Standalone HBO streaming is a good thing

HBO announced yesterday that their streaming service, HBOGo, would be available as an a la carte service for anyone who wants to pony up the subscription fee (estimated to be around $20/month) could do so without having any cable television subscription. That is the first step in cable television channels giving viewers the power to choose the most important channels and paying for only what they want to watch.

The bad part is that most of the people who would want to subscribe to a standalone HBOGo service would still need to be strapped to a cable television company to receive streaming content because cable internet is the norm for a large percentage of internet customers.

In the end the cable companies still get your money and you are still dependent on them because people have few, if any, options. The only other viable option is to sever all ties to cable companies. I did this just over a year ago and went with DSL (just a fast and actually cheaper) but opted to subscribe to DISH TV service because my cable company (Mediacom) moved to metered internet service and my Netflix habits would have burned through that data cap in no time at all.

And it's those very data caps / metered internet access that cable companies will impose on their customers to keep them from cutting the cord to television service completely. This borderline monopoly is the kind of practice that keeps the cable companies insanely profitable and keeps customers tied to their television service.

The only hope is municipal fiber internet service or for a company like Google to become ultra aggressive in their deployment of fiber internet service. True competition is the only thing which will force cable television companies to be competitive -- both in price and speed -- with their internet service.

Mediacom Cable's restrictive internet data caps

As a long-time Mediacaom Cable customer (over ten years), I was disgusted to find out last Thursday via a browser injection notice that the company would be instituting data caps for their internet customers beginning September 7th. For the past many years I had been able to save money with Mediacom cable's internet access while still having reasonable fast cable internet speeds. To think that I was paying less than $30.00 per month for high speed internet access was quite the achievement given what some of Mediacom's faster speeds cost per month.

But, as I said, last week that all came to a screeching halt. With the new data cap for my lowest tier plan of 150 GB per month, Mediacom's high speed internet became useless to me. Being a Netflix user, that alone sucks up more than 1/30th of my data, on average, per day. Not to mention moving large files when I am freelancing at home and backing up my own websites and doing other web development work. And forget ever being able to work from home and avoiding my commute with the restrictive data caps in place.

Thus began my search. In the end I went with DSL at an identical speed I was receiving with cable and TV service from Dish Network at a significant savings over Mediacom Cable. What disgusted me the most was the slmost insulting way I was treated by the customer service representative at Mediacom when I called regarding their internet data cap. She offered me a 10% discount for six months on my television service and said the only way to increase my data cap was to pay an additional $20.00 per month to receive a 250 GB monthly data cap. When asked about a free increase to the higher data cap and, thus, a higher speed, her reply was a blunt "I can't do that, every customer is now under the terms of the data cap".

That last ditch effort for Mediacom to redeem themselves and their subsequent failure made my decision minutes later to call Dish Network that much easier. Apparently ten years as a customer, subject to ever-increasing monthly fees and less reliable service means nothing to a nationwide company.

As far as the Mediacom Cable company line goes, "only 3% of our cable internet customers will meet or exceed their data cap thresholds". Why, then, is everyone subjected to a seemingly arbitrary data cap? Why not, instead, address those who have what Mediacom Cable deems to be excessive cable internet usage? Why use fear of exceeding an arbitrary threshold to force customers into purchasing exceedingly expensive internet access packages?

The only logical answer is to avoid people from cutting the cable cord. If people continue to stream content from Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and other sources, cable television providers like Mediacom Cable stand to lose a significant portion of their income from essentially passing along television signals to subscribers. While there is even less overhead and potentially more profit to be made from internet access at any speed, if you can still walk that line where cable internet access is still only slightly less expensive than the bundled cost of TV and internet, traditional cable television providers like Mediacom Cable can continue to have immense profits and have virtual monopolies on service in the communities they "serve". In short, Mediacom Cable will continue to lose customers as they keep instituting restrictive policies like data caps with little notice filled with confusing language while their customer service team scrambles to find the correct answers. For a company who is in the communications industry, they have done a dreadful job of communicating the specifics of a data cap plan for internet access roleld out in relatively short order.

