Sephy’s Platzish

After writing about NBC’s distinct lack of caring they hold for people who want to watch a live broadcast of tomorrow’s Opening Ceremonies, I’ve gotten a few hits from folks looking for the fact that it isn’t live, along with one person who works for NBC-Universal searching for "nbc delay olympic opening".

So, this morning I decided that I’d go and have a look to see if I could find a way to contact them - either a web form or an email address, and lo and behold, I did find it here - Contact NBC.

Listed in there is an address specifically for questions regarding the Olympics - nbcolympicsfeedback#nbcuni.com, so I sent them (and the main NBC Sports email) a letter, basically reminding them that they’re about the only people who can’t be bothered to show the ceremony live, and told them that you know, if you air it twice, you can increase ad revenue…

I hit send, and half expect a form letter saying "Blah, Blah, We really don’t care what you said, but we will say we did because our extensive market research shows that people who receive form letters are more apt to be satiated than people who don’t. Et cetera."

What I received was not that - it was a message stating that my message did not reach the nbcolympicsfeedback email address. Why, you ask?

Well, according to NBC-Universal, the recipient name is not recognized.

The only thing that this says to me is that NBC claim that this box is there, but then you try to contact them you’re told that it isn’t there. The only conclusion I can logically reach is that NBC doesn’t care what its viewers think about their Olympic programming.

What do you think?

Do you think it’s right that NBC has chosen again to delay the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, as they have done with all Olympics they’ve covered overseas? Consider the fact that the Today show is broadcasting live from China tomorrow, at the same time as the opening ceremony goes on, probably just behind their backs.

By the way, if you like what I’ve written, on either this post or the first post about NBC, there are links for you to submit the posts to different sites like StumbleUpon.

Everybody knows that the Olympics start officially on Friday with the opening ceremony going off on 8/8/08 at 8:00PM Chinese Time (GMT+8) or 7:00AM Central Daylight Time (GMT-5), or at the time that the Today show starts on NBC most days in the Central time zone (for those who may not know it, NBC and all the other networks air their morning shows on a schedule of 7-9AM no matter where you watch it, so viewers in my area are actually watching a show that is an hour old-by the way, for Aussie insomniacs or shift-workers who see these shows on 9 or 10 at 4am or whenever, take a note of the upper left - it usually will say Live EDT or Live PDT there-that’s the sign that it’s been shifted).

Now, most rational people would assume that this would mean that the Today Show, for one day out of, oh, however many thousands of days, would be pre-empted for a live, nationwide broadcast of the Olympics starting at 6AM, an hour before the ceremony started, right? I mean, it’s not unprecedented as people in Australia, Canada, Mexico, and a lot of other countries are going to do the same thing. Heck, here in the States, the AC Nielsen company counts repeat viewership as part of ratings now, so they’d make even more of a killing by playing it live and then replaying it at night (like CBC is doing).

However, Dick Ebersol, along with the NBC programming department have decided that it is far superior to ignore the time of the actual event and air it whenever they feel like it. In this case, 6:30PM CDT has been declared as the time that the Olympics shall start on NBC, three hours later if you’re on the West Coast, a delay of 11½-14½ hours. Thankfully NBC can rest safe in the knowledge that people don’t have access to things where they can, oh, watch the opening ceremony live via legal and, ahem, other methods.

Oh wait. There’s this Internet thing. How many people do you think will forego having to listen to whoever NBC have chosen to host the ceremony blabbing over the whole thing (though without Katie Couric it shouldn’t be so bad this time, but Mary Carillo is just as annoying), and find their way to a foreign-sourced broadcast of the ceremony, and have access to it before it even starts broadcasting here? Oh, the irony that the one thing that they love to bandy about to people who want to show old footage of old TV shows - Piracy - is only solution to a problem that they’ve created by ignoring the fact that an Olympic opening ceremony is designed to be an event shared by the world as one.

Remember that the next time you see a clip on YouTube removed "Due to a claim of Copyright by NBC-Universal", will you?

Oh, and one last thing, here’s a couple of lists comparing who is showing the ceremony live and who isn’t. It must be lonely at the top of Rockefeller Plaza…

Nations airing the Opening Ceremony live

• Australia (something I personally confirmed by calling 1800 777 777 and speaking to Matt on Saturday Afternoon)
• New Zealand
• United Kingdom
• Spain
• Canada
• México
• Chile
• Brazil
• Portugal
• Colombia
• Venezuela
• Perú
• Argentina
• All of Europe (Eurosport)
• China
• Japan
• South Korea
• Russia
• South Africa
• Egypt
• Israel
• United Arab Emirates

Nations NOT airing the Opening Ceremony live

• United States of America

So much for caring about the viewer - I guess they need to make the money somehow to pay for the billions of dollars they have to pay the IOC…but of course, air the ceremony twice, you can instantly double the advertising revenue.

