Broadcast

Every cable network has a contract with cable carriers, not viewers, and thus it caught little attention outside the trade press that last October, Fox renewed its contract with Cablevision, the nation's fifth* largest cable system, tripling its carriage fee from 25 cents a month per subscriber to 75 cents.

Here's a brief suggestion how video news archives could better market themselves in a YouTube world. Archive catalogs have, after all, content to license and sell, and a growing number of amateurs (not to mention the next generation of professionals) are seeking to use it.

There are a few sites which provide a summary of, and a search within, print/online news stories: Google News and Topix are the obvious leaders. But there's nothing comparable for television video, let alone audio.

For community journalism, there's no easier story to carry than the one I'm about to describe. The ol' “Mainstream Media” broke it first. Now we would expect the blogs to enter stage front and take the case, maybe organize some advocacy journalism. Heard of made-for-TV? This one's made-for-blogs: it's got an underdog community media effort against an out-of-town one trying to push it out. The Maynard (MA) High School radio station is about to lose its license to a California-based religious broadcaster which has been scouring up licenses nationwide, with the FCC's neutral approach enabling it.

When I heard that President Bush had given an interview on Al Hurra television, I recalled that this was the Arabic satellite channel funded by you and me, the American taxpayers. So I was curious what sort of programming we were sending out this evening, or any evening. How popular the 3 month old network is has not been well reported, but early reviews derided it as poor propaganda.

In the town of Brookline, the cable company had given an ultimatum to customers to convert to digital, and pay extra per month to rent the convertor boxes. This has caused a bit of rancor, as cable television is expensive enough as it is. When everyone has a digital cable box, the cable company will be able to fine-tune each viewer watches; no longer will a subscriber be able to simply hook up to a cable-ready set and watch channels. This could be a cause of deep concern. Or it could be a great opportunity, to finally introduce a real market in television by using à la carte pricing, where users can choose to only pay for the channels they want.

Thoughts on an otherwise exciting football game. Had I not watched the halftime show, I would have skipped writing this and been happily asleep with the Patriots win. And a party mostly cleaned up.

They're vulgar, increasing in frequency, and containing shameless displays that shouldn't be shown to impressionable young children. No, I'm not talking about the variations on profane words which Congress wishes to ban on broadcast television. I'm talking about celebrities making impromptu speeches on televised award shows.