Tag Archives: networks

For the Love of God, Can We All Stop Whining About the Olympics Being Tape Delayed?

by SimonCreswick Posted on August 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here is Meredith Blake in the LA Times commenting on the Olympic opening ceremonies last night:

In yet the latest decision to fuel the #NBCfail hashag, the network broadcast the ceremony on a one-hour delay on the East Coast. The West Coast was delayed by an additional three hours. NBC claimed it was delaying the broadcast in order to provide additional “context” for viewers. The real reason, of course, was to draw as many eyeballs and run as many commercials (and women’s gymnastics promos) as possible.

Are we going to keep whining about this forever? The Olympics are tape-delayed so they can be broadcast in prime time. They’re stuffed with commercials because NBC paid a billion dollars for the broadcast rights and commercials are how they make up for that.

We’re not children. We all know this. Nevertheless, we’ve been complaining about it since 1992 and NBC has been resolutely tape-delaying the games anyway ever since. Why? Because that’s how most normal people like it. You know, the ones who have to work during the day and don’t get home until 6 or 7 o’clock.

The only question I have is why NBC allows itself to be bullied by a small squad of elitist reporters and sports purists into making up weird excuses about “context” or “plausibly live.” Why not just say, “Don’t be a child. We’re tape-delaying it so more people can watch.” Their viewing audience, which is much more sophisticated than the reporters and sports purists, will have no problem with this.

POSTSCRIPT: But other sports events aren’t tape delayed. Why the Olympics? Why why why?

Please. Events in the US aren’t tape delayed because they’re carefully scheduled to air when the networks want them to air. Overseas events are usually shown live and re-broadcast on tape delay. But you can’t do this with the Olympics because they run all day.

Also, not to make too fine a point of this, but most Americans don’t give a shit about most Olympic sports. They watch them once every four years, mostly to cheer Americans who win medals, and that’s about it. If it’s even slightly inconvenient to watch, they won’t bother. Despite their whinging, this is also true of the elitist reporters and sports purists, who for 47 months out of every 48 mostly couldn’t care less about rowing or archery or sumo wrestling.

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For the Love of God, Can We All Stop Whining About the Olympics Being Tape Delayed?

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Updated: Hillary Clinton Wins the Nevada Democratic Caucuses

by DorisMunday Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton appears to have eked out a win in the Nevada Democratic caucuses on Saturday. With more than half of precincts reporting, the networks called this third contest of the 2016 Democratic primary in Clinton’s favor around 5 p.m. ET.

Bernie Sanders kept it close, but Clinton performed well in Las Vegas’ Clark County, especially among minority voters, helping the former secretary of state hang on for the victory.

Sanders congratulated Clinton on her win, but framed the close results as something of a victory for his campaign, which was far behind in the state until the past week.

And in case you were wondering, there were no coin flips. There were, however, the far more reasonable games of high card.

This article: 

Updated: Hillary Clinton Wins the Nevada Democratic Caucuses

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The Saturday Profile: German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too

by Myrna Posted on January 29, 2016

Peter Wohlleben, a career ranger, has topped best-seller lists with “The Hidden Life of Trees,” describing trees as social beings that communicate on the “Wood Wide Web.” Read article here:  The Saturday Profile: German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too ; ; ;

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The Saturday Profile: German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too

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Want Better Broadband? Unbundle the Local Loop.

by XOCKellieqnkfp Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Felix Salmon says we have plenty of bandwidth in America. Contra Tyler Cowen, we don’t need to spend a bajillion dollars rolling out a new nationwide network based on new pipes or new technology:

What we do need, on the other hand, is the ability of different companies to provide broadband services to America’s households. And here’s where the real problem lies: the cable companies own the cable pipes, and the regulators refuse to force them to allow anybody else to provide services over those pipes. This is called local loop unbundling, it’s the main reason for low broadband prices in Europe, and of course it’s vehemently opposed by the cable companies.

Local loop unbundling, in the broadband space, would be vastly more effective than waiting for some hugely expensive new technology to be built, nationally, in parallel to the existing internet infrastructure. The problem with Cowen’s dream is precisely the monopoly rents that the cable companies are currently extracting. If and when any new competitor arrives, the local monopolist has more room to cut prices and drive the competitor out of business than the newcomer has.

