The Televisionist

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The Mad Men season 6 premiere date got everyone buzzing (until JJ Abrams stole the show). So I've done you all a solid and compiled a list of all my (and presumably your) favorite shows. Late? Slightly. Still relevant? Absolutely! 

Feb 10th - The Walking Dead

March 30th - Dr. Who

March 31st - Game of Thrones

April 7th - Mad Men

May (4th possibly) - Arrested Development 

June - Futurama (unconfirmed but logic would dictate June since the last few seasons have also aired that month)

June 10th - True Blood

June 24th - The Newsroom

June 30th - Dexter

July 14th - Breaking Bad

Sept 29th - Homeland

May 2014 - Louie

Never - Fringe :(

All I'm waiting on is the exact return dates for Sherlock and Luther. I've read August and "Fall 2013" (duh) respectively but neither were confirmed. We shall wait and see!

More over Pacific Playland, Columbus, Tallahassee and the rest of the Zombieland survivors have found a new home. Amazon.com has picked up the show based on the 2009 movie in what I consider a major coo for the sites streaming service. 

Amazon Prime/Amazon Instant Video sits in the third in the streaming war behind Netflix and Hulu for subscribers. I'm bummin' (borrowing) the service from a friend which I use on my PS3. The layout is lovely (if slightly confusing) but it's just lacking interesting, unique titles which competitors have in spades at the moment. Perhaps this will help it even the playing field a bit. 

At this point little is known about the plot and talent attached to the show. i09 scored a few pages of script from the series. Sounds like it's half-hour episodes will have the classic Z-land humor and more on the Columbus/Wichita romance, which I for one have been jonesing for since the movie came out. I wonder though if the actors will be even half as good as Jesse, Emma and co. 

This is what Kim Dotcom's new file-sharing/storage site 'Mega' looks like...A little boring eh? It's certainly not what I expected from the dude who created MegaUpload, MegaVideo and many more now defunct sites. I suppose that's what a year-long high profile copyright infringement case will do to ya. It will also serve to attract a lot of attention. Dotcom tweeted that within the first two hours the server reached it's 250,000 registrations. In all, more than a million people registered for the site within the first 24 hours. I signed up for the service this morning and these are some of general first impressions. 

Registration didn't take as long as I expected. Some sites like Mashable reported some slowness in the registration process. Mine was fairly smooth.

It looks less like MegaUpload and more like Dropbox. And the great thing is you get WAY more storage on Mega than Dropbox (and every other cloud storage site -- see blow). However, I wonder if Mega will eventually catch up to other online locker services in terms of phone and tablet availability. 

Where's the porn!?! LOL JK JK! (kinda)

So sorry for the delay, my lovelies! 2012 was a weird and wonderful year. However I regret not being more active here. There was a ton of interesting streaming news that I neglected to post. So many missed opportunities. BUT(T) I got a lot of good experience working as a web editor and social media coordinator for the now defunct (not my fault) Fourth Wall Studios' interactive web series platform RIDES.tv. It was an ambitious venture that I sincerely wished would have succeeded. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I learned a ton about the web series world and the future of how we consume our entertainment, which is of course what this blog is all about. 

                                           Ahhhhhhh the Olympics, the quadrennial sports patriotica during which we as a nation say to ourselves "I'm going to be a fan of competitive swimming from now on" only to forget about it two days later as we draft our fantasy football teams. And finally, this year, NBC will be live streaming every event to satiate our fleeting jingoistic war-metaphor mongering.

I love some Olympics, LOVE some Olympics. The first games I fell deep for was Barcelona 1992 when European basketball players still looked like THIS and asked for autographs while trying to guard THIS , and THIS GUY hit his head on the diving platform,  and THIS GUY was the fastest man on earth,  and THIS GUY and his dad made everyone cry. It was perhaps the greatest three weeks an 11 year old sports crazed wiener-kid could have asked for.

Sadly though most of the events were woefully inaccessible thanks to the idiotic Olympic Triple Cast, a pay-per-view plan that priced most of America out of the full gaming splendor. That was the last time, thank God, we were made to pay to watch what is supposed to be the ultimate symbol of good will and human brotherhood. Since then NBC has tried it's best to smear the events over it's broadcast and cable channels. They did what they could, but it was tough to navigate. Were we really supposed to hunt through pages and pages of event listings until we finally discover that the gold medal Archery event is on at 2am on Bravo? Come on. And of course there was the famous re-broadcasting for primetime fiasco that eliminated the joy of world wide communal watching that creates such a unique atmosphere. But this year promises to be different.

NBC has announced a partnership with YouTube to live stream EVERY event at London 2012. This arrangement is apparently a purely technological one though. YouTube.com won't carry any of the events. They are merely lending their infrastructure and brandname to NBCOlympics.com where you can watch all the jocky goodness go down across the pond. 

