CHILDREN'S TV - Sesame Street, HBO

It's all about money.

"Does Sesame Street’s new address change its mission?" PBS NewsHour 8/14/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Sesame Street, the beloved children's television series and PBS staple since 1969, will have a new address coming this fall.  A five-year partnership with HBO means episodes will air first on the premium pay cable channel before appearing on public television nine months later.  Judy Woodruff discusses the changes with Gary Knell, former CEO of Sesame Workshop.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Finally, big changes at “Sesame Street.”

Yesterday, the long-running PBS children’s television series announced a new five-year partnership with HBO starting this fall.  New episodes of the show, a PBS staple since it premiered in 1969, will appear first on the premium pay cable channel.  Then it will air for free on their traditional public television home nine months later.

To help us explore what led to this change, and what it means, we turn to Gary Knell.  He was CEO of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit group behind the show, from 2000 until 2011.  Then he was head of NPR, before moving to his current job as president of the National Geographic Society.

Gary Knell, great to have you with us.

GARY KNELL, Former CEO, Sesame Workshop:  Thanks for having me back.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  So, tell us, what was behind this?  Now that we have a day to digest the news, what do we attribute this to?  What were the forces at work?

GARY KNELL:  Well, I think you have got to look at this three ways, Judy.

For HBO, this is about streaming.  They’re competing with Netflix, and for them — and Amazon Prime — and this is a way of getting a number-one quality brand onto their streaming platforms.

For “Sesame Street”, this filled an economic gap.  And their economic model for many years has really been filled by home video and toys and books and other things that they were able to monetize off the brand to pay for the production in a lot of ways from — for PBS.  And this is a way of plugging that gap and giving them running room.

And I think, for PBS, it’s a little bit of an admission that maybe they’re a little bigger than “Sesame Street.”  They have 19 preschool and kids shows on PBS.  And PBS KIDS has become a robust network that is bigger than “Sesame Street” now.  It includes “Sesame Street.”  That’s an important component, but it’s bigger than.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  But why HBO?  We think of this as a — frankly, a channel that appeals to adults.  It’s a premium pay cable thing.  It’s something people are going to have to pay for.  Why — couldn’t it work at PBS?

GARY KNELL:  Well, it could, but I think, for HBO, this is quite a brilliant move, I think, to go after millennial audiences and young parents who grew up with “Sesame Street.”

(like I said, it's all about the money, for HBO)

And, again, they’re in a fight to the death now, not so much about their cable channel, so to speak, but it’s much more about streaming.  It’s this a la carte world, where we’re now competing against every piece of content ever invented, from a cat video to “Gone With the Wind,” every night, and unless you have great a la carte programs, you’re going to be in a competitive disadvantage to the Netflixes and the Amazon Primes of the world.

MEDIA - Comcast Time Warner Cable Behemoth Dead

"Why Comcast Walked Away" by Leticia Miranda, ProPublica 4/23/2015

A Comcast Time Warner Cable behemoth could have spelled trouble for consumers and online innovators.

Update, April 24, 2015:  This story has been updated to reflect Comcast's official announcement that the merger has been terminated.

Today, Comcast announced that the company is walking away from its proposed $45.2 billion merger with Time Warner Cable.  Comcast had recently met with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission.  The deal had been troubled for weeks.

The Justice Department and FCC had reason to carefully evaluate the merger, which was first announced in Feb. 2014 and had been expected at the time to be completed by the end of 2014 or early 2015.  If the two companies had joined, they would have controlled just under 30 percent of the country’s pay TV market and, by one measure, roughly 57 percent of the broadband Internet market (Comcast put the figure at 35 percent).

Comcast’s argument that the merger would have minimal competitive harm seems to have unraveled.  Here’s some of what could have gone wrong.

