by ·Comments Off on IA #1: My Man Godfrey (1936)

My Man Godfrey (1936) on IMDb

Here we are at the top of the Internet Archive Top 100 with a comedy that has social consciousness and a heart. William Powell and real-life ex-wife Carole Lombard both received Oscar nominations for My Man Godfrey, which was nominated for six Academy Awards in all. It starts when Lombard brings back homeless Powell as part of a charity scavenger hunt. When her family hires him as a butler, we all learn that he is more complicated than he seems.

Leonard Maltin gave the film a perfect 4 stars, calling it a delightful romp and a classic screwball comedy. In 1999, My Man Godfrey was deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2006, Premiere magazine voted it one of “The 50 Greatest Comedies Of All Time”. For many years, it was on the IMDb Top 250 list, and it still ranks as the best in the Archive’s Feature Films collection.

by ·Comments Off on Wednesday Notes

CW logoMichael Malone at Broadcasting & Cable wrote this afternoon that the CW will expand its programming to six nights a week including Sunday evenings. At 12 hours a week, it’s still not a full-fledged network, but at least we’ll get a couple more hours of fresh programming broadcast over the air.

YouTube TV looks a lot more attractive to me now that it has added the Turner networks, as reported by FierceCable’s Ben Munson. Beginning March 13, the price will rise from $35/month to $40, but before then subscribers can lock in that $35 rate. There are also reports that MLB Network will become available. Now if it can add Comedy Central, then I might think about switching.

Finally, Alan Wolk at Decider wrote yesterday that over-the-top services such as Sling and YouTube TV, though not exactly “cord-cutting” according to his strict definition, are “poised to take over the world.” Jeff Baumgartner of Multichannel News had estimates of all the OTT providers, with Sling leading at 2.3 million subscribers and DirecTV Now second at 1.2 million. However, Netflix has about 55 million subscribers in the US alone, so we might need to wait a while before OTT completes that world takeover.

by ·Comments Off on Are These Really “Cable-Cutting Problems”?
Scissors cutting a cable in front of a video screen

© paulmhill / Depositphotos

Huffington Post’s Todd Van Luling ran an article yesterday about the 5 Cable-Cutting Problems You Probably Didn’t Think About. They’re worth considering, though most of those problems could have been easily prevented. Go ahead and read that article first, then come back for the rebuttal.

1. The new live services have buffering issues. Yes, DirecTV Now and Hulu have had well-publicized problems, but Sling with its earlier launch seems to have figured that one out after its first couple of months.

2. It’s impossible to get every channel you had before. Most of the comments were about trouble with local channels because of bad over-the-air TV reception. The lesson here is not to return to cable, it’s to upgrade your OTA reception.

3. Streaming live sports can be particularly tricky. (See also #1.) The three comments were, in essence: My husband needs the local channels, We have (an OTA) antenna but it’s flaky, and We were watching the Super Bowl on Hulu when it puked. In other words, it’s another problem that would be solved mainly with a good OTA antenna.

4. Internet problems can mess with streaming. This is the most important issue of the five. If you cut the cord and want to stream over-the-top services, you need reliable internet service with decent bandwidth. You’re stuck if your internet provider fails, but that’s also true for cable viewers when their provider has problems.

5. You might have to fight your cable company. Well, yes, some cable companies are notoriously stubborn about cancelling service. Yet every month thousands of subscribers manage to complete the process.

Also, content libraries shift. What you want next month may have left Netflix, but if your heart is set on a given movie or show, buying or renting it online is still cheaper than a big cable bundle. And I think that points to another mindshift that’s helpful to a cable-cutter – even when that one program isn’t available, there’s always something else that is.

To summarize my perspective, if you want to drop pay-TV, the first order of business is to get a great OTA antenna positioned for maximum reliability and channel selection. Second is to line up really good broadband internet access. Then if you want some of those old channels, my current recommendation is Sling, which has the best price and few issues. That might be different a year from now as lineups shift and the other OTT services mature. The video disruption experiment continues.

by ·Comments Off on Proposed Budget Would Kill Public Broadcasting Funding

Corporation for Public Broadcasting logoThis is depressing. Just a couple of weeks ago, an FCC commissioner wanted to revisit educational program requirements for broadcast TV stations, pointing to local PBS stations as the proper substitute. Today, the president’s proposed 2019 budget eliminates funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which subsidizes those local PBS stations.

As described by Ted Johnson in Variety, the previous year’s budget tried the same trick, but fortunately “funding survived, which is a testament to just how much of a wish-list the White House budget really is, as opposed to something that will actually gain traction on Capitol Hill.”

Patrick Butler, president and CEO of America’s Public Television Stations, said he hoped that Washington would see that “we provide the only preschool education for more than half of America’s children, that we are the backbone of public safety communications networks at the local, state and national levels, and that we do more to equip America’s citizens to do the hard work of democracy than anyone else.”

I’m surprised that anyone has to explain this, but education is a societal investment. Kids with hope and knowledge grow up to become productive taxpayers. Kids who see no way out become unhappy burdens to society. Let’s hope that Congress again recognizes that a small outlay today can prevent huge outlays for years to come.

by ·Comments Off on IA #2: His Girl Friday (1940)

His Girl Friday (1940) on IMDb

There are fast-paced comedies, and then there’s His Girl Friday, where Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell and the rest of the cast ad-lib over each other to get a word in edgewise. The film is based on the play The Front Page, in which a newspaper editor tries to keep his star reporter from defecting with one last great story. The switch here is that the role of the reporter was changed to a woman, the editor’s ex-wife.

An IMDb poster said that director Howard Hawks thought of the gender switch at a dinner party where a woman spoke the dialogue from The Front Page. Wikipedia says it occurred during casting after Hawks’ secretary read the reporter’s lines. However it happened, the added level of conflict turned a good play into a great film. The American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Laughs ranked this as the 19th funniest movie of the century, and it fits well as the second-highest ranked movie in the Internet Archive Top 100.