Although Labor Day isn’t for another seven days, for all intents and purposes, summer is over. I usually try to get my syllabi done in early August, but I haven’t been especially motivated lately, especially since I’ve taught these classes before. I didn’t start reviewing the syllabi until last week, and I even posted one for this semester’s Introduction to Electronic Media and that class that was ultimately cancelled on Friday.
After getting that bit of bad news, I lost whatever slim motivation I had developed last week. I took the weekend off and started reviewing my unfinished syllabi today. Since it’s a bit late in the game here, I did a little triage to figure out which classes to prioritize, and, in doing so, I figured out that I have a “soft landing” at the beginning of the semester.
As you can see, my classes start over the course of three weeks. And with one already cancelled and one in danger of being cancelled, I start one class each of the next three weeks, giving me a bit of time in finishing each of these syllabi. It could get complicated if Queens College runs American Film Industry. The course had six students enrolled on Thursday, when I learned it was in danger of being cancelled, but it now has nine students. I’m not sure if that’s enough to spare the course. I haven’t heard anything yet, but I am not updating another syllabus only to have the class cancelled.
It’s not easy to write syllabi in the summer…especially when there might not even be a class.
This class was cancelled on August 23, due to low enrollment. ↩
This class is in danger of being cancelled due to low enrollment. ↩
As someone why doesn’t have a dog in the fight, as I don’t watch any CBS shows and I don’t subscribe to any multichannel video provider, I have been a bit detached from the CBS-Time Warner Cable retransmission dispute. Someone complains that they can’t watch…wait, what does CBS air in the summer?…and I think, “shut up and get an antenna!”
The timing of the dispute has been to the advantage of both parties. They get to dig in their heels during broadcast television’s lowest season, and they both save face since the stakes are rather low right now. The conventional wisdom, however, is that someone has to give in before the NFL season starts. Once that season kicks off, all hell is supposed to break loose. Time Warner Cable customers are supposed to revolt because they can’t get their Patriots vs. Bills, Titans vs. Steelers, or any of four other games on CBS on Sunday, September 8. Or so the thinking goes. In the meantime, we have a stalemate. Both parties are hanging tough, but until something gives, let’s examine the issues at hand.
Time Warner Cable is a multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD), an industry term for a company that brings you a lot of television channels. An MVPD such as Time Warner needs consent from a broadcaster to take its signal, from a transmitting antenna, and retransmit it through its own cable/satellite/fiber optic network to your home. In exchange for distributing the signal, the MVPD charges you a monthly fee. This is your cable bill.
Until 1992, MVPDs were required to retransmit all of the television stations in their local area and carry them on their channel lineup with the same channel assignment. The practice has a catchy name: must carry. For instance, the station you received on Channel 7 with your antenna was the same as Channel 7, although the signal was probably clearer because most people don’t know how to orient properly an antenna. Although the MVPD carried the stations’ signals, the stations were not compensated. Your cable company basically took something from the air for free and charged you for it. We have hated the Cable Company ever since.
They can require the MVPD to retransmit their station’s signal (“must-carry”) without compensation
They can allow the MVPD to retransmit their station’s signal (“may-carry”) in exchange for compensation.
Most broadcasters choose the latter: a practice called retransmission consent. To get consent, MVPDs could either pay the station a fee or negotiate some other form of compensation. Most MVPDs balked at paying stations for what used to be free. Instead, they would offer to carry cable-only stations owned by the broadcaster or its parent company. For example, in 1993, the then-owners of ABC stations negotiated with the MVPD Continental Cable to carry its nascent ESPN2, instead of requiring a cash payment for retransmitting its broadcast stations, paving the way for its nationwide rollout.[1]
This situation would be a win-win for both parties. The channel lineup would expand for the MVPD, and thus their service was more valuable (and expensive), and the station owner would expand the reach of its cable channel and could sell more advertising (and charge more). Today, however, advertising revenue is unstable because of the dwindling audience, and thus stations and their owners are demanding cash, which they hadn’t done until very recently.
This is the background behind the dispute between Time Warner Cable, an MVPD, and CBS Television Stations, the division of CBS, Inc. that owns twenty-eight or so television stations. Each station that CBS owns is known as an owned-and-operated, or O&O, station. CBS Television Stations has reportedly demanded an increased payment for Time Warner Cable to retransmit the signal of its O&Os, and also Showtime, The Movie Channel, and Smithsonian. Time Warner Cable cannot retransmit those signals either because CBS owns those cable stations, too. Time Warner Cable is balking at the increase because they will either have to make less money (yeah, right) or pass along the charge to subscribers, who will complain about yet another rate increase. Thus, no Time Warner Cable customer gets to watch anything transmitted by a CBS-owned broadcast or cable television station. Tough toenails, as my seventh-grade science teacher used to say.
