Month: January 2006
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Catch Up on Your Indecency
Last Thursday the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on “Decency,” and the hearing’s video is now available on-line at the Committee’s website, along with printed statements from the invited guests who gave tesimony. I did short report on the hearing on last Friday’s radioshow, available for listening online. You can also read that headline.…
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Government Handouts and Playing Hardball with Cable and Satellite Win Big Money for Nexstar & Sinclair
Nexstar is this year’s Sinclair Broadcast Group — a medium-sized TV station owner getting aggressive about squeezing cash out of stations any way possible. Nexstar isn’t as outwardly political as Sinclair is — there’s no Nexstar equivalent to Mark Hyman‘s The Point — although it recently refused to air NBC’s controversial “Book of Daniel” on…
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mediageek radioshow headlines: Indecency at the Senate; Google Won’t Pay Telcos; Stern Back on FM… Pirate FM
These are the media news headlines as read on the mediageek radioshow on Jan. 20, 2006: Indecency Day at the Senate Commerce Committee; Consumer Groups Prefer A La Carte; Google Says It Won’t Pay Telcos for Consumer Bandwidth; Stern Gets Pirated. Indecency Day at the Senate Commerce Committee Decency, and indecency was the big topic…
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The Life of One Brand of Cheapo Electronics
One might argue that cheap, nearly disposable, electronics is one signpost towards the collapse of modern capitalism. If so, the Yorx brand is one trip taken on that road. I only remember Yorx as the cheaper (but not cheapest) brand when you went shopping for boomboxes or radios during the 1980s at stores like Consumers…
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mediageek.org is back
For some of you fair readers mediageek may have been off-line for nearly a week — my apologies. It’s not been completely off-line, however. The mediageek.org domain went into domain limbo through a changeover of hosts and registrars. But, I actually moved the blog over to mediageek.net in November — since then most of what…
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Satellite, Cable and TV Stations Betting Viewers Like Chips in a High-Stakes Gamble
On last Friday’s radioshow, former WCIA news director Ken Schreiner and I talked about how TV station owners like Nexstar (WCIA’s owner) and Sinclair are trying to suck money out of every stream they can find. These midsize owners leveraged the hell out of themselves in order to buy up stations, and currently aren’t turning…
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Senate Commerce Committee Gets Hot for Indecency Tuesday
Tuesday Thursday begins the Senate Commerce Committee’s orgy of telecom hearings with every pandering lawmaker’s favorite topic: broadcast indecency. It all starts at 10 AM EST. The lineup of invited panelists is heavy on broadcast and media execs, though anti-indecency crusader Brent Bozell from the Parents Television Council, and Jeff McIntyre from the American Psychological…
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Vinyl and the Death of our Cultural Heritage
In the last couple of months I’ve been discussing what I’m calling the death of our culturual heritage due to obscene copyright laws. In some ways, it’s worse than I even thought — and I’m both pretty cynical and informed. There are thousands, if not millions of recordings that were issued on vinyl LPs but…
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News Headlines from the Jan. 13 Radioshow: NJ Outlaws Pirates, Indiana Senate Considers Massive Telecom Dereg, more…
These are the news headlines as read on the Jan. 13, 2006 edition of the mediageek radioshow: NJ Passes Anti-Pirate Radio Law; Indiana Senate Considering Radical Telecom Deregulation; FCC Accepting Comments on Local Cable TV; FCC Chair Says ‘Yes’ to Network Neutrality, and ‘Yes’ to Two-Tiered Internet; Groups Urge FCC Not To Expedite TV Station…
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