If there was ever a company to avoid, Mediacom Cable is that company.

Will CBS vanish from the airwaves?

CBS head honcho Les Moonves likes to make a good threat but his latest -- to pull CBS from the free

To think that the biggest of the big four television networks could vanish from the airwaves to become a cable-only channel is, for lack of a better word, insane. Insane too, though, is Aereo's business plan of essentially hijacking a free over-the-air television signal (in a fair number of major metropolitan areas) and re-transmitting those signals to internet connected antennas which people then pay a fee to receive.

The biggest problem I have with Aereo's business model is that they are profiting from something which is free. Sure, some would claim that news aggregation websites already do this but they typically only use a brief snippet of the news item in question and direct readers to the full article on its originating website. Aereo, though, stands to make a decent profit by selling something they receive for free. This alone makes Aereo worse than cable companies because at least cable companies pay a retransmission fee to local affiliates and/or television networks to be able to sell subscription packages to users.

I find it hard to believe that Aereo will gain much traction, though. Yes, cable television rates are insane and show no sign of becoming less expensive... ever but Aereo is only another, cheaper and immoral alternative.

Rather than fight Aereo, I'd be encouraged if the big four television networks would work with Aereo to give television viewers who are unable to use a rooftop antenna, rabbit ears, satellite or cable TV an alternative to cable and satellite television. I'd love for television networks to embrace technology rather than fight it tooth and nail. Imagine a world where you could freely, without fear of your ISP disconnecting you, download a torrent of a television show you already have the ability to watch live but were unable to do so due to other conflicts. I would even tolerate a periodic lower third ad embedded in the video because as I well know, advertising pays the bills. Embrace more product placement. I know that shows like Bones and others already do this (even to the point of writing in rather clumsy statements promoting the advertiser).

The biggest uproar, though, will likely be from local affiliates who count on the advertising revenue from their local programmign to keep their local news-gathering operations afloat. Once they are left with fewer eyeballs, it will become increasingly difficult to sell advertising time and cuts will have to be made. It only snowballs from there until the local news operations wither up and eventually die. While we can argue all day that local television news is a dying breed like newspapers and radio, all things local effect us too and without knowing about that information, we are simply blind.
(think using a rooftop antenna) airwaves if Aereo's way of doing business isn't struck down as illegal is ridiculous.

Nobody will miss George Lopez

In the suddenly cluttered world of late-night talk shows, there isn't much of an audience. Of course there are the regular viewers such as college students, second-shift workers, prostitutes with time between tricks, insomniacs, drug addicts and senior citizens who get up REALLY early but in the grand scheme of things those aren't truly huge numbers. And none of those segments of the population are going to sit through two or more hours of late-night talk shows. Especially when you factor in all of the late-night talk show choices. There's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Conan O'Brien, The Colbert Report, David Letterman, Nightline, Jay Leno, Chelsea Handler's Chelsea Lately, Jay Leno's Tonight Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Jimmy Fallon, Craig Ferguson and Last Call with Carson Daly.

Throw George Lopez in the mix and that adds up to a whopping 14 late-night talk/comedy show options. Even for a couch potato with a drug habit and insomnia that's overload. Most working-class folks are in bed, at the latest, by 11 PM (here in the central time zone, at least) and that leaves, at the mmost, an hour of late-night viewing potential. The simple fact is that people are still hard-wired to think that only the big three networks have late-night talk show options. Yeah, Conan's departure from NBC at least helped a few people to remember that the little cable outlet TBS has late-night talk as well but habits are hard to change.

I, for one, love Conan's style of entertainment but I almost always forget he's even an option. Out of habit, I flip my TV to WCCO and start getting ready for bed. I can count the number of times on one hand that I've remembered that Conan is on at 10 PM also. That fact alone said that, unless TBS was willing to lose money to keep an original program on the air, George Lopez's Lopez Tonight was destined for cancellation.