Cable companies have a thousand ready-made technical incantations to explain why they can’t possibly open up their networks to competitors. To listen to them, you’d think this would be akin to letting a five-year-old mess around with your electric wiring. This is delicate stuff! You can’t just let anyone start sending bits around on it.

It’s all special pleading, of course, of the same type that Ma Bell engaged in when people wanted to start putting answering machines on their phone lines. But everyone understands there would be technical requirements they’d have to meet, just as answering machines had to meet reasonable technical requirements back in the day. Regulators would have to be involved to make sure everyone plays nice with each other, but that’s far from impossible.

No, this is all about money, as you already guessed. Allowing other companies to use their last-mile pipes would (a) take away some of their broadband rents, (b) force cable companies to genuinely compete on price and features, and (c) allow competitors onto their network who couldn’t care less about cannibalizing TV business. If I were a cable company, I’d fight that tooth and nail too.

But that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to take their arguments seriously. The rest of us should be in favor of competition, not the profit margins of local cable TV monopolies.

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Want Better Broadband? Unbundle the Local Loop.

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The FCC Takes Yet Another Crack at Net Neutrality

by JosephFinsch Posted on February 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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After losing a court battle over its effort to impose net neutrality requirements on broadband carriers, the FCC is taking another crack at it:

The Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday that it will craft new rules to prevent Internet service providers from charging companies like Netflix Inc. or Google Inc. a toll to reach consumers at the highest speeds.

The guidelines are expected to ban broadband providers from blocking or slowing down access to any websites. Supporters say the concept, known as “net neutrality,” is crucial to keeping the Internet open and allowing smaller companies to compete with the biggest content providers. But the courts have ruled against the FCC’s last two attempts to enforce net neutrality on companies like Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. that provide Internet connections to households and businesses.

The Journal has an accompanying article about the feud between Netflix and the large backbone carriers that’s causing slowdowns in Netflix service:

Verizon has a policy of requiring payments from networks that dump more data into its pipes than they carry in return. “When one party’s getting all the benefit and the other’s carrying all the cost, issues will arise,” said Craig Silliman, Verizon’s head of public policy and government affairs.

The Internet has historically been built on arrangements in which big networks agree to swap each other’s traffic without charge, based on the assumption that it will all even out over time. But, America’s heavy use of video services like Netflix and Amazon.com Inc., as well as expanded online offerings from TV channels like ESPN, is making these old arrangements less tenable.

….The pendulum has been swinging toward the carriers in such disputes. In recent years several big Web companies, including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Facebook Inc., have begun paying major U.S. broadband providers for direct connections that bring faster and smoother access into their networks. Netflix, so far, has held out.

It’s not clear if net neutrality rules would affect this particular dispute or not. It probably depends on how the rules are written, and no details were provided today. I imagine the rules-writing process will take quite a while, so this isn’t going to be resolved anytime soon.

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The FCC Takes Yet Another Crack at Net Neutrality

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Comcast-Time Warner Merger Really Has Nothing to do With You and Me

by hoseawilder7387 Posted on February 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Matt Yglesias, I see that Matthew Klein has finally written a short post that explains what’s really behind the Comcast-Time Warner merger:

To understand what the deal is really about, remember that pay-TV distributors are at the mercy of the networks that sell programming. According to Bloomberg Industries analyst Paul Sweeney, about half your cable bill goes to companies such as Viacom Inc. and Walt Disney Co. The networks consistently raise prices about 10 percent a year on average, irrespective of the state of the economy. By contrast, the typical cable bill only goes up by about 5 percent a year. Cable companies have eaten the difference by lowering their margins and cutting costs elsewhere, but there are limits to both processes.

This margin squeeze is why Time Warner Inc. spun off its cable business, why Comcast acquired NBC Universal, and why Internet-based subscription services offered by Netflix Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have invested in original programming as a defense against the rising cost of licensing content. It also explains why Time Warner Cable had to cave to demands for higher fees from CBS Corp. a few months ago. Merging the two biggest cable operators might give them more bargaining power with the networks, especially if it encourages DIRECTV and Dish Network Corp. to consolidate the satellite business.

In the same way that the health care business can largely be understood as a competition between suppliers (hospitals, pharma, etc.) and consumers (insurance companies), the video entertainment business should largely be understood as a competition between content producers (Disney, Viacom, etc.) and content distributors (Comcast, Verizon, etc.). Ideally, you want competition everywhere. That is, you want enough producers that they compete with each other; enough distributors that they compete with each other; and enough balance between the two that neither producers nor distributors have the whip hand against the other.

