The Modern Media Consumer

The Modern Media Consumer: A study in the annoyance, frustration, and overwhelming feelings of betrayal felt by this humble customer in my dealings with media publishers, the owners of the ultimate object of my desire, their product, and the consumption of it in some form or other.

The recipients of today's indignity: the one and only, Mr. Tony Bennett, and Bugs freaking Bunny.

In the networked world, people tell each other to "check out" things they think might be of interest, and someone did that to me regarding NBC's tribute to Tony Bennett, "Tony Bennett: An American Classic" aired sometime in the winter of 2006 (there's an "A Christmas Story" themed ad for Cingular and a Jesus movie, made the approximation easy). This is how highly I regarded the recommender's opinion: I allowed it to take an hour of precious hard drive space for full definition audio/video for over 2 months while I waited to archive it for potential eventual viewing.

That may not seem like much sacrifice in the new world of 80 hour PVR/DVRs ("Tivos" to most of us), but over the holidays it was, as is common in American households. This year was the year we flew back to my family's home in St. Louis, and it was the time for celebrating my father-in-law's 60th birthday, and it was when we finally were able to start re-building a relationship with my younger brother's family, this year barracked out in Arizona, one that had been on hold for years due to an excess of complications and budgetary/time issues going back really to before our wedding almost 6 years ago.

Who knows what serendipitous joy had to be discarded un-viewed during that entire period? And all to preserve this one hour of crooning, a musical style I am not generally known to appreciate that much (don't get me started on Ol' Blue Eyes). For comparison's sake, the only other show that had a a similar "highly protected" status to prevent me/Mr. Tivo from having a brain-fart and accidentally deleting was the US vs. Denmark friendly soccer match in January, which I had actually completely forgot about during all of my travels, only to happily find helpfully awaiting me after whatever leg of the journeys I was on when it was being played.

So, it was a bit of a something something that I saved this particular Tony Bennett show. And today I finally got around to taking it the next fateful step on its path to my eventual viewing: archiving to DVD. Archiving is not however a direct line to my eyeballs, but it's a necessary one for things that I think probably will like if I give them a chance, but who knows when the next time might come that my cranky ass actually feels like giving a chance to something I don't KNOW I'll like?^*

I generally try to at least watch the beginning and/or the end of a show when I'm dubbing it down if it's on a commercial channel, because who knows when their schedule has been slightly shifted by live programs, or if it's merely off a couple minutes due to the normal vagaries of broadcast schedules, but I can't watch the whole show to pause and stop the recording and make sure it all fits on the disk. This way I can usually just fast forward through the commercials during the first break, which generally offsets this margin enough that I haven't yet found one of these shows being prematurely cut off.

So here comes the first dramatically backlit shot of Mr. Bennett in a spotlight, solo on the stage, really nice, classy-looking imagery, then up pops this crappy little insert on the bottom of the screen for the local news broadcast: "Elderly couple murdered in Northern Virginia, News at 11". Classy indeed. And you see, that's the crap you have to put up with when you try to watch those "free" over-the-air broadcasts: you never know when a complete viewing train-wreck like this is likely to occur.

Say it's not a gruesome, tragic double-murder ruining what's otherwise a thoughtful and moving tribute to an American icon, what about when you do the nice social thing of go to a friend's house (or even better, the friend of a spouse's house) and watch the local team in a game you don't really have any interest in, while you're recording at home the game you really want to watch off the satellite (should you be so lucky as to not a have a freaking massive tree that you can't remove blocking your reception). For me say Missouri is playing Kansas when both are ranked again and slugging it out in the Big 12, while U.Va is pounding on a hapless Maryland. This is the essence of delayed gratification that we're all taught is one of the principal signs of achieving adulthood, right? Making the best of a crappy situation, at least saving your reactions to real- if delayed-time. And there, on the freaking ESPN2 ticker you see the final score.

So what, this is the price of watching free programming right? Well, I thought that's what advertising was. And even though I was tivo'ing and recording the DVD of the Tony Bennett show, partially fast forwarding through the ads, I can still tell you that the primary sponsor of the show was Target^**, and the first ads were for Cingular, Target and that Nativity movie. I mean, you know you'll have to one way or the other generally at least see any ads embedded in the breaks of the program, as well as the logos and other bric-a-brac overlaid on the video (hello Mr. Peacock), but why also during the actual broadcast of a non-live sporting event?

So if a broadcast network doesn't even take itself seriously enough to prevent it's own self-inflicted wound, why should I bother to believe that it really matters to them? Why would I expect them to do anything other than the most inept of jobs on any other presentation of what would otherwise be considered high-brow-ish programming?

And like so another broadcast network makes a good argument for it's own eventual demise to people who actually care about what they do, today easily found among the user-contributed and edited content on places like youtube.

I know that the person really cared about what they were doing when they went to the trouble of digitizing this old Bugs Bunny from 1946, youtube link (bizarrely this is currently the only place in my house I can watch what I remembered used to be the most ubiquitous content of my childhood). Yet why didn't Warner Brothers do this, making this kind of stuff available to people like me who grew up with it and have a very strong, latent interest in viewing. You can't tell me the cost is what would be preventing making making this quality of video available for .50 on iTunes.

I only found out that Bugs and Pals appear to not be receiving current broadcast on my friendly local Comcast network when I tried to schedule a Tivo season pass to have a little for a late night, pre-bedtime viewing treat some cold winter night. No luck finding any Bugs or Looney Tunes, but I think there might have been that kind of creepy tiny tunes baby version of the same characters somewhere. I know some of these old beauts are a bit embarrassing these days (to say the least: some superlatively shitty racial stereotypes here, viewer beware, but there are plenty that remain plenty entertaining, even if the Peter Lorre and Edgar G. Robinson references in the earlier non-racist Bugs cartoon need to have a director's commentary to explain to many of today's viewers.

So there you have it: this Modern Media Consumer today is annoyed at what I do see when I take the time to watch a high-profile Prime Time foofarah on NBC, and then doubly so for having to look to user-contributed content to find one of the most well-known icons of Western Pop culture. Losers: NBC and Comcast; Winner: Youtube and Verizon (the provider of the series of tubes coming into our home).

^*Thus these things go to DVD, then to a holding area on top of one of the tvs for a period of rest lasting between 1 and 3 months, following which I usually will pick them up, realise that they're still unlabelled, requiring me to wonder what the hell the last things might have been that I would have left there.

This can sometimes be an interesting journey through my recent viewing history, assuming I knew what it was that I was archiving, but as is most often the case I wind up confused, but if I have the time I'll go ahead and throw them back in the nearest player so I can finally label them and migrate them on to the next part of their journey, usually in a nearby secondary holding area.

Downstairs this may be on top of the bookcase, which is relatively valuable real estate as it's directly at eye level. But it's just above lots of open shelving, from which it and the latest episode of 2 hours of unwatched VW Gol may never see the light of day (I never know when I might want to track down one of the dozens of goals scored anywhere in the world the week of February 19, 2007, that I also would presumably have no other access to on youtube, or somewhere similar). I have more than a couple foreign language movies, I likely will never, ever see, despite my best intentions, in this category.

^**The Target branding actually was prominent enough that I noted it even while fast-forwarding through it, like the Cingular ad featuring my favorite Holiday movie, but I forgot them both when I was actually writing this and had to cheat for the above, so please forgive the temporary deception.