Joey Gibson's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘tv’

A couple of weeks ago I extolled the virtues of my new Netflix Player. I’m still thrilled with it, but the other day I happened to be looking at my instant queue from a web browser, and I noticed several lines in the queue that looked like this

Notice anything about that? Yeah, it’s the “Available Until Dec 31, 2008.” WTF? Out of 53 entries in my instant queue, 9 of them will no longer be available after January 1, 2009. That really, really sucks. According to this article and this one, the reason for this is something called “release windows.” These are time periods that the movie studios allow their movies and shows to appear in a given format. Basically, after a certain amount of time, the studios yank content from one medium, such as downloads, and make it available on another, such as broadcast TV. According to the articles, that’s what the studios think will rake in the most money. It seems to me that the best way to maximize profit for a movie or show is to maximize exposure. This means making it available in as many formats as consumers are willing to pay for, for as long as possible. This would give consumers the most flexibility in how they watch the content. And maybe, just maybe, if it were super easy to legally watch the content that people want to watch, piracy would decline. I’m just speculating on that one, of course.

I understand that businesses have to make money to stay in business, but I’m really not happy that 17% of my queue will evaporate on January 2.

Thanks, Hollywood.

My Netflix Player arrived on Wednesday. It was supposed to be a family Christmas present, but you know how those things go. When something this cool arrives this early, there’s no way it’s going to stay boxed up for three more weeks.

The box is very small, maybe 4.5 inches on a side, and about 2 inches think, and it will fit easily next to our DVD player. Installation was absurdly easy. I attached it to the A/V input jacks on our DVD/VCR and plugged it in. I was planning on connecting to the Internet using my WiFi router, and as the player was coming on, I told the family to pray that it supported WPA2, and not just WEP, because if it didn’t, I’d have to reconfigure the router. Fortunately, it did support WPA2, and within about 30 seconds of connecting the A/V wires, it was online.

After it phoned home, it gave me a code that I had to enter at netflix.com to tie the box to my account. I did this on my laptop and almost before I could pick up the remote again, the screen had changed and was telling me that everything was now set up.

The first screen you see is your “Instant Queue.” This is a CoverFlow-like page which shows you the covers of all the videos in your Instant Queue. This is the one thing that I don’t like about the player: you can’t search for things to watch using the player itself. You have to go to the website using a computer, find what you want and stuff it into your Instant Queue. Once you do that, it shows up on the player within seconds. This is a bit hokey, and they really should have come up with a better solution. However, this is my only real complaint about the thing.

We did get off to a slightly bad start, though. The first thing we decided to watch was an episode of Doctor Who from 1974, featuring the One True Doctor™, Tom Baker. (Nothing against the current fellow, whom I like quite a bit.) I clicked the Play button and it started buffering. And buffering. And buffering. After about three minutes, it started playing, but within 30 seconds, it was buffering again. This was discouraging, but we decided to try something else, and the problem seems to be with this particular episode, as everything else has worked flawlessly.

The way it works is after hitting the Play button, the player buffers for about 30 seconds, then it starts playing. That’s it. You can pause and restart. You can rewind and fast-forward, though this is a bit klunky. What I really like is that if you stop watching a show and come back later, it remembers where you left off. I don’t know how many shows it will remember, but it’s at least one.

So, what did we watch? First, I watched the wonderful concert movie by Talking Heads called Stop Making Sense (it never gets old). Then we watched the first episode of the original (and best) Battlestar Galactica series. We then moved on to season 1 of The A-Team. Those things Thomas and I watched together. After he went to bed, I watched the first episode of season 2 of 30 Rock. We’ve also got season 1 of the original Knight Rider, Buck Rogers and Airwolf in the queue. Lots of great, old shows.

We were slightly disappointed that several of the shows Thomas was hoping for are not available for instant viewing. These include Fraggle Rock, Invader Zim and The Muppet Show. Perhaps these will be added later. Netflix currently has 100,000+ DVDs, but only 12,000ish of these are available for instant viewing. I have to believe this number will increase.