TV program stifling

Comcast is already the largest video and TV service distributor in the country, according to the Leichtman Research Group.  With a wider geographic footprint, it could have used its weight to push out competition on TV airwaves, according to critics of the merger.  In fact, it already has.  Comcast refused to carry Univision’s sports network, Deportes Univision, one of the largest sports networks in the country and a competitor to Telemundo, which is owned by NBCUniversal and Comcast.  Randy Falco, Univision’s CEO, said in an earnings call in Apr. 2014 just after the merger was proposed that he feared “this type of anticompetitive conduct would continue."  Comcast responded by saying it “has had an extraordinary, long-standing commitment to Hispanic programming,” adding through its merger with Time Warner Cable it is “committed to bringing high-quality Hispanic content to millions of additional Americans.”  Just five months later, Comcast announced that it would offer Univision Deportes to its Xfinity TV subscribers in certain urban Latino markets.

John Bergmayer, senior staff attorney at Public Knowledge, expressed concerned that these practices would expand if Comcast merged with Time Warner Cable, bringing the combined company the ability to reach 33 million cable subscribers.  “In a world of lots of smaller video distributors, no one of them has the ability to single-handedly dictate terms like that since a video programmer could walk away,” he wrote in an email.

Monopoly on broadband Internet service

Aside from TV, Comcast would have a number of mechanisms to squeeze out online companies.  A typical household requires at least 25 mbps of Internet speed to go about their daily online routines.  That might include watching an HD video over Netflix while also posting pictures to Instagram as another person in the home works on their laptop.  Comcast and Time Warner Cable are two of the country’s major providers of broadband service of this speed.  If they were to merge, there would be few other Internet service providers that could compete, leaving many content companies like Google’s YouTube with only one option to reach their subscribers, according to FCC filings by opponents of the merger.  In this scenario, a merged Comcast/Time Warner Cable behemoth could leverage its interconnection points, which is where services like YouTube connect to stream video to their customers.  Comcast could keep YouTube from offering services over its network, degrade their traffic or charge them a high fee to connect to Comcast customers.  DISH Network wrote to the FCC that such chokeholds “over the broadband pipe would stifle future video competition and innovation, all to the detriment of consumers,” adding that the merger would consolidate “too much power in the hands of too few.”  Comcast argued that it would “bring significant benefits to Time Warner Cable customers, including higher Internet speeds and greater reliability.”

More broken promises

Comcast agreed to conditions to facilitate past mergers, but its record of complying with them raised concerns among critics.  The FCC slapped several conditions onto its approval of Comcast’s 2011 merger with NBCUniversal.  For one thing, the agency required Comcast to “visibly offer and actively market standalone retail broadband Internet access service.”  But just a year later an FCC investigation found that the company was not visibly marketing the standalone service and required it to pay a $800,000 fine and extend the service offer for another year.  Comcast also defied what are called “neighboring” conditions.  Bloomberg complained to the FCC that Comcast placed Bloomberg TV in the outer dial away from most other business networks and its own channel, CNBC, in the lower dial with other business news where viewers would be more likely to come upon it.  Comcast argued that the condition only applied to future news neighborhoods, not channels that existed prior to its merger.  The FCC ruled against Comcast and ordered it to place Bloomberg TV in its neighborhood lineup of business news.  Even then, Comcast said this was “not a compliance issue, it’s an interpretive issue.”  Comcast also violated its own voluntary agreement to respect the FCC’s 2010 net neutrality rules.  In February 2014, Comcast was found slowing Netflix traffic over its network which pressured Netflix into a paid agreement to ensure its traffic reached its customers at a normal speed.  David Cohen, Comcast’s executive vice president, said at a telecommunications summit three months later that paid prioritization for traffic was completely legal.  “Whatever it is,” he said.  “We are allowed to do it.”

MEDIA - Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

"Comedian John Oliver makes fun of serious news" PBS NewsHour 7/14/2014

Excerpt

JOHN OLIVER, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”:  If we let cable companies offer two speeds of service, there won’t be Usain Bolt and Usain Bolt on a motorbike.

(LAUGHTER)

JOHN OLIVER:  They will be Usain Bolt and Usain bolted to an anchor.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN:  The highly divisive debate over who controls Internet speed and access, so-called net neutrality, is hardly standard comic fare.

JOHN OLIVER:  The point is, the Internet in its current state is not broken, and the FCC is currently taking steps to fix that.

(LAUGHTER)

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  But it’s just the kind of policy and political subject that John Oliver tackles, often in surprising depth, on his new HBO comedy program “Last Week Tonight.”

JOHN OLIVER:  We need you to channel that anger.

