About the new Star Trek series CBS announced...
Now, only making it available via their (apparently lousy) subscription (with commercials) streaming service is certainly not setting it up for success.
But it premiers January 2017.
What are the chances that CBS All Access still exists in January 2017?
We love the Food Network in my household. And while we still have a U-verse subscription and DVR, most of our TV watching these days is on-demand via iOS apps or Apple TV. (And...to a lesser extent...Amazon Video via iOS or Roku.)
Unfortunately, the Watch Food Network app is not great. It frequently drops when using AirPlay. It frequently crashes. Those problems would be mitigated some if it remembered your place and resumed playing from there, but it never does. To add insult to injury, trying to manually jump forward to where you were is frustrating. In the best case it makes you rewatch all the commercial breaks you’d already sat through, and you eventually find the place despite not having the help of a good scrubber UI. If it should crash, however, it sends you back to square one. There are episodes we haven’t finished watching because several attempts to resume failed.
The worst part is that our experience with this app is making us not want to watch Food Network at all.
Here’s the deal: We pay $12 a month for Hulu without commercials. We would watch enough Food Network, that we’d be willing to pay the same $12/month for just a Food Network subscription without commercials.
But...it would require an app on par with the other big streaming services. (e.g. I hear the people behind the MLB streaming service have helped out others in this department.) And it should allow downloading episodes for offline viewing.
And if anyone from Food Network reads this...while I have your attention... Why is there no way I pay you to watch Feasting on Asphalt?
When I was a kid, public television was inspirational. They (seemingly, at least) proved that, against conventional wisdom, individuals could come together to build something good and give it away for free. In the day when only six organizations could afford to broadcast television in a market the size of Houston. For those idealists to be able to stand alongside the national networks on the VHF band was impressive.
Somewhere along the line, though, they became addicted to corporate money and tacky pledge drives and selling DVDs. The differences between public television and private television were no longer very clear.
I know that some great programming was funded by the money that brought in. But at what cost? The loss of what made public television different. If it isn’t different, what’s the point? I would rather have less programming with lower production values that had stuck to their ideals.
When I said anything, the letters I got back said that I wasn’t as important as their corporate sponsors and the success of their pledge drives.
Now, they send me a letter telling me they’re counting on me because the corporate money is drying up. Now, Nova is interrupted by commercials that look exactly like the shopping channels and nothing like public television. The only thing they are inspiring in my son is snarky comments.
Maybe I’ll help them out. Maybe they’ll rediscover those ideals. Or maybe I’ll instead support what they’re doing on YouTube. Because I get the feeling it is that stuff, of anything they’re doing, that will inspire my kids.
I don’t know that I’ve ever put it this way before, but it seemed so simple when I did.
Except perhaps in some very specific circumstances, I have not been convinced that anti-piracy measures ever increase sales, much less pay for themselves.
Piracy doesn’t matter; sales do. Any anti-piracy measure has to prove that it is going to generate additional sales to more than make up for its costs.
Android TV may sound like a semantic difference — after all, Google TV was based on Android — but it’s something very different. Android TV is no longer a crazy attempt to turn your TV into a bigger, more powerful smartphone. "Android TV is an entertainment interface, not a computing platform," writes Google. "It’s all about finding and enjoying content with the least amount of friction." It will be "cinematic, fun, fluid, and fast."
The thing about convergence was that people wanted the technologies in the background to converge, but they never wanted the experiences to converge. Watching video is ideally done on a TV; web surfing is ideally done on a tablet, and writing a novel is ideally done on a PC. That’s not to say that we shouldn't be able to do all three tasks on all three platforms, but we don’t want, e.g., the full PC experience on our TVs.
If you’re trying to sell me food, and you talk about a lot of things except how it tastes, you’ve not sold me.
I will gladly choose oil over cream because I like the taste of Cool Whip more than Reddi-Wip.
No matter how “natural” your product is, the technical names of chemical compounds in it don’t sound any more appetizing than those you point out in your competition’s products. And I don’t remember what your product even was. I can’t even come up with enough to google for it like I could for Reddi-Wip. So, that was a complete failure.
In fact, no matter what you’re selling, if you’re talking more about your competition than your own product, that’s a bad sign.
Sargento, I am glad you talk about your product in your commercials, but you don’t have to insult other products that I also like at the same time.
Good stories, according to me, have a point. A moral, even if it isn’t a particularly moral moral.
Soap operas are simply about keeping the story going. There is no point except for continuing. Soaps can only hold my interest for a time.
(If you’re thinking of a soap opera that doesn’t meet that definition of a soap opera, then that’s not what I’m talking about when I write “soap opera”.)
I haven’t read any of the Song of Fire and Ice yet. The TV series isn’t selling me on it. I suspect the TV series of being a soap opera, although there are hints of a possible point or two. I’m afraid it won’t actually get to any of those points.
Why? Because I read this quote from GRRM, which I’ve edited for spoilers. (The original with spoilers)
I knew it almost from the beginning. Not the first day, but very soon. I’ve said in many interviews that I like my fiction to be unpredictable. I like there to be considerable suspense. I [SPOILER] in the first book and it shocked a lot of people. [SPOILER] The next predictable thing is to think [SPOILER]. And everybody is going to expect that. So immediately [it] became the next thing I had to do.
Unpredictability for the sake of unpredictability doesn’t make for good storytelling, IMHO. And, ironically, unpredictability becomes predictable after a while. If this is his primary reason for these events, then I’m not inclined to care.
Since the owners of video content can’t wrap their heads around the simple fact that there is zero difference between streaming video to a phone, tablet, computer, “smart TV”, or set-top box†, I say it is time for compulsory licensing.
That’s how music is licensed (here in the US at least). You don’t have to go to the “rights holder” for permission to play a song. You just have to be sure that you pay them the mandated fee.
We get to watch movies and TV however is convenient for us; the “rights holders” get paid; win-win.
†Here’s how you can tell: Open them up and see that, inside, all of these things are computers.