The ire of most customers is directed at the MPVD. After learning all of this, I almost sympathetic to the MVPD. Its costs are rising seemingly arbitrarily and has little recourse but to accept it. If they drop CBS and its many stations, their customers will revolt. They will either jump to a competitor, should they exist, or they will simply cancel their service. People are doing that already and missing must-have channels can only exacerbate the cord cutting.
Joe Flint. “Top of the Week: CapCities, Hearts Opt for Channel.” In Broadcasting and Cable 19 July 1993: 6, 8–9. ↩
Although I cut my cable in 2010, I never felt left out of the Breaking Bad party. In fact, having started watching the series right after the first season was released on DVD, it felt like the audience was pretty small. But last night, it was the talk of the town, and of Facebook and Twitter. I wanted to watch the premiere, but my options were limited:
Watch at a friend’s place.
Watch at a bar.
We opted for the second choice because it was closer to home. It was a mistake.
I’m not blaming the bar for hosting a TV night. It is a great way to attract business on otherwise slow Sunday night, and I won’t name it because I don’t believe it’s their fault, even if watching Breaking Bad there was not a good experience.
Watching at the bar sucked. First, there was the setup. The television sets scattered around the bar were of poor quality. There was also a projected screen, but it was set to the incorrect aspect ratio: 4:3 for a program intended for a 16:9 screen. It looked terrible. And since there were so many people there, the sound was turned up so loud that it was distorted. I couldn’t decipher the dialog.
Second and more important was the classic New York problem: there were too many people. It was nearly impossible to find a place to park a bicycle on the street, let alone find a comfortable spot in the bar. I resorted to standing in a small pool of people. All these patrons, however, deserve a lot of praise. As crowded as the bar was, everyone was absolutely silent when the program started.
Having watched every almost other episode of Breaking Bad asynchronously, I couldn’t get into watching it at the bar, standing against a window, barely following the story because I could neither see the picture, hear the dialogue or get used to the commercials. I left at the third ad break.
This morning I bought a season pass for Breaking Bad on iTunes, as I had done since the fourth season, and I invited a small group of friends who also don’t subscribe to cable/satellite TV to come over to watch.
We cord cutters have to stick together.
The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.
Timehop scrubs through your social network accounts and offers a summary of what you did on this day one year ago, two years ago, three years ago, etc. It’s really not as creepy as you might think, since you posted your thoughts, activities, or whereabouts to Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare in the first place. It often jogs my memory about trips I took or friends I hadn’t seen in a while. At the end of your feed, it includes a story of interest (though not always an interesting story) from the pages of USA Today of what happened on this day some years ago.
Although the television signals we use today are for the most part digital, most television stations today transmit on the UHF band. That band was designated for television channels 14–69 and was established in 1952. Television receivers and antennas have fully supported that band since 1960. Television antennas, both the rooftop and the rabbit ear kind, can still receive the new digital signal and pass it to your television set. The only problem is that if your television set is older than 2000, then it won’t know how to decode the digital signal.
Cable and satellite companies took this as an opportunity to sign up new customers thinking that those that received over-the-air television would be doomed. Instead, they were just duped.
In this morning’s Introduction to Electronic Media class, which one member of the university staff referred to as my “volunteer job” without even the slightest sense of irony, we covered American network television. The topics involved the networks’ competition and a bit of its style over the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s. It’s a lot to cram into a one-hundred fifty minute section, but I like to make sure students can see a bit of what television looked like some decades ago.
One of my favorite programs to screen from the 1960s is an episode of Dragnet from 1968. In this episode Joe Friday and Bill Gannon stumble upon an epidemic: youngsters taking LSD. In the clip I screened in class, Joe and Bill go to an abandoned house only to find several youngsters tripping on acid. The representation of the hallucinating kids is a bit over the top. One guy holds a paintbrush and proceeds to put it in his mouth. A woman takes to climbing a wall, although her feet never leave the ground.
As a way to disorient the viewer when entering this mind-altering den, the cinematography establishes the room in an unconventional way, at least for the television medium. We see a very wide-angle shot with several planes of action. The most string element is the placement of the colored lightbulbs throughout the room. There is even one in the front and center of the frame. The framing does not last very long. The subsequent shots are of the officers’ bewildered expressions and then of the kids tripping. It’s not the most innovative message: kids taking drugs is bad. It does however take advantage of the visual form to make the audience trip a little without resorting to unnecessary effects.
It’s hard to say anything new about Miami Vice that hasn’t been said, especially concerning its form. But I wanted to share a very different shot than the Dragnet example. While the shot of the kids tripping on LSD is a wide shot, this is the opposite: a telephoto lens that collapses the planes into one flattened image.