JEFFREY BROWN:  His admonition to viewers to write to the FCC even briefly shut down the agency’s comments section of the Web site.  Born in a suburb of Birmingham, England, Oliver studied English and joined a comedy troupe at Cambridge University.  He performed stand-up in festivals, pubs and clubs around England, before coming to this country and joining “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” in 2006, eventually sitting in as host while Stewart took time off.

The new program has probed, poked fun, and raised serious questions around a variety of news topics, from India’s elections to Supreme Court decisions.

HBO TV - 'Game of Thrones' Resembles Medieval History

I really love this series.  I watch via DVDs, have the first 3 seasons and panting for the 4th.

Also, I love dragons so you can guess who's side I'm on (if you watch the series).

"What does a medieval literature scholar read into ‘Game of Thrones?’" by Victoria Fleischer, PBS NewsHour 4/3/2014

In the video above, Brantley Bryant, associate professor of medieval literature at Sonoma State University, shares what he and others in his field see of the Canterbury Tales, Le Morte d’Arthur and Beowulf in HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”  Spoiler alert:  If you haven’t watched the first three seasons, you will learn what happens to certain characters.

The land of Westeros may seem far off for fans of “Game of Thrones,” but as season four of HBO’s successful show is gearing up to start on Sunday, (NewsHour's) Art Beat learned it may not be as distant as one might think.

According to Brantley Bryant, an associate professor of medieval literature at Sonoma State University, George R.R. Martin, the author of the fantasy series that inspired the HBO show, “has read deeply into medieval history.”

“Sometimes people who haven’t had a chance to read a lot of medieval literature have this idea that it’s a kind of fairy tale world, that medieval literature is this kind of thing where everyone is always very chaste and everyone is very pure and nice,” said Bryant, who specializes in Chaucer and writes a blog in the meter and style of the poet.

“Some of the most sensational, violent aspects of ‘Game of Thrones’ are actually also present in medieval literature.”

From Ned Stark to Jaime Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen, the violence, the conceptions of justice and the use of monsters and mythical creatures hark back to the worlds of Geoffrey Chaucer and Sir Thomas Malory.

Are Stannis Baratheon and Melisandre a new version of King Arthur and Morgan le Fay?  How are the characters of Beowulf and John Snow similar?

WALL STREET - Comcast + Time Warner = Media Giant?

"How will regulators see the Comcast-Time Warner deal?" PBS Newshour 2/13/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  Comcast’s deal to buy Time Warner means the media giant, which already owns NBC Universal, is about to cast an even longer shadow over the industry.  If the deal is approved, Comcast will have 30 million subscribers and control just under 30 percent of all paid cable subscribers in the country.  It also becomes an even bigger player in the world of broadband Internet and video.

Geographically, Comcast grows as well.  It will operate in 43 of the largest 50 markets, extend its heaviest concentration of subscribers north all the way to Maine, and gain access to markets in New York City, Los Angeles, and Dallas.  But the $45 billion deal is being criticized by public interest groups worried about media consolidation.

We get more on all this from Edmund Lee of Bloomberg News.

FUTURE OF TV - Money for Quality Shows via Non-Traditional Sources

"As TV platforms, tastes diversify, where will money come from for quality shows?" PBS Newshour 10/9/2013

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  The major broadcast television networks have something to celebrate.  Each has at least one new prime-time entertainment series that's drawn at least 10 million viewers.  This comes as cable networks like AMC are drawing comparable or better ratings with series like "Breaking Bad" and "The Walking Dead."

But there's another important trend.  The latest data show growing numbers of viewers watching shows on a delayed timeline through their video recorder or computer.  Tonight, we look at the role of viewers, as seen by a pair of writers who have long chronicled the media business.

Hari Sreenivasan has the latest conversation in our series on the future of TV.

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  So far in this series, we have heard from a disrupter named Aereo and we have heard from one of the established players, Comcast.

Today, for a perhaps 10,000-, 20,000-foot view, we're joined by Ken Auletta from The New Yorker and David Carr from The New York Times.

So, is this period now a transformative time for the viewer when it comes to television?

