Cord Cutting Debate Takes Center Stage at UBS Conference
Okay, but Cable is starting to suck. I’m not talking about my Internet and my phone. Those are fantastic. I get what I pay for and it’s usually tip-top. If it goes out, I call, it gets figured out. Everything’s great. Bravo Cox on those. Cox customer service isn’t superb but compared to those douchebags at DirecTV, it’s like being at a damn resort. Here in New Orleans, it’s Cox all the way for me.
HDLC will fine you a hundred dollars for mounting a dish in the first ten feet of your historic home. Do you think DirectTV knows this? Perhaps, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter because they must not give a damn because you can see the dishes mounted on the fronts of houses in historic neighborhoods all over the city. Do the installers ask if the houses are in historic district? Mine didn’t. Almost cost me a C-note but I happened to notice HDLC snooping around and quick, got the ladder out.
Okay, so DirectTV sucks. I had a very long story about just how bad their customer service was on a past blog that no longer exists. Ask me about it some time.
So Cox is the best thing going here in New Orleans. Let’s talk about TV programming and providence. And with providence I’m talking about the stuff that really puts the user / viewer in control. I know, I know, it’s not what the media companies want. But they have to make us think we are in control. Like the plot line of one of those movies, there has to be a suspension of disbelief. So they offer us DVR and In-Demand.
DVR is where they allow you to record (I still say “tape”) an episode of your favorite show or movie and watch it at your leisure. So you don’t have to station your ass in front of the TV or run home from the bar so you don’t miss the first 10 minutes of Boardwalk Empire. That’s awesome. So, they only did it because Tivo was making it look easy and they probably saw they were getting jacked up. They came up with their own service and charged a monthly fee for it. Brilliant.
Except it sorta sucks.
First, the hard drive isn’t very big. So if you are taping HD, you only get about three dozen shows in there. Then it starts deleting old shows. You do have an option to hold the show until manually erased. But really, hard drives are vast these days. Make a little effort. Don’t let computers school you that hard. Show some vision. Give us a vast hard drive. We know they exist.
Second, it can only tape two shows at a time and it will often switch the channel you are watching to tape something. So prime time gets real crowded and you have to sort of be on your game if you want to tape a movie showing once before a TV show that will repeat later that night.
Third, even though it has an option to only tape first runs and never tape repeats, if you select repeats, it will tape EVERY repeat. Even if it already has the same episode taped. So you know how some cable channels run their shows in the morning, then in the afternoon and then at night. It will tape all three of the episodes. It fucking doesn’t understand that you want it to tape first runs and repeats THAT AREN’T ALREADY TAPED! So little DVR machine, IF THE FUCKING SAME EPISODE OF THE SAME SHOW IS ALREADY ON THE HARD DRIVE, DON’T TAPE IT AGAIN. I know programmers can figure this out.
So that’s what sucks about DVR. It’s still worth the money but it seems like they could do more with it. And I will say that the reverse and pause features are fantastic. Especially during Saints games.
(Speaking of Saints games, I want to take a quick paragraph here to say FoxHD sucks. It sucks so bad.)
So Cox DVR, a mixed bag. Could really be improved. But okay.
Where Cable really starts getting their ass kicked by the Internet is content and programming and how it is provided. This is less Cox’s fault and more the media companies’.
Yes, yes, everybody just loves “The Walking Dead” and “Mad Men” and “Treme.” But let’s be real honest. They are only a small portion of what’s out there. What truly exists is a bevy of reality shows showing the coached, obviously produced lives of vapid fuckers who don’t even act that way in real life. In between the 22 minutes of Vapid Lives are commercials advertising other people’s Vapid Lives shows and all throughout are annoying ads that take up half the screen advertising the latest Vapid Lives.
Then there is some paid programming and then there are those QVC type channels. So even though we are paying for this stuff, the amount of actual content we are getting is pretty pathetic. The free market, like that line from Fortunate Son, needs more, more, more.
Every now and again there are good movies on basic Cable but the edits are fucking ridiculous and the commercials are too damn long. And does it seems like the channels are all in cahoots as to when to show the commercials? If I switch from “Empire Strikes Back” to “Office Space,” they both have commercials on.
Oh, and the ads. Commercials, whatever, I have a remote for that. Not what I’m paying for but I do have some control. But now there are even ads within the programming. Sometimes the ads obscure the programming. Like sometimes there are subtitles and you cant read them because they are advertising Season 4 of Vapid Lives all over the screen.
Over the last year or so, I have taken screen shots of some of the more un-fucking-believable instances of the onscreen bugs.
Witness…
Image 1: I was pissed at the subtitles being blotted out by ads and hit pause and then, amazingly, the subtitled words “stupid Americans” was blotted out by a show called “Ugly Americans.” On purpose? Hell no. But weird.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Image 2: Yes, that is Sheri Moon Zombie’s cute little butt being obscured by an advertisement for blogs! Get that shit out of there! Sex is a HUGE reason why people pay for cable! (And the Internet too for that matter.)
————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Image 3: What kind of graduate assistant is he? We don’t fucking know!