With tonight being the final episode of Lopez Tonight, I truly doubt that even a sliver of the population will miss his show in a month. Nobody will miss George Lopez beause nobody knew he was even on TV. Sadly, I can see Conan meeting the same fate in a year or two unless either Letterman or Leno retires. There just ins't enough audience at 10 PM or 10:30 PM who are willing to stick around for a complete hour of talk and comedy.

My take on TNT's Falling Skies

A drama focusing on a post-apocalyptic United States six months after aliens initially visit then violently kill and incapacitate the military and leadership network of Earth and take over the major cities around the planet. That's the basic outline of TNT's first foray outside of police and lawyer procedurals and it's probably the cable channel's best series to date and proves that while the networks cater to the lowest common denominator and continue to cast a wide net and appeal to everyone, quality actually has a place and it's increasingly on cable.

Starring Noah Wyle as as sort-of second-in-command of the human resistance after large groups are forced to split up due to the advancing detection methods of the aliens, referred to as Skitters, the show definitely has a dark theme to it. The series definitely does not lack action as I only found myself waiting for things to pick up the pace a couple time throughout the 90 minutes of the 2 hour series premiere I was able to watch.

If you like edge-of-your-seat drama that leaves you wondering what kind of fresh hell awaits you in the next scene, this is just the show for you. It's the kind of series that would never stand a chance on one of the big four networks as was proven in the past year with both The Event and ABC's reboot of V being cancelled at the end of the season.

It's also the sort of series that would have been a perfect fit for Sci-Fi back when it was still Sci-Fi and not SyFy.

I have a feeling that the remaining episodes of Falling Skies will continue along the vein of human interaction and cooperation as they battle against both the child slavery aspect of the alien takeover and fight against the further demise of society in general. It's a common theme when anyone imagines a post-apocalyptic scenario -- society goes straight to shit as everyone fends for themselves instead of being civilized and banding together to reform some semblance of a society.

That will obviously be the b-plot of the series in the coming weeks but I can't wait to see what happens when the resistance captures one of the aliens and am crazy curious to find out just why the aliens chose Earth and what their ultimate purpose is with the planet.

Check out Falling Skies Sundays at 9 PM C/T on TNT.

ABC cans All My Children and One Life to Live

Chalk up another victory for piss-poor unscripted filler programming. ABC's decision to give two of their three daytime soaps the ax is yet another slit to the throat of scripted television. Think I'm wrong? Flip around next time you're home sick from work and see the sad excuses for programming that exist during the daytime hours. Outside of a few cartoons for the kids on a couple cable channels and the mostly decent offerings from PBS, the rest of the channels are tenth-run movies or talk shows.

Maybe we have Oprah Winfrey to blame for the proliferation of talk shows. After all, her's was the first barnburning success story in the daytime talk format but those that have copied and badly altered the format are the ones to truly blame. I get it, though. Daytime TV viewership is home to some pretty dismal numbers due to the fact that the stay-at-home mom crowd is about as large as the number of polar bears living in Iowa but even a mom who spends her days wrangling a gang of rugrats deserves to be entertained and that entertainment used to come in the form of scripted daytime dramas (soap operas) but now comes in the form of 4 hours of the Today show on NBC, an hour of local news, Rachel Ray cooking something and a couple hours of doctor-themed talk shows.

That seems recipe seems like an awful lot of the same ingredients. Take, for instance, local NBC affiliate KARE-TV. KARE-TV is home to one scripted hour of television outside of the 7-10 PM primetime block. The rest of the hours consist of local or network news/entertainment programming, Jeopardy! and many hours of talk shows which all seem to cover the same topics. I understand that a talk show costs far less to produce than an hour of scripted television but with ABC bringing shows entitled "The Chew" (a food/cooking show) and "The Revolution" (a weight loss series) it seems like, in an effort to cut costs, the networks are almost desperate to copy or even sink below their cable television competition.