So what does this say about broadcast TV? NBC, the storied and sickly over-the-air elder statesman, is giving in to the power of the stream. Surely this is a precedent that will be followed from here on out. They had success streaming this year's Super Bowl so this was a logical next step, but it is a HUGE step. The Olympics are NBC's last dignified institution, so for Sarnoff's baby to go all-in online says a lot about the old guard adopting the new kids platform. It can only be a matter of time before streaming all live sports, and even eventually entertainment programming, is the rule and not the exception.

Imagine you're at a 19th century World's fair of sorts and George Washington Carver gets up on stage and announces not one, but TWO amazing new food products. One is a paste made of mashed peanuts, the other of mashed and sweetened strawberries. "I call this one Peanut Butter, and this one Jelly. They are both delicious and delightful, and should be used individually. Never the twain shall meet!" 

Thus concludes my artistic/historical recap of Tuesday's iPad announcement.

I am first and foremost a TV geek, so allow me my entitled malaise after Apple provided us with a tech tease the likes of which would make a good Christian prom date behold in awe. 

Apple unveiled a new iPad with a ungodly sharp display and a fast new processor. A perfect combination to both stream and watch TV shows and movies in glorious high definition. Apple also announced a new version of Apple TV that now supports 1080p HD streaming content. So where is the tease you ask? I'm so glad you asked. I feel like you're really listening to me :)

Rumors of an Apple TV, a REAL Apple TV like one with a 50' screen that sits in your living room and waste your life away in front of, have been swirling for a long time (see here, here, and here). Is that something you might be interested in? Of course. But on Tuesday instead of giving us that beautiful beast, Apple gives us the two main ingredients without putting them together: Cutting edge retina display, 1080 streaming, and enough apps to say goodbye to cable forever the same way putting together peanut butter and jelly makes us say goodbye to hunger forever or for a few hours depending on how fat you are.

Apple will probably unveil their full TV soon. Perhaps this year. And it has the potential to change the landscape of broadcast and streaming TV forever. No more channels, just apps. It's going to be delightful. But Tim Cook strutting around on stage introducing peanut butter in one hand and jelly in the other without mushing them together and giving us a bite is sort of a dick move.

"I see you've purchased 9 INCH STUDDED DOMINATRIX BOOTS WITH MATCHING HORSE WHIP. Other users who purchased that enjoyed our new original series 'BLOG GRL, QUEEN OF JR. HIGH'. Would you like to stream that now?"

Soon, that could be the kind of message that greets you when you go onto Amazon.com to buy the embarrassing shit you'd never dream of buying in person.  WIRED and FORTUNE magazines have reported recent developments that make it face-palmingly obvious the online shopping megalith will follow Google, Hulu, and Netflix into the original content arena.

How obvious is it? How about this guy, master of secret keeping:

It's true. Boxing legend and one time corpse Joe Lewis has changed colors and risen from the grave to take a Creative Executive job at Amazon's production arm, once again proving you can't keep a good fighter down. That is theory #1. My other theory is that this alt-Joe Lewis is an entertainment suit who recently got a plum new job and couldn't help but leverage it to entice some of that sweet sweet Linkedin gold digger tail we've all read so much about. His profile listing has since been changed to "Production Executive" or some such fluff, but the leak is leaked.

If theory #2 is correct, Amazon.com is staffing up with executive types to develop a slate of original content for distribution on their website and, most likely a cross-platform app much like Netflix. So why does anyone care about (non-American hero) Joe Lewis going all braggy on America's least addicting social network? Because this would be a major development and further proof that the future of television lies squarely in the digital hands of online creators with their billions of dollars and billions of users. 

But honestly if this was a secret, it was the clumsiest secret ever. Behold:

Such demanding qualifications. How do they expect to find anyone fitting all three of those impossible credentials? Why Amazon posted a job to create comedy and kids TV series without making some an announcement of their plans is kind of bitchy. Maybe this is some sort of passive aggressive viral marketing like those friends who only post cryptic tweets, hoping their followers attempt to deduce their meaning like so much digital-Riddler (introducing Digddler!).

I am watching Battleground

“What else are you going to watch? Lilyhammer? I don't think so, girlfriend!”

Bye bye Terra Nova. You were, in a word... bad. Not the Michael Jackson kinda bad. Not bad to the bone. Not bad meaning good. Not even so bad that it's good. Just classic bad. The cheesy dialogue, overacting, and frankly, stupid idea just made it too much to watch. So why did I watch the whole season series? Because I'm a completionist. Once I start a series I need to finish it. Unless it's Harper's Island -- that show might be the worst of all time. Maybe. In any case, Terra Nova is gone. Too much money spent on not enough viewers (although I'm sure other show <cough cough Fringe cough cough> would love Terra Nova numbers).