————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Image 4: Oh man. This is the scene where Jimmy Conway tells the young Henry Hill never to rat on his friends. It’s foreshadowing because later in the movie…SPOILER…Henry rats out Jimmy and Jimmy goes to jail for the rest of his life. Everybody knows DeNiro acts with his mouth. The same mouth that we can’t see because Bravo wants to tell us Tabitha’s back. Who the fuck is Tabitha? I think she’s on that show Vapid Lives.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Image 5: What’s Bourdain so pissed about? It’s because he makes a point of showing us all the nasty bits and the nastiest part of this episode is being obscured because Travel Channel is bragging about showing us their shit in HD. What’s the fucking point of watching it in HD if you can’t see the nasty bits?
————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Image 6: Finally this one was the one that inspired the whole thing. Every time I watch Blazing Saddles I revel in Madeline Kahn’s song onstage, Gene Wilder’s fabulous acting and dialog and this otherwise unknown redhead’s immaculate breasts. Get your stupid graphic off them AMC! WTF!?
————————————————————————————————————————————————————
So when programming isn’t filled with Vapid Lives, Vapid Lives: Miami and Vapid Lives Rewind, they are bombarding us with ads during our favorite movies and shows.
But there is also this thing called InDemand. I have HBO so therefore I have HBO InDemand so I can watch selected shows whenever the hell I want to. Typically for movies they will have like 35 to choose from. A terrible, terrible comparison to Netflix streaming which is only $7 a month and features thousands and thousands more titles. But you know how I said there were 35 to choose from? That’s actually more like 25. Because 10 of those are “making of” shorts.
If there is anything I hate more, it’s “making of” shit. It was cool back in the day when you saw dudes building models of the Mellinium Falcon and blowing up little X-Wings and what not. Or like when the sound guys made laser sounds by hitting a rod against a tension wire?
Now it’s just a guy in a suit against a green screen with little ping pong balls on him and another guy at a computer overlaying a monster skin on him. Not taking away anything from those CGI guys. They are talented. But it doesn’t really do the “making of” concept any justice. We know how yall made it. You made it on your computer. If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.
That’s just with special effects movies. They also have “making of” offerings for flicks like “Wedding Crashers.” These are just commercials for the films and publicity for the actors. I sense a lot of bullshit in them.
I want Ina Garten, Bourdain and Two Fat Ladies for my wife and Cosmos, American Experience and The Boondocks for me. I don’t want Vapid Lives, chopped up versions of Casino and “making of” shit.The long tail is so long these days, Cable needs to be agile to keep up. They have to get out of the concept that they can provide everything the viewer needs. I am shocked that Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Netflix and just about anyone else were able to get in on the the limitless content of Internet on the TV first.
But look, cable channels, you need to understand that advertising that takes away from the experience you are providing is the shittiest way to deliver it. You do nothing for your advertisers and diminish the very thing you are trying to sell to them, that people will stick around for the ads in spite of invasive advertisements.
I’ve recently got a wi-fi port on my blu-ray player and it has cut down on my cable watching. It would have been awesome if my cable box had one in it.
Netflix, son. Patience and Netflix.
I’m just happier not watching anything on the idiot box. I know I should be paying attention to what is going on the culture over the wires and ether but I’m too busy exploring New Orleans and living life on the street. I read the newspaper. I subscribed to Netflix but never really used it. I returned the videos as soon as I opened the envelope. I streamed a few movies but usually fell asleep after a few minutes. This is not really a “purer than thou” comment. I just find New Orleans itself more interesting than what gets piped in over cable wires. If I feel the need to see moving pictures, I go the Prytania Theater.
I view television like pornography. People who are getting enough don’t need fantasy and they don’t need it on demand. New Orleans is fantastic enough and it satisfies my curiosity. Maybe I’ll get jaded after time. I hope not. As long as the city is alive, I hope to be alive to savor it and enjoy it and press the flesh.
Two cranky cents for what they are worth. I am a cranky Yankee.
Thanks for indulging me.
WK
Not sure PBS documentaries qualify as fantasy though. And since I am knee-deep in the heart of New Orleans 20 hours a week, sometimes I certainly need to get away.
Adding to your title theme. Once upon a time, TLC stood for The Learning Channel. I have no idea what it stands for now. I can’t say for sure if “Beyond Petroleum” was the first example of a company attempting to change the meaning of its established acronym but I do like to blame them for the trend. There is an ugly arrogance in the presumption that a company can just tell us to call it something different from what we always knew it as and pretend as though the former label never existed. It’s disturbing. Like when a civic building like a sports arena sells its naming rights and a whole city is required to pretend a commonly known landmark was never the place we all knew it to be.
As far as cable “keeping up” with other providers of entertainment content, I think what you’ll see in the next few years, as net neutrality fades away, and telecoms assert more control over how data is accessed, is an overall shrinking of the “long tail” until everything looks more and more like what cable looks like today.
Man I don’t think I could handle adverts for blogs and that kind of thing popping up onscreen while I watch TV…there’s no reason for that. As a DISH customer(and employee) you don’t have to deal with that nonsense…they also have the receivers with the largest DVR hard drive in the industry, and offer more HD than anyone else.