Smalltalk with James Robertson

You could fail to see how the Samuel story on Heroes was going to end up if you haven't ever read or seen anything created in, oh, the last few millenia. It's time for this sorry mess to fold the tent and shuffle off the stage...

I find this whole Leno/Conan thing terribly amusing. The entire contretemps was set into motion years ago by Zucker himself, when he promised the Tonight Show to Conan. Then, he let Conan find out about the "bring Leno back to 11:35" move via media reports. Now, he's "talking tough":

But now the NBCU chief has been talking tough during the negotiations with Team Conan. To counter O'Brien's principled public statement which the late night host issued this week, Zucker "is threatening to ice Conan", according to his reps. "Zucker said, 'I'll keep you off the air for 3 1/2 years.' Which doesn't have a chance in hell of happening.

I've written about Zucker before; he might well be the dumbest man in the TV business. He's certainly a living example of the "Peter Principle" in action...

The big winner in all this? CBS and Letterman. The more Zucker does, the bigger they win, I think.

Technorati Tags: stupidity, nbc, leno, conan

A sixth season of Supernatural? This year, the Winchester boys are fighting Lucifer. How the heck do they top that?

Let the story end, just like Buffy should have ended after season 5...

Heroes used to be good - season 1, when the cast was a reasonable sized ensemble. Since then, the writers seem to have been working with the theory that "more characters are better!"

Many, many more characters. So many characters that we get to spend tiny bits of time on each plot thread - so little that we can't really maintain much interest in any of them.

Kill half of them, and maybe the show will have meaning again....

I watch the way my daughter consumes video, and I realize that the broadcast model is on its last legs. I'm sure there are people in her age group (high school) who watch a fair amount of TV, but here's what I see:

• Lots of iTunes usage
• Interest in Streaming (we just got Netflix)
• Virtually no "channel surfing" or regular watching. What watching there is, is via the DVR

The broadcast model is being shaken up now. Over the next decade, I think it's going to shrink dramatically, to be replaced by more of an on-demand model. No one under twenty really expects to have to wait for anything they want to see. Heck, I've gotten to that point myself...

Spotted in SCI FI Wire

Remember NBC's proposed sci-fi series Day One? First it was a show. Then it was a one-season show. Then it was a miniseries. Now, it's just a TV movie, said Angela Bromstad, president of prime-time entertainment at NBC and Universal Media Studios.

Wow. I have to wonder whether it will air at all :)

I find this amusing - the White House decided not to preempt the big "Lost" season opener for the annual State of the Union Speech. I suspect they didn't want a modern day Heidi incident on their hands :)

Technorati Tags: Lost

Tim Bray wrote up an excellent summary of the options for watching TV shows on your schedule (as opposed to the network's ideas) - it's applicable across the world, but especially outside the US. Here in the US, if I miss a show and haven't picked it up via one of the DVRs, we have plenty of options: Hulu, iTunes, Netflix - it's probably available somewhere legally.

I spent 2 weeks sharing Tim Bray's pain last year in France - as a traveler a DVR wasn't in the cards, and everything else (save iTunes, and even there, show availability is based on physical borders) just stops working.

This is just insane. It's a legacy of the old system, where shows came over the air on limited bandwidth, and you watched what they had and liked it. Now? With an IP based system, any show that's been released should be available for a fair price - the way it's set up now, the content providers are just driving the technically skilled to consider things like BitTorrent. As Tim wraps it up:

Speaking of functioning markets, watching episodes of a TV series (in the case of Lost, the most expensive ever produced), with no ads, for a low single-digit number of dollars seems like a good deal to me, even though I have in principle bought the right to watch these shows via my monthly TV bill. So that's my choice, given the choice. But if there's nobody who wants to take my money

That's the way a lot of the content/copyright business works right now. You stand there, wallet open, ready to pay someone - only they have everything locked up behind a wall of badly maintained spikes, and keep muttering unintelligible things - none of which involve a way to pay for the content you want access to...

Technorati Tags: dvr, time shifting, copyright