Saturday Night: Live

Last week I watched some clips from the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live. As a kid, growing up in New York, I used to stay up late to watch it, like many of my fellow New Yorkers.

My uncle used to work at 30 Rockefeller Center, so he would occasionally get me tickets to NBC programs like  Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. 

Although I didn't get a chance to see a live broadcast of SNL, I did get to see the two-hour dress rehearsal that occurs each Saturday night from 8 PM – 10 PM. Based on the audience's reaction, a couple sketches are cut from the show to make it fit in 90 minutes. 

So, I had a chance to watch the dress rehearsal on December 17, 1994 with Courtney Love's band, Hole along with George Forman as the guest host. 

After the dress rehearsal, my buddy and I went to a local NYC bar and we were thrilled to watch the live broadcast while knowing what was about to happen. 

Tube Tester Memories at Blair TV

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

– Grace Hopper

Before solid-state electronics, like the transistor, there were vacuum tube electronics like the triode. Vacuum tubes consume a lot of power and are fragile, similar to an incandescent light bulb.

As a child, we had many televisions in my home. Every bedroom had one, and there were two more in the basement. The reason we had so many TVs was because my father would always stop to pick up discarded televisions that were lying on the side of the road, waiting for track pickup. 

About a mile from home was the now defunct Blair TV repair shop that had tube tester. My father would pull out any suspected bad tubes from the TV's he found and bring the tubes to the TV repair shop for testing. Once he uncovered a bad tube, he'd pay a few bucks to replace it and, voila, we'd have a working TV in the house.

Must Have Better TV

I spent today dog sitting at a buddy's house while he took his family to Universal Studios. He has AT&T U-verse with many, many channels. I haven't channel surfed TV in over a year.

In 2002 I hooked up a new TV to cable and let it automatically block out any channels that weren't broadcasting between channels 2 and 72. A decade later, more than ten of those channels were no longer broadcasting. The cable company kept moving channels above 72 to encourage their customers to forgo analog cable for digital TV.

On weekend mornings, more than a dozen of the remaining channels were broadcasting infomercials for weight loss and get rich quick products.

Why was I paying to see infomercials?

Unbundle Cable TV

Without a doubt, consumers would love to unbundle TV channels much like music albums. I'd really like to pay for, say, CNBC, CNN, KUSI, Spike, etc, without having to pay for QVC or channels broadcasting in languages I don't understand.

Ari Emanuel is a Hollywood talent agent who is is strongly against unbundling cable TV channels. In other words he doesn't want to give consumers the ability to pick, à la carte, which channels they want to pay for. Ari Emanuel spoke about this at D10:

Overall, from subscriptions to advertising, the market is about $100 billion now, while moving to à la carte pricing might only get $40 billion, which would be a major inhibitor [of developing premium content].

Basically, Ari Emanuel reasons that if the market shrinks so will the quality of the content like Hollywood movies and TV shows. Maybe. Maybe not. But Ari is one of those guys who you might say is a tad arrogant (see the end of my digression video below).

Companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple have been trying to unbundle channels but it has been a uphill battle. Unbundled content like House of Cards or Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is rare. Eddy Cue once told us at a meeting that getting content from the music and TV industries onto iTunes was "simple" compared to the film industry. He said that the film industry was the most business savvy of them all since movies were sold to theaters, TV, cable, DVD, airlines, military, etc, for a very long time.

Perhaps, one day, we'll be able to pick the channels we want to pay for.

Digression...

Ari Emanuel is the brother of President Obama's former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who is now the mayor of Chicago. A fictionalization of Ari Emanuel is played by the character Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven), in the HBO series Entourage. It's funny to watch Ari Gold bash others, like his assistant Lloyd, on the TV show. But, it's a bit uncomfortable to watch the real life Ari Emanuel tell people to shut up and sit down like he does in this Q&A panel.

Say Good-Bye to T.V. Shows and Cable Channels

All at once the series finales are going... going... gone. Say good-bye to Lost and 24. Will America be safe without Jack Bauer?

How dangerous are the streets of New York City since Law and Order is going off the air, too? It seems that there's a L&O episode airing on TV, continuously, between 6 am and midnight every day. I'm sure they'd like to keep running episodes into the wee hours of the morning, but we have to make room for get-rich-quick and fad diet informercials.

Speaking of informercials; of the all the stations we have through our Time Warner cable subscription between channels 2 and 72, more and more are now off the air. It looks like these stations now broadcast in the triple digits which our old TVs don't receive. I recently counted 13 informercials, all running at the same time, on different channels, throughout the 59 channels that were broadcasting at 5 am. That is ridiculous.

Thank God for Hulu, ABC.com, and Netflix on my iPad. I suspect that watching TV, in the not-so-distant future, will be more common on tablet size devices. A 10" screen, viewed at 18", appears bigger than a large flat panel TV on the other side of the room. Today, homes no longer have party (telephone) lines and, soon, bedrooms may no longer haver "party" (shared) TVs.