08:18 – Yesterday, I unplugged the Roku box and left it unplugged for an hour or two. When I powered it back up, the problem seemed to have resolved itself. We watched a couple of streaming episodes last nigh with no apparent problems.
Speaking of television, Barbara and I saw in the paper that our local NBC affiliate, WXII, is no longer on Time-Warner Cable as a result of a money dispute. We hadn’t even noticed. TWC replaced the WXII feed with a feed from an NBC affiliate in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, so no one would miss NBC network feeds. It still strikes me as bizarre that local TV affiliates can charge cable systems to carry their signal. That charge is of course passed on to cable subscribers in their bills, so they are being charged for something that they could watch over-the-air for free. It seems to me that the local affiliates benefit hugely from being on the cable systems; their ad revenues must be many times what they would be if only their OTA viewership was counted. So I think the cable systems should take a hard line: tell the local affiliate that the cable system won’t pay them a cent for carrying their signals, and if the local affiliates don’t like it, the cable system won’t carry their signals at all.
In reality, as I’ve said many times before, local network affiliates are an obsolete holdover from the days when networks needed local affiliates to put their signals on the air. With cable and satellite universally available, there’s no longer any need for local affiliates. The networks should simply provide their signals to the cable and satellite systems. The huge benefit to eliminating local affiliates is that it would free up a massive amount of RF spectrum that could be used for cell phones, wireless data, and so on. And, as I’ve also said repeatedly, the networks themselves are also obsolete. They’re middlemen, and the Internet has eliminated the need for them.
I’ve allocated today to making up solutions and filling bottles and doing some label redesign.
“It still strikes me as bizarre that local TV affiliates can charge cable systems to carry their signal.”
IIRC, when they were building the cable systems 30+ years ago that the local TVs demanded that the ciites write the coverage into the charters of the cable providers. However, it was my understanding such was in lieu of the locals paying the cable providers to carry their signals.
This has been brought up here before
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wilson-social-sciences-20120712,0,4672619.story
read the comments too.
(if the LATimes page wants you to register or subscribe just turn of scripting)
Sirius/XM seems to be holding its own. They have worked really hard to get a year’s sample of satellite in every new car, and that has ultimately kept them in business, as many people I know have willingly re-upped, just to be rid of commercials.
Now, John Malone has said his Liberty Media will spin it off into its own company, like CBS did with Viacom. The irony of the Viacom spinoff, is that Viacom ultimately bought its former parent, CBS.
Here’s the article on Sirius:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-12/liberty-s-malone-says-sirius-will-eventually-be-spun-off.html
Interesting airing of laundry by Sirius chief Karmazan and Malone. Karmazan was just a local radio station GM when I arrived in Boston, but eventually headed up the whole of CBS. After Karmazan says he can’t be second banana, I thought Malone treated him very kindly. If you do not know who Sumner Redstone is, he was a kind of directionless guy running some family-owned movie theaters in Boston, until he was caught in a fire at the Copley Hotel in Boston and almost perished. No spring chicken at that time, the event lit a fire under him, until he became perhaps the most important media magnate in the US (even if American-come-lately Rupert is in the news more). Redstone then bought Viacom, which then bought the then immensely-profitable Blockbuster, and later bought CBS, sending Karmazan to Sirius. I am sure Malone is sending a message from Redstone, who, at 89, knows Karmazan can keep his empire running when he is no longer around. Hope Mel pays attention to Malone.
Right after I got back from Germany, Sirius was selling for about 60ยข/share, and I thought if might go to as much as $5. It went to something over $2, so I could have more than doubled my money, but I never got around to making the purchase. Oh, well.
Sorry—misspelled Karmazin.