So the question we should be asking about the Comcast-Time Warner merger is simple: Do content distributors need more clout? Klein suggests they do: they’re at the mercy of rapacious networks who keep raising carriage fees and they don’t have the market power to fight back. The merger will help that.

That may be, but I’d like to hear more about this. Networks and cable companies fight constantly, as you know if you’ve ever seen dueling ads about why your favorite shows will soon be off the air in your area. The networks run ads telling people that if they don’t want to miss the next episode of CSI, they better call their cable company and tell them to knock off the gamesmanship. The cable companies run ads insisting that the network is jacking up rates unconscionably and everyone should besiege them with demands that they be more reasonable. Usually this continues until about one minute before the current contract runs out, at which point both sides make a deal. Occasionally it goes longer, and certain shows really are blacked out for a while.

If you’ve ever had trouble figuring out which side is really at fault in one of these battles of the titans, well, that’s the problem. Two mega-corporations are duking it out, and the rest of us are just caught in the middle. From a consumer point of view, part of the problem is that we’ve all been trained to hate the cable companies who send us outrageous bills every month and love the content producers who make all the shows we love. But don’t fall for that: it’s just an artifact of which business happens to be customer facing. The truth is that both sides are big, soulless corporations who have no claim on your emotions. That said, I’d normally take Klein’s side of this except for one thing: would a bigger Comcast really have more negotiating clout than they do now? I guess that’s possible, but they have a helluva lot of clout already. No network can afford to be shut out of Comcast’s market for long. So it’s not clear to me that a bigger Comcast would really do much for the rest of us.

In any case, that’s how to think of this stuff. Practically every big battle you see in the media arena is, one way or another, a battle between gigantic producers on the one hand and gigantic distributors on the other. That’s what net neutrality is all about. That’s what copyright battles are all about. That’s what broadband fights are all about. And that’s what this merger is all about. We are all just pawns watching the fireworks.

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Comcast-Time Warner Merger Really Has Nothing to do With You and Me

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Major newspaper coverage of climate change plummeted last year

by AshelyStory Posted on January 15, 2014

Major newspaper coverage of climate change plummeted last year

By

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We were feeling optimistic a couple of weeks ago when we reported that mainstream media coverage of climate and energy issues was up last year. But it turns out that if you remove the “and energy,” the numbers are actually pretty depressing.

The University of Colorado’s Center for Science & Technology Research monitors mentions of “global warming” and “climate change” in five major U.S. newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. Check out the following sad graph showing its latest findings:

University of ColoradoClick to embiggen.

ClimateProgress breaks down bad news:

The final numbers for the year are in and NY Times climate coverage — stories in which the words “global warming” or “climate change” appeared — has plummeted more than 40 percent. That is a bigger drop than any of the other newspapers monitored by the University of Colorado, though the Washington Post’s coverage dropped by a third, no doubt driven in part by its mind-boggling decision to take its lead climate reporter, Juliet Eilperin, off the environment beat.

And remember, this drop happened from levels of climate coverage that were already near a historical low and in a year that was HUGE on climate news. We’ve had devastating extreme weather around the planet. In May, CO2 levels in the air passed the 400 parts per million threshold for the first time in millions of years. In June, President Obama announced his Climate Action Plan. And in September, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest alarming review of the scientific literature.

As the chart above shows, when the IPCC released its previous reports (2001, 2007), media coverage spiked at the major newspapers. These days, the media herd is not to be heard from.

Meanwhile, TV news coverage of climate change flatlined. According to Robert Brulle of Drexel University, the nightly news programs at ABC, NBC, and CBS aired 30 climate stories in 2013, compared to 29 in 2012.

A new Climate Action Task Force in the U.S. Senate is going to try to reverse the trend. It announced yesterday that it will push to get more climate coverage in the mainstream media, particularly on Sunday morning political talk shows. “Sunday news shows are obviously important because they talk to millions of people,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a task force member, “but they go beyond that by helping to define what the establishment considers to be important and what is often discussed during the rest of the week.” We wish them good luck.


Source
Media coverage of climate change / global warming, University of Colorado
Silence Of The Lambs: Climate Coverage Drops At Major U.S. Newspapers, Flatlines On TV, ClimateProgress
Democrats Plan to Pressure TV Networks Into Covering Climate Change, National Journal

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Major newspaper coverage of climate change plummeted last year

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