While the tone of this week is predominantly sad, there have been a couple of occasions for me to laugh, generally at other people’s stupidity (or just silly things that had been said). So, here are 3 scenarios which I faced just in the course of this day (Tuesday, not Wednesday when this is being published ). However, one really isn’t totally funny, but involves me having a bit of a saving grace.

They Speak THAT there?

I was alerted to the fact that an episode of the PBS travel show Rick Steves’ Europe featuring London was on the Create channel today. During the show, he was explaining how the Tube works, and he actually uttered this line -

Lost? Don’t worry because most of the locals speak English.

Really? I always thought they spoke Swahili or Mandarin in Tube stations…this was a shocking revelation that I would have never expected. That being said, however, Rick Steves is really the best (American) authority there is when it comes to travelling in Europe. Normally he has rock-solid information, and if you look at it in this context, you don’t get much more rock solid than that.

Gee…I wonder why he got stopped?

After work tonight, I went out to the south from my place of work in search of some less-expensive gas for my car (details of that in my next snippet). When you go to the south, you have to cross the freeway, and that involves a series of three stoplights (one is for a service road that leads to a hotel and restaurant complex, along with some banks and other services, the other two are for the freeway).

At the first of the freeway stoplights, traffic going south was stopped for the red light, and then, as they work, the light for traffic coming off of the freeway from the east was green. The first car in the line was a police car, marked and in black. Apparently the bright spark in the left lane didn’t notice this minor fact.

So what does he do? Go. While the light is still red. He didn’t even make it halfway across the freeway bridge before the cop had his lights on and getting ready to stop him, which he did just after the other stoplights. Wouldn’t you have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation? By the way, the fine for failing to obey a traffic signal is somewhere in the region of $150 and 3 points on your license.

Always pay attention to road signs, ok?

Yeah, I kinda didn’t… :blush:

As I was driving into the city that is past the gas station that I usually stop at (which was only 1 cent per gallon cheaper) in my search for cheap gas, I got to a point where I decided to turn around. This particular city is renowned for having confusing streets and you can get lost easily. I guess the good news is that I didn’t get lost, but the bad news could have been me either in a heap of trouble with the police or in a hospital.

That is, if it wasn’t for a guy in a truck yelling at me about the street. You see, I had gone to the end of what was a split set of one-way streets, and I had assumed that because it was a one-way street intersecting the other half of the one-way pair, that this street was also one-way. It didn’t click in my head that there were lights going both ways on the street, meaning that it is a 2-way street. And I wondered why there weren’t signs talking about left turns on red…

Anyway, the light turns green, and I do what I thought was right (and what would have been right if this were a one-way street) and turned into the lane closest to me. The guy behind me turns into the correct lane, which I thought was about 3 lanes too far over. He goes and passes me, yelling to me "This isn’t a one-way!" I promptly swerve into the correct lane behind him and his truck, and when we get to the next intersection that has lights, I went into the right lane and thanked him for letting me know. He said that he did it so that I didn’t get hurt. It goes to prove that there are good folks out there.

In fact, if it were one of those Miller commercials, he’d probably have been given a bottle of the product they’re selling because he was genuine.

Oh, and the gas? I wound up getting it at the station I went past in the first place after all - it was $4.169 per gallon (or $1.102 per liter) there - the highest I’ve paid so far. Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to come down appreciably at all, thanks to the speculators playing their games.

One of the things I’ve been grumpy about a lot is the way that severe weather warnings are presented on local TV. Do they need to be presented? Yes, because it is a public service to inform the viewing audience of where storms are and if you need to take cover from said storms. That’s something we all can agree on. However, there are good ways and there are bad ways to handle informing the public of severe weather.

Let’s look at a bad way first, shall we?

This picture comes from just a couple of weeks ago, on the Sunday before Memorial Day, when we had some (as you can see on the radar picture) storms in the area. They weren’t severe (at the time), and there was just a watch issued for the area.

However, the fine folks at channel 12 decided to do what they do every time there’s a watch issued for the area - squeeze the picture so that it’s completely unwatchable and essentially waste about 1/8th of the screen with their graphic telling you that you’re watching channel 12’s weather bar. Of course, not to be outdone by the weather department, you also have the convenient reminder that you’re WATCHING CHANNEL 12 in the lower right hand corner. By the way, the reason for the black bars is that this was taken from their digital feed, and if it were not for the watch bar, the show would have been in HD, and the 12 logo would have been about 1/4 the size.