In this shot, we see Crocket call his estranged wife before heading out on a potentially fatal mission to take down a Miami drug lord. As he and Tubbs speed to their mission, Crocket stops the car and pulls it over at a phone booth. (Yes, this is slightly before “car phones”.) The shot shows this neon sign, which we see earlier in the episode, the phone booth, and the marina. Because of the telephoto lens, it makes Crocket seem very distant. Moreover, it is also disorienting because of the unconventional use of the flattened space. Subsequent shots show close-ups of Crocket and of his wife and reestablishes the conventional focal length to revert the television style back to “normal.” Normal focal length…normal television style…normal action-packed episode.
This afternoon at NYU, I went to a seminar on media archeology and digital humanities. I had thought that these two areas were new to me, but it turns out that I have been doing alot of that work already without having realized it. There were some very enlightening discussions at the seminar, but I’ll save those points for another day, another post.
After we adjourned for the day, a graduate student in the English department told me about an educational television series NYU had helped produced in the 1950s called Sunrise Semester. It was where television viewers could take classes from NYU faculty with broadcasts scheduled as early as 6:00 AM, and the program ran from the 1950s to 1980s, he said. This format of "telecourse" was not as rare as most people might think. Most notably, NBC produced and aired The Continental Classroom from 1955 to 1963, if memory serves, as an early-morning nationally televised program. Unlike Sunrise Semester on CBS, many different universities participated.
The "telecourse" is back with the push for Massively Open Online Courses and ways to "disrupt" traditional universities with technology. NYU shares its courses for free through its OpenEd initiative. Some subjects include sociology, biology, and mathematics. A professional crew records lectures throughout the semester and posts them on YouTube, iTunesU, and its own NYU Stream platform. Students anywhere can "take" the course, although they do not yet receive credit.
Here’s one example from Cyrus Patel’s American Literature course.
The two programs are more different than I would have thought. For one thing, the primary audience for the OpenEd example is the classroom and the paying customers attending. In the case of the Sunrise Semester, the professor speaks to the camera in direct address. There is a fair amount of editing in the Sunrise example, especially compared to OpenEd, although it does not leverage the visual form by showing slides or other illustrations as we see in the latter course.
It is hard to make generalizations about a single episode of a television program with a decades-long run, but that is why we need media archeology to uncover these media artifacts. By looking at how universities were using new technologies, such as television in the 1950s, we can better gauge the possibility of something like MOOCs replacing the traditional university.
Having just screened some early television programs in my Electronic Media class, I never seem to get across the extraordinary nature of live anthology dramas, specifically the gravity of Days of Wine and Roses (1958).
Every television historian has a soft spot in his/her heart for live anthology dramas. What’s not to like? These “teleplays” were well-written, well-acted, and focused on deep character psychology. They were also performed live and almost never repeated. The only reason we have these programs is because someone made a recording of the kinescope. A kinescope recording works like taking a film camera and recording a television screen, but because video runs at a rate of 30 frames-per-second and a film camera runs at 24 frames-per-second, the camera had to drop six television frames for each second. It was not easy, nor was it always pretty.
In this installment of Playhouse 90 from 1958, Days of Wine and Roses concerns a married couple who are alcoholics. The portrayal of this disease is extraordinary. This clip starts after Joe, a public relations man, has reached his moment of clarity and begins attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. AA was a fairly new organization in the late 1950s, founded in 1935, and was gaining prominence by this point. During his testimonial, there’s a flashback to a particularly dark part of his and his wife’s lives.
Joe’s and Kristen’s addiction is absolutely breathtaking. When I first saw this about five years ago, the representation of rye whiskey, a socially acceptable and even upscale spirit today, compares to how we think of crack cocaine or meth today. Beyond the addiction, the performance is relatively naturalistic: the stage-trained actors seem like real people, not delivering a stylized performance. It’s gritty but not exaggerated. Also, consider the medium of television. There are a lot of closeups and very few cuts (or “switches” in the parlance of live television). Televisions were much smaller than the sixty-inch sets of today, and the tight framing would foster some intimacy between the viewer and the character.
In my New Technologies class, one of the recurring topics we’ve covered is that of disruptive innovations. I did not use the Clayton Christensen text as the basis of this discussion, primarily because Christensen seems a bit too optimistic about the role that disruptive innovations can have in creating new markets and new players. Instead, I felt that Tim Wu’s The Master Switch was a more complete discussion of potential disruptions such as telephone, radio, and the Internet because it not chronicled how these and other technologies disrupted existing markets but also how they were consolidated anew.
