us with little reason to expect anything better than the worst-case scenario once ISPs can do whatever they want.

Jeff Baumgartner of Multichannel News hits the highlights of a report by The Diffusion Group predicting that legacy pay TV service penetration will fall to 60% by 2030. Meanwhile over-the-top pay TV will grow from 4% of U.S. homes to 14% by then. I remember when I encountered my first report like this at an old magazine job and immediately thought it was a big deal. The wise senior editor looked at me as the rookie I was and gently admonished, “They’re just guessing.”

On the other hand, as Jeremy Barr of The Hollywood Reporter and others noticed, ESPN laid off another 150 employees this morning. “The cuts represent less than 2 percent of ESPN’s 8,000-strong workplace, and the network is still hiring.” The wife asked me if this is the start of the network’s death spiral. I assured her that ESPN would endure, if ever so slightly more frugally. The real pinch should come in two or three years when sports rights fees will stop escalating, and owners and players will need to agree on the best way to divide a more stable revenue pie. I predict at least one major sports lockout by 2020, but I’m just guessing.

by ·Comments Off on IA #27: One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942)

One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) on IMDb

One of Our Aircraft is Missing rises above its World War II propaganda roots, showing an RAF bomber crew bailing out over the occupied Netherlands and looking for a way to get back to England. The Dutch people who put their lives at risk to help and the thoughtful sequence of events on the way to rescue make this a true classic.

Peter Ustinov makes his film debut as a young priest, as if you needed another reason to watch this earnest, realistic entry in the Internet Archive Top 100.