FUTURE OF TV - Impact of Shows Without a Television Set or a Cable Connection

"The Future of TV:  How Do Networks Plan to Stay Competitive?" PBS Newshour 9/25/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Today's technology lets consumers watch shows without a cable connection or even a television.  What's next for broadcast networks, cable providers and their places in the media market?  Hari Sreenivasan talks to Brian Roberts of Comcast about staying competitive and the legal battles with companies who stream TV for free.

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Broadcast TV networks, no surprise, are clamoring for new viewers this fall.  But beyond the traditional scramble for ads and ratings, the networks and the companies that own them are also preparing in to do battle with an entirely new set of competitors.

Hari Sreenivasan gets the perspective from one of the industry's biggest players tonight, part of our occasional series on the future of TV.

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  With all the new ways to consume media, phones, tablets, laptops, you can now watch TV shows without a television set or a cable connection.

But established companies are reluctant to give up their hold on the media industry, among them, cable giant and owner of NBC, Comcast.  It's the largest cable company in the U.S., and one of the biggest broadband Internet and home phone service providers.  In 2011, it acquired NBC Universal, making it a major content player in the market.

MEDIA - "Deadwood" HBO Series

I recently discovered HBO's "Deadwood" series (36 episodes) which is a VERY RAW look at 1870's South Dakota.

The series charts Deadwood's growth from camp to town, with many historical figures appear as characters on the show—such as Seth Bullock, Al Swearengen, Wild Bill Hickok, Sol Star, Calamity Jane, Wyatt Earp, George Crook, E. B. Farnum, Charlie Utter, Jack McCall and George Hearst.

One lead actor is Timothy Olyphant (plays Seth Bullock) is also the lead in FX series "Justified."  Keith Carradine plays Wild Bill Hickok.

Like many HBO movies, the series is not for the squeamish and has adult content, but is OUTSTANDING.


(Not for the squeamish)

I have the full 36 episode DVD set.

HBO Deadwood home page where you can watch full episodes.

MEDIA - U.S. Current TV Purchase By Al-Jazeera

AJE - Al Jazeera English

"What Al Jazeera's Current TV Acquisition Means for American Media" PBS Newshour 1/3/2013

Excerpt

RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): The Pan-Arab news channel Al-Jazeera has long wanted to boost its reach in the U.S. beyond a few large metropolitan areas.

With its purchase of Current, Al-Jazeera has expanded its potential audience nearly nine-fold to about 40 million homes.

Current was co-founded in 2005 by former Vice President Al Gore. The channel confirmed the sale in a statement yesterday, saying:

"Al-Jazeera shares Current TV's mission to give voice to those who are not typically heard, to speak truth to power, to provide independent and diverse points of view."

Al-Jazeera plans to transform Current into a new network called Al-JazeeraAmerica. It will add between five and 10 new bureaus in the U.S. beyond the five it currently operates.

Al-Jazeera has struggled to increased U.S. viewership from its earliest days. Cable and satellite companies have been reluctant to carry Al-Jazeera.

The English and Arabic-language networks are owned by the government of the small Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar. It signed on from the capital, Doha, in 1996.

Al-Jazeera's Arabic network gained worldwide attention after American and allied troops invaded Afghanistan, when it was the only channel to cover the war live. Al-Jazeera English launched in 2006. It has a different staff and budget from the Arabic network.

But both are overseen by a member of Qatar's royal family. And both actively covered the Arab spring, which helped the English-language channel win a prestigious Peabody Award to add to a number of other high-profile journalistic laurels it was awarded last year. There are already signs of trouble for the new American channel.

Yesterday, the nation's second largest cable TV operator, Time Warner, dropped Current as soon as the Current-Al-Jazeera deal was confirmed.

For its part, Current TV tried to make its mark promoting user-generated content from the public. But it's recently evolved into a more conventional talk format with a liberal leaning. Its ratings have been very small.

According to the Nielsen ratings company, 42,000 people watched Current programming on a typical night in 2012. The network is expected to post $114 million in revenue this year.

COMMENT: While Al Jazeera is owned by a friendly Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar I wonder IF they are really fair in their news presentations. I have watched (online) some Al Jazeera news, and CNN and other U.S. networks present pieces from Al Jazeera, I have not viewed enough to make a judgement at to their fairness.