by ·Comments Off on Sinclair mini-blackout could be a retrans milestone
Mean, angry TV set with teeth

© Depositphotos / herminutomo

Last week, we got to see the full lifespan of a retransmission consent dispute condensed to just a day or two. When Sinclair Broadcasting tried to tie an unrelated pay-only network to permission to rebroadcast 129 over-the-air channels, Dish Network and the FCC blocked them, and Sinclair’s blackout ended in less than 24 hours.

At least that’s what happened if you believe Dish, and since I’m still a Dish shareholder, that would be my inclination. Sinclair has a completely different view, and I’ll get around to that.

First, the details. A couple of weeks ago, Dish filed a complaint to the FCC saying Sinclair was refusing to negotiate. The day after that formal complaint, Dish said Sinclair had resumed talks. Then last Tuesday, Sinclair pulled its 129 TV stations off Dish solely “to gain negotiating leverage for carriage of an unrelated cable channel that it hopes to acquire,” according a Dish press release. Dish also restarted the FCC complaint.

The next morning, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler sprang to action, calling for an emergency meeting with Dish and Sinclair. “Just last year, Congress instructed the Commission to look closely at whether retransmission consent negotiations are being conducted in good faith,” he wrote. “That’s why I have proposed to my fellow Commissioners a new rulemaking to determine how best to protect the public interest.” By the end of the day, Sinclair had agreed in principle to a long-term deal with Dish and lifted the blackout.

BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield wrote in a blog post that Sinclair’s short-lived blackout may be the last straw for unfettered retransmission demands. “The government is looking for reasons to get more involved to help consumers,” he wrote. “Sinclair may have finally given them a blatant enough excuse.”

On the other hand, Sinclair later claimed that the FCC’s actions had literally nothing to do with the speedy end to the blackout. Seriously. “In fact, the FCC process actually delayed the resolution, because it added more issues to negotiate, which lengthened DISH’s service interruption, not shortened it,” Sinclair wrote. So without that meddling FCC, the blackout would have been over in maybe eight hours? I guess we’ll never know.

If this incident signals a new willingness for the FCC to protect the public interest in retransmission fee negotiations, Greenfield might be spot on. If stations have to negotiate on price alone without leveraging unrelated networks, and if the FCC will nudge them to bargain in good faith, maybe we could start seeing contracts reached through arbitration instead of blackouts. If viewers are okay with monthly subscriptions to watch their local free-TV stations, they deserve to get what they pay for.

by ·Comments Off on Videos about videos: David Lee Roth

David Lee Roth’s remake of the Just A Gigolo / I Ain’t Got Nobody medley, melded by Louis Prima and earlier covered by The Village People, peaked at #4 on the Billboard charts in September 1985.

But it was this tour de force video that lampooned MTV and so many 80s video staples that got everyone’s attention. There are two nominees for 1985 MTV Video of the Year in this clip: California Girls (seen in the opening framing sequence) and the medley itself. Both lost to Don Henley’s The Boys Of Summer.

When it comes to goofy videos, this is one of my favorites. I’ll sometimes tell someone who’s in on the joke, “You’ve got char-asthma.” And when it comes to videos about videos, this might be the best.

by ·Comments Off on Videos about videos: Phil Collins

We continue the discussion of 80s music videos about making music videos with Phil Collins’ Don’t Lose My Number. The song peaked at #4 in September 1985, but was never released as a single in the UK.

If the song’s Wikipedia entry is to believed, this is truly a meta video. Supposedly, “Collins did not know what he would use as a video theme for ‘Don’t Lose My Number’, so he decided to create a video showing his decision process in selecting a theme for it.” In the video, Collins interviews several “directors” who offer parodies of other music videos, including You Might Think, which I covered last month. In lieu of a tidy ending, the video ends with the spoken line, “So how does it end?” So very, very meta!

Earlier, in Easy Lover, Collins shared MTV’s award for Best Overall Performance in a Video with Philip Bailey. That beat out another video about making videos, and that’s the one I’ll use to wrap up this theme next week.

by ·Comments Off on Videos about videos: Steve Perry

To wind up this Summer of 80s Music Videos, I want to turn to another theme that developed after a couple of years. You saw it in Money For Nothing, profiled here last week, but it was more obvious in several other videos – they were music videos specifically about making music videos.

One of the first examples of this form of navel-gazing was Oh Sherrie by Journey lead singer Steve Perry. It’s the most unintentionally ironic of the form; after complaining that a Renaissance-style wedding in the video was too over-the-top and serious, Perry performs a very serious, over-the-top ballad.

The song written for Perry’s then-girlfriend Sherrie Swafford, who was also his love interest in the music video. Other co-writers included supporting musicians Bill Cuomo and Craig Krampf, who had also performed on Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes, and Randy Goodrum. It peaked at #3 on the Billboard chart in June 1984.

by ·Comments Off on Here's another animated Video of the Year

Money for Nothing by Dire Straits beat out Take On Me and three other nominees to win the 1986 MTV Video of the Year award. The video was one of the first uses of computer animation, intercut with rotoscoped concert footage and just a little T&A parody.

Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair created the animation, and the studio they later founded was responsible for another milestone in computer animation, the Saturday morning cartoon ReBoot.

Composer and lead vocalist Mark Knopfler said the lyrics were transcribed from, or at least based on, what a real electronics store customer said while watching music videos on the televisions there. It’s use of an f-word (six letters, not four) later caused it to be banned by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. Like offensive stereotypes in some 1940s cartoons, that slur can be heard as what some loser might mutter in the 80s, even though we know better now.