Cable TV: From Community to Commerce
Once a grassroots technology, cable television is an example of a technology on the cusp of a disruption. The cable industry emerged as a community-oriented project in the 1940s, known as Community Antenna Television, that gave television set owners in remote locations access to broadcast signals necessary to make television a worthwhile product.[1]Hardware is essentially useless unless you have enough software. By the 1960s, the broadcasters saw cable as a threat to their livelihood and convinced the FCC to block it in all but the smallest markets. Meanwhile, policy wonks were enamored with cable television because it offered an alternative to broadcast television. Television viewers could be liberated from the dependence of watching television via scarce and tightly controlled radio waves. They could access more specialized, relevant than anything that the broadcast networks could ever offer.[2]
By the 1970s, cable television was hardly a disruptive medium. Ted Turner had pioneered a way to distribute his Atlanta-based UHF station to a nationwide audience, via satellite. While this was a truly innovative strategy for starting a superstation that could rival broadcast networks, its programming strategy was actually less ambitious than that of the broadcasters. The superstation WTBS aired off-network syndicated programming, such as older sitcoms and movies, and live coverage of Atlanta Braves and Hawks games.[3]
The Threat of Internet and Cord Cutters
As cable television has evolved to “multichannel television” as it has included direct broadcast satellite for the better part of twenty years, new Internet-connected television sets and over-the-top devices appear as disruptive innovations for multichannel television, possibly encouraging “cord cutters” to sever the ties with cable and satellite suppliers and their high bills once and for all. Derek Thompson has challenged that idea because he sees the technology titans, namely Apple, Google, and Microsoft, not as agents of change because they simply don’t care for unbundling specific content from the lucrative packages that net multichannel video providers their fortunes. As Thompson writes, “Apple has realized that it doesn’t have to beat Comcast and Verizon to own your living room. It only has to join them.” The tech giants are more likely than not partner with multichannel television providers than to challenge them.
The Smartphone Sustains the Wireless Carriers
Any television device that Apple could market will likely fall short of disrupting the multichannel television industry and will likely resemble what we’ve seen with smartphones. While the smartphone has clearly been a wonderful innovation, it is, to use Christensen’s terminology, a “revolutionary” one because it introduced an unexpected innovation but one that ultimately sustains the existing market. That’s what we saw with the iPhone and with its chief rival Android. Charles Arthur explains that Android actually strengthens the wireless carrier industry. He writes, “Google wants as many carriers as possible to sell Android phones – that’s how you get market share, and because the phones are ad-supported the more the better; it defrays the cost of software development faster. The business model for the carriers is exactly as it was before Android: sell a variety of phones from a variety of handset makers at a variety of prices. No disruption there.” Despite its significant marketshare, Android has not disrupted the smartphone industry, much less the wireless telephone industry.
The wireless carriers have benefitted greatly from the innovation of the smartphone. It has allowed them to sell new services, such as lucrative data plans and unlimited text messaging plans while retaining the legacy voice services that make up a significant portion of a consumer’s monthly bill. In the case of the iPhone, Apple might control the hardware and the software at the expense of the carriers’ tight control, but the wireless carriers are also benefitting from expanding revenues.
“No Disruption There”
As the smartphone has strengthened the finances of the wireless carriers, I expect that any new television product Apple introduces will actually strengthen the position of the multichannel television providers. In the case of the multichannel television providers, they might lose control over the hardware necessary to deliver video to the television set, but they will still be the beneficiaries of such any innovation that the tech companies develop. I wouldn’t be surprised to see any new Apple TV device to first work with Verizon FiOS and AT&T’s U-Verse, since there’s already a partnership between Apple and those companies in the wireless space, and then to the others, such as TimeWarner Cable, Cox, and Comcast. I don’t know what that device is, all I know is that it will be revolutionary, but, Charles Arthur would say, “no disruption there.”
The above links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy something through those links, I will earn a commission fee.
Mullen, Megan. The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution? University of Texas Press, 2003. 32–38. ↩
Since 2009, I have watched a total of three Blu-ray disks at home, and although they looked beautiful, there was never an easy supply of Blu-ray disks. At the time, there were not many Blu-ray titles available on Netflix, which also charged a $3 monthly surcharge for Blu-ray disks, and there were no remaining video stores in my neighborhood. Even today, the Blockbuster Express kiosks only carry a very small selection of Blu-ray titles.
Eventually, the Blu-ray deck became a streaming player for Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Amazon. Most of my Netflix viewing is with the Apple TV because of the better interface and much lower latency. The Blu-ray player will not start playing video for almost fifteen seconds, while the Apple TV (and Roku for that matter) are much faster.
Now, with Hulu available on the Apple TV, I can’t see myself using the Blu-ray player much after this. I mean, after all, why would I buy/rent video from Amazon if I can’t watch with my iPad?
To help raise awareness of the demand for a standalone HBO streaming service, a new site — Takemymoneyhbo.com — has sprung up, allowing members of the public to say (and tweet) how much they’d pay for the service each month.
I said $8 because that’s the same price as Netflix streaming and a Hulu Plus subscription.