(I should note that they do seem to remove the ability to stream some DVDs occasionally. When they first announced support for OSX, I watched part of Purple Rain, just to test it out. Purple Rain is no longer available for streaming. I don’t know why, but it isn’t.)

So, after three days, we all love the Netflix Player. For us, it was certainly worth the $100 it cost.

I didn’t see this when it aired, but I caught it on one of those “most outrageous” clip shows. It’s now one of my favorites.

I used to love watching the original Japanese show Iron Chef and I’ve come to like Iron Chef America. I love Alton Brown and frequent judge, Ted Allen. But there are three things that really annoy me about this show, and it would be far better if they would fix them. 

1. Teach Kevin Brausch how to say “kon ban wa.” It’s not “kan ben wa,” as Kevin says it. It’s not that hard to say properly.
2. Get rid of that idiot who plays “The Chairman.” Chairman Kaga on the original show was somewhat dignified. This guy is a total cornball.
3. Lose the cheesy kung-fu sound effects when the Chairman turns his head, moves his arm, etc.

To be honest, I think they should get rid of the whole show mythology and just make it a cooking competition. Making this chairman the supposed nephew of Chairman Kaga was a reasonable device to introduce the show to America, but it’s time to get rid of it. Especially that campy idiot who plays him. (Yes, I know, I mentioned that twice.)

So we’re watching Project Runway (don’t ask) and the designers only have 5 minutes left. Tim Gunn walks in and says

Designers! Five Minutes! And some of you are still sewing? Question Mark!

I laughed out loud at that. And of course, the way Tim says it, with his “gay lilt,” it’s far funnier than if someone else had said it.

Several months ago a friend recommended a show on the USA network called Burn Notice. I didn’t get around to watching it until about two weeks ago. I wish I’d taken his advice sooner, since this show is great. It’s about a former spy who gets burned by his agency. He is trying to find out who burned him, while he and his friend Sam take on various jobs and good deeds to pay the bills. It’s sort of like a miniature A-Team. Sam, by the way, is played by Bruce Campbell, of Evil Dead, Army of Darkness and Bubba Ho-Tep fame. If you like spy shows with bits of humor, definitely check it out.

I just finished watching the series premiere of The Cleaner on the A&E network and about the only thing I can say is, “meh.” Part of my indifference comes from the fact that when I heard the name of the show, I assumed it was going to be something similar to Harvey Keitel’s “Mr. Wolfe” from Pulp Fiction; “I’m Winston Wolfe. I solve problems.” But that’s not what it was about. The other part is due to the excessive use of “the ‘s’ word.” In this one-hour show, there were at least 12 occurrences of the word. That’s a lot. One single conversation in one scene contained 5 of those uses. That’s just absurd, and shows a lack of skill in the writers.

Anyway, the show revolves around an ex-junkie who believes he talks to God, and his network of  ex-junkie associates who try to help people with drug problems. Get it? He’s the “clean”er? Of course, while he’s helping other people, he’s neglecting his own family, and strife ensues. The acting was pretty good and the characters were fairly interesting, but the show just didn’t do it for me.

I just finished watching the latest installment of The Sopranos and I have to say it sucked really bad. I was a huge fan of the show for the first three years. Season 4 was a bit rocky and Season 5 was absolutely horrible. With the one notable exception of the whacking of Adriana, S5 season was a big yawn. So far this year, I’m completely unimpressed. If you’re going to make your fans wait two years between seasons, the new season needs to be big. Huge, even. So far, they’re just not cutting it.

As an aside, we just finished watching all of Season 1 of Desperate Housewives. Now that is a great show.

Tammy and I have started watching a show on BBC America called The Kumars at No. 42, and we love it. According to the official site, it’s “Part scripted comedy, part improvisation, part genuine interview,” which pretty much sums up what we’ve seen. Tammy doesn’t usually like British humor (while I love it) so for her to laugh out loud at this show, it must be funny. Check it out. It comes on Wednesday nights at 10:00 PM.