by ·Comments Off on IA #30: My Favorite Brunette (1947)

My Favorite Brunette (1947) on IMDb

There’s a good amount of film noir in the Internet Archive Top 100, but I think this is the only film noir parody. The story is told in flashback as Bob Hope, as a baby photographer, relates how he was caught up in a world of mistaken identity and subterfuge. Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney provide the humorous menace, and with Dorothy Lamour as the love interest, you might be able to guess who appears in a cameo.

The IMDb’s users don’t give comedies the high rankings they give more serious films. Adjusted for that, plus Leonard Maltin’s endorsement, it’s enough to keep this fun movie in the top 30.

by ·Comments Off on Your Friday FCC Dump

I was reminded today why I often find it hard to write anything on Fridays. That seems to be the day of the week when all the bad news comes out.

Ben Munson at FierceCable wrote about reactions to the FCC’s vote yesterday to relax media ownership rules to make it easier for broadcasters to own newspapers in their markets, and to own multiple TV stations. Supporters thought it was a gift to broadcast groups such as Sinclair, and opponents thought it was a gift to Sinclair Broadcasting.

Brian Heater at TechCrunch rounded up the evidence that the FCC will vote to kill Net Neutrality next month. There’s another case where on a Monday I might have exhorted you to call your legislators to fight to keep equal treatment for all bits, but on Friday I just see a future where Comcast charges extra for OTT services it doesn’t own.

And there’s news, also from Munson, that Sinclair is going full speed ahead on ATSC 3.0 just hours after the FCC voted to allow the broadcast standard. According to a Reuters story, Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said the new technology would force consumers to buy new televisions. “The FCC calls this approach market driven. That’s right — because we will all be forced into the market for new television sets or devices.” On the other hand, Sinclair calls it “the Holy Grail” because it will tells them who is watching and where, so there are privacy concerns.

There must be some good news in the middle of all this. Maybe I’ll find it on Monday.

by ·Comments Off on IA #31: Love Affair (1939)

Love Affair (1939) on IMDb

A painter meets a young American woman on a ship bound for New York. This isn’t Titanic, but Love Affair definitely steers towards romance. Charles Boyer plays the French painter who, ducking notoriety, promises to meet Irene Dunne six months after they disembark. As you might guess, plenty of stuff happens in those six months.

Leonard Maltin gave this movie 3½ (of 4) stars, and you can see the high IMDb user rating above. Boyer and Dunne’s chemistry make this drama with a touch of comedy better than most, even in the Internet Archive Top 100.

by ·Comments Off on How I Fixed My FTA Dish
Close-up of the side of a dish motor showing angle marks

This close-up of my old motor mounted to the dish pole showed me how to mount my new motor.

Hey, all you free-to-air satellite viewers who hopefully frequent FTAList! I remembered today that I forgot to tell you what I did last month. My FTA system stopped working, but I was able to fix it.

It started months ago. Once in awhile, when I would tell my receiver to tell my motor to point my dish to a new satellite, it would go there, then continue on just a teeny bit too far. The channels on that bird simply wouldn’t be visible until I told the motor to switch to another satellite then switch back to the one I wanted in the first place. I shrugged and figured my 1.2-meter Ku-band dish had just shifted on its mount somehow.

The glitches came more frequently. Finally last month, the motor just refused to turn in response to most commands. That STAB HH 120 motor is one of the few that can drive my large dish, and I’d had it for years, much longer than I’ve kept any one receiver. To isolate the problem, I swapped out a different receiver, different quad-shield coax cables, and bypassed the DiSEqC switch. As you can guess by the photo, nothing else helped; it was the motor that had gone bad.

I remember the work it took to set up and point that motor when I first installed it, so I went looking for an exact replacement. I wound up at Ricks Satellite, home to the best wild feed forum that I know of, and Rick had just what I was looking for. I bought it, Rick shipped it, and two days later I installed it to match the photos I had taken of the old motor. In less time than it’s taken me to type this note, my motorized dish was ready for action without any repointing or tweaking.

So take this as a reminder, if you happen to have a motorized FTA system, that pieces of it will go bad over time. When that piece is the motor, a few photos and an exact replacement can save hours of set up time. For once, I got it right!

 

by ·Comments Off on Wednesday Notes

Ben Munson at FierceCable disagrees with my assessment of the new Philo OTT service. “Since all the programmers involved in the Philo launch are also strategic investors, the service also provides them with some degree of distribution ownership … There doesn’t seem to be any reason Philo won’t have a material impact for all involved.” I’ve been wrong before.

Brian Fung writes in The Washington Post that ATSC 3.0 is just another facet of the FCC’s broadcast TV changes that benefit media consolidation at the expense of localism. It’s really quite depressing.

And Troy Dreier at Streaming Media magazine has the right response to the typical newspaper hand-wringing about using OTT services to replace cable TV. The future of video has begun, and “we can all enjoy a variety of niche services that … we can now select from. Did I say select? No, apparently we’re forced to subscribe … to all of them.” Exactly! So many of those articles rebuild a matching set of pay-TV channels using streaming services, then complain that they’re about as expensive. Which is the opposite of the point of OTT – the ability to pick and choose which channels to buy. It’s not a la carte, but it’s the closest we’ve got for now.