By the way if you think that channel 12 are the only ones who do this kind of thing, here’s what channel 58’s bar looks like (note that this is from September 2006, during which time they were running a promotion and squeezing the picture even further than they had already with their weather bar!)

Channels 4 and 6 at least use a bit of sense (though how much sense is questionable because it just happens that they wind up wasting more space by doing this) and just shrink the picture so that the aspect ratio isn’t messed up; only the picture is smaller.

Now, let’s take a look at how this kind of thing should be pursued (or, at least how it was pursued by the local stations in the past). First off, I should commend channel 12 on their old way of doing this - they would just put up text at the bottom of the screen that read, for example, "T-STORM WARNING ___ COUNTY". It was simple, didn’t interfere too much with the picture, and was a perfect solution to a complex problem.

However, what really got me going on this was the fact that I was able to pick up stations from out of the area yesterday (ahh, the old days of TVDX, you might say, and that’s true, and this was my first time doing some digital DXing, which made it that much cooler ). Thanks to the weather, a lot of the stations had their warnings up and showing for you to see.

On every single occasion, no station had squeezed, squished, crunched, or even re-sized a picture to accommodate the warning information. All they did was put a simple overlay of the affected counties, and text telling you what warnings were out (along with the counties affected). In another instance, an ABC affiliate broke into their programming (game 2 of the NBA finals), but did something that I think would give Milwaukee TV bosses heart attacks (well, except for channel 6 back in 2007) - they kept the game on in the bottom left and had the meteorologist in the upper right!

So, you may ask, what did warnings look like in the "olden days" of TV (i.e. anywhere but Milwaukee yesterday). Well, I could show you a picture I took of one station that is literally stuck in the early 90s with just showing a storm cloud in the lower left — which is what they used to do on local TV; sometimes with an S or a T to tell you what kind of warning it was. However, as it so happens, I have an old picture from channel 4, from a taped airing of "Days of Our Lives" circa I have no idea - maybe late 90s or early 2000s.

Look! A full-screen picture (though it wouldn’t be in HD because none of the major stations have the technology yet, but you’ve got the feeling it’s coming) with a simple overlay. Can anyone tell me why the TV stations can’t make such a simple step backward that would, in the end, be a huge step forward?

Oh, and by the way, I must also give kudos to the PBS broadcaster in the area - channels 10 & 36 - because they can do an HD overlay, and the size of it is very comfortable - it looks like a postage stamp on an envelope. When viewed on a 42-inch screen, I bet it’s the perfect size.

What I’m curious about is if Milwaukee is the only TV market that does this stupidity. I have this inkling that we are. That should be a lesson to them, but I don’t think they care to listen…

About a week ago or so, I finally got my hands on one of the digital converter boxes I’d talked about not being available at Wal-Mart at all. It turns out that Best Buy has literally scads of them for sale. So, they’re $10 more than the Wal-Mart ones, but you’re getting a much better box.

Interestingly, the box that is sold at Best Buy (under their Insignia name) is manufactured by LG Electronics for Zenith. As we all probably know, LG make some darn good products, and they haven’t gotten this one wrong either.

Now that we’re finally getting towards the cutoff of analog TV and we finally have the digital converter boxes (set top box, STB for short) available in stores, and to be honest, I’d be prepared to buy another one at full price even for my room, or for the computer.

As it stands, with analog TV, using rabbit ears, we’d get 11 channels over the air, and the signals on those channels went all the way from fairly clear to barely watchable. Of course, since it is digital, now all the channels come in crystal clear, and there’s 28 of them. That’s just from Milwaukee!

The only problem is that this number goes down to around 8 when something happens. This happens when the noisy neighbor comes through. Its presence interferes with the UHF signals (I think the term for that is “multipath” - where the signals bounce off of something causing confusion), so I’m only left with the 8 channels of public TV, including one which shows Mr. Rogers Neighborhood at midnight…

However, the greatest thing is that I can get all the programs in HD now. Well, not purely HD, but it’s widescreen and just as clear as HD pictures, just downscaled to the proper resolution for an analog TV. Seriously, if you haven’t gotten a coupon for the digital boxes, you can do it at dtv2009.gov - the program should still be available for a little bit of time from now.

I’ll have some shots of the digital channels soon, because there is something annoying about some of them.