"The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Tuesday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2012 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Program scripts from week of May 14, 2012
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Here We Go Again
Here we go again. And I for one am more than a little tired of it. It’s the classic game of “Let’s panic the customer base as a negotiating tool”. It happens every time a service provider like a cable company or satellite system is in negotiation with a content provider like Discovery Channel or ESPN.
In this case it is the Dish Satellite network and the movie and programming channel American Movie Classics or AMC. The behind the scenes story on all of this is that this is business. The service providers have contracts with the content providers that allow them to carry those channels and offer them to you and me, the viewers. If you think about the number of channels that satellite or cable companies carry you realize that it must be a fairly complicated financial situation for them. Just like any business the service providers need to keep the cost of their below the level of their sales. That’s Business Admin 101.
On the other side a content provider like AMC needs to make deals with a variety of service providers as well. Those fees provide a solid foundation on which they can build their programming. Commercial advertising sales will wax and wane but these contracts tend to run for several years at a time which provides some stability. So they need to make sure that the income will be enough to continue to create and license their product. Again Business Admin 101.
I get all of that. I also get that the basic equation begins with AMC wanting the fees to be as high as possible and that Dish wants them to be as low as possible. What I also get is that the timing of this dispute is curious. Dish Network began threatening to drop AMC along with its sister channels IFC, Sundance and WeTV following a court ruling in favor of the movie channels earlier this spring. Dish maintains they are thinking about dropping the channels because no one watches them. In the end AMC needs Dish to as part of its distribution network and Dish needs AMC for quality programming like Mad Men.
And what the viewers need is to not be in the middle of all this. We may all want access to our Mad Men but what we really need is for everyone to start acting like grown men.
Cancellation Season
It’s TV series cancellation season again! That time of year when the networks have to clear away the dead wood to make way for what they hope are better shows. Of course that’s what they were hoping for when they started airing THESE shows as well. In network TV you need to have a very short memory I think.
Now the bulk of the shows that get the ax every cancellation season are no surprise. They are the shows that you either never heard of or only ever saw a promo for. They generated no buzz, no water cooler talk. Shows like Best Friends Forever, Free Agents, The River, and rather ironically the completely forgettable Unforgettable. Shows that may have had an interesting concept or cast but just never found an audience. That’s TV network speak for “just weren’t very good”.
There’s also usually a couple of these shows that fall into the head scratcher category. Head scratcher in the sense that you have to wonder who ever thought they were a good idea in the first place. There are two of those for me this year. First is GCB a show that can’t even say it’s real name because it has a bad word in it. Based on a novel whose title includes that same I can’t say it on the radio word it’s about Christian women behaving, well like anything other than Christian women. But the real head scratcher for me is Rob. Who thought giving Rob Schneider his own series was a good idea? Who thought that a series based on ethnic humor doing a re-hash of Bridget Loves Bernie was a good idea? How did this show last as long as it did?
The other interesting note in this cancellation season is the semi-cancellation of NBC’s Community and 30 Rock. Both shows were picked up for the fall but with only 13 week basically half season commitments. The Peacock Network stoutly maintains this doesn’t mean anything but Parks and Recreation was picked up for a full season commitment so it clearly does. Meanwhile the first of the CSI franchise met the ax. CSI Miami was dropped after 10 years. The story lines were increasingly stupid but I will miss the gorgeous cast. We need to find Eva Larue a new series ASAP.
On the up side this is also when we can celebrate great new series making the cut. My two personal favorite new series, NBC’s Grimm and CBS’s Person of Interest were both renewed.
So we wait to see what new candidates for next springs cancellation season get launched this fall.
Big Money
Let me be perfectly clear right up front. I know nothing about big finance, stocks or anything of the sort. At the same time like a lot of people I am fascinated by the story of Facebook’s IPO which is expected to finally take place at the end of this week.
In case you keep hearing the term IPO and are afraid to embarrass yourself by asking what it means let me help you out. It stands for Initial Public Offering. In simple terms it means the first time that stock in the company is sold to the public. It’s a way for a company to raise money while giving up a little control of the company.
So here we have the company that has probably had the single largest influence on our day to day lives over the last what 6 years taking that big step. And the numbers that people are throwing around are insane. If the stocks sell at the top price being tossed around (that would be $35 a share) the total value of the company, both the publically sold stock and the stuff that people like Mark Zuckerberg will hold onto, would be around 100 b-as-in-boy-isn’t-that-a -big-number billion dollars.
What I love about all of this is that the old guard on Wall Street are torn between wanting part of the big money and just being driven insane by the new media tendencies of Zuckerberg and company. Recently Mark needed to meet with some major investor types prior to the IPO. He showed up in his trademark hoodie because that’s who Mark is. Mark keeps saying crazy stuff like the social mission of Facebook (meaning all that stuff that you and I like about Facebook) are more important to him than the financial side. The sound you just heard was half a dozen venture capitalists swooning in dismay.
You don’t have to be a financial genius to realize that for the investors to feel like it’s worth that kind of money Facebook will have to start making ginormous amounts of money. And no one is quite sure how that would happen. Like an awful lot of people Facebook is having trouble trying to figure out how to make money as more of the online experience moves towards mobile devices.
So here’s the deal. Come Friday sit back and enjoy the circus
Call that the View From the Phlipside.
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