With each passing day I lose more hope for the continued existence of over the air network television and while I'm no fan of daytime soaps, today's loss -- bringing the remaining total to four soaps across the big three networks -- seems to say that the networks will do whatever it takes to cut costs to the bone while still raking in the same amount of advertising dollars as always. Hell, none of the big three networks actually program new content on Saturday evenings and Friday evenings are mainly reality fare so it's only a matter of time until the big three networks take on The CW model and go five nights a week with only two hours each night.

I'm only half joking with that last prediction but it's time for the networks to get serious. Slashing costs and going the route of more unscripted content is not going to one-up their cable competition. Like any business, it's time for the suits to be held accountable and it's time for them to come up with real, long-term solutions because drivel like "The Chew" and "The Revolution" are nothing more than placeholders.

Why broadcast in HD?

Much has been made in the past decade about High-Definition (HD) broadcasting. It was touted as the biggest advancement in television since color TV. I remember first seeing a High-Definition broadcast during some incarnation of the Winter Olympics as I wandered through the Rochester, MN Best Buy store. I am fairly certain that the local NBC affiliate, KTTC, wasn’t yet broadcasting in HD (this may have been as far back as 1998, more likely 2002) but they had a handful of many-thousand-dollar plasma televisions showing the most kick-ass picture that I had ever seen on a TV. I know it was a hockey game being broadcast but beyond that I can’t remember anything else.

Fast forward about a decade and I actually own two HD sets. But I still only receive a handful of channels -- mainly the local Twin Cities signals - in High-Def. This is one part my own frugality (I refuse to pay an additional $7.95/month for a box from Mediacom which forces me to use their shitty remote and make room for a clunky, ass-ugly box) and another part the fault of the companies broadcasting the very content we watch. The first local affiliate I received was KARE-11. KSTP, FOX 9 and WCCO followed within a year but then things stopped. It took another year of so before Mediacom Cable started re-transmitting High-Def signals for KPXM (Ion) and WFTC just arrived on my TVs a few months ago along with WGN. I’m still holding out for KSTC (45) and that’s where the story really begins.

KSTC-45 has the rights to the Minnesota Timberwolves, Minnesota State High School League playoff games and the Minnesota Wild. While I haven’t caught either an NBA or NHL game on KSTC I did pass by and watch a few seconds of a high school hockey state playoff game last night. To put it bluntly it looked like shit.

The picture was best described as muddy and grainy, the audio sounded like it was first being passed through a bucket of thick Mississippi River mud and I could barely read the scores in the graphics bar at the top of the screen. And to top it all off, it was still being broadcast in standard definition (the old not-widescreen 4:3 aspect ratio).

Why, in 2011, are any sports being shown not in full widescreen high definition? I am not sure if this is an issue with the broadcast equipment being used by the folks producing the high school games for KSTC or if the fault lies with KSTC themselves.

I do know that a huge amount of responsibility lies with Mediacom, my cable television provider, for not granting its customers access to the last broadcast television station in the Twin Cities not available in high definition. The other gripe about the lack of high definition broadcasts lies, again, with cable providers. They are viewing the advent of high definition not as a way to provide a better experience to their viewers but instead as yet another way to profit. Why should I, as a customer, pay any additional money per month for what is essentially a duplication of services? Both of my televisions, equipped with internal QAM tuners, receive unencrypted HD signals. The logical thing for cable providers to do is send those HD signals from all subscribed packages to customers’ televisions unencrypted. They already do this with the shitty analog version of every channel I subscribe to, I just want the digital (and HD) version in the same way. My television (and every decent TV sold in recent years) supports this and it would remove a huge burden from the cable companies. They would no longer have to supply clunky Motorola cable boxes to receive the signal. Things could go back to a simple plug and play format -- the way they were meant to be. Even new TVs still have a co-ax input so it’s a logical process.

And if Mediacom -- and other cable providers -- would just loosen the reigns a bit they’d have happier customers instead of angry people like me who just want to watch some Minnesota Wild playoff games in full widescreen high definition.