Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Advertising and lack of interesting content are what made me start building my library of physical media. Go ahead and cut an hour, I don't care, I don't even watch your stupid TV anymore anyway.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Likely that's the case nowadays. When they first started there were complaints about them though, but even then you never heard many words from the people responsible explaining why they were there. When NBC started, there was a long thread on the rec.arts.tv newsgroup which I read often at the time titled "Stop the NBC Logo"- I would link to it but it doesn't seem to be easily findable now. Some people were outraged, but of course there were some who said "Doesn't bother ME." I do remember someone said "If they get away with this, all the other networks will follow suit" and that's exactly what happened- though for the most part nobody has talked about them, almost like they have been threatened with something really bad if they do. They've become the elephant in the room. It was ironic that it happened right at the start of HD also (NBC even had "HD" next to their peacock logo for a while). I'd been waiting for HD a long time but didn't see any point to it if they were going to intentionally deface the picture.

There's definitely been people who like to ridicule those who complain about bugs also- there was one person on that Usenet group who I think worked in the industry who would post about them a lot (his name was "LAGuy", and other users would just crap on him. Someone flat out told him to just stop complaining and he replied "I will complain about them as long as they're on my screen."

Fair enough- to me, credibility means should I respect your opinion or not, and should I consider what you say as fact. I've studied the history of TV going back to the beginning, there are people in the early years who did a lot of great things. NBC as a company was a huge innovator. They started color TV in the mid-50s long before color TVs were affordable. They were the first network with stereo in the mid-80s, which not many people cared about (and many today still don't) but as an audiophile I was thrilled; audio on TV wasn't much of a priority before that. Networks had a sense of SHOWMANSHIP also that's completely gone now. Commercial breaks were always a necessary evil, but they'd at least try to place them tastefully during shows. If a segment ended with a big emotional moment, there's be a good few seconds of silence (often with a title card) before the first commercial kicked in. This week I digitized an off-air recording of "Shogun" aired on NBC in 1980; that was a huge EVENT (which cost a ton of money to produce) and was treated as such. Sure there were commercials, but the first one didn't even appear until 25 minutes. That would be unheard of today. Point is, the people who ran NBC then actually CARED about how their shows were presented. Today, obviously the most innovative thing they can think of is to drop an hour per night- a few years ago I heard they were already considering dropping Saturdays.

So you admit you have no real proof of whether this has done any good overall (and specifically to NBC, which this thread is about.) They publish studies of lots of things, but there's been just about nothing about logos. And as I said in the other thread it's NOT about having content "shared all over the internet", that wasn't even possible in 1996 which was when NBC started this. And logically I can see that it looks terrible.

Quote:

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Even flipping from channel to channel, the viewer can quickly see what station they are on. That’s a good thing for everyone.

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How is knowing what station you are on more important than being able to see and enjoy the show? By that same logic, radio stations should loop IDs constantly over the music so that you'll always know what station you're listening to, and that's always been a higher priority there than it has been on TV. Besides that, all digital tuners will display the name of the station and the show that's on when changing channels, even if you land on a commercial. Digital TV also should have included a graphics signal similar to what blu-rays have, so that they could overlay all the graphics they wanted but the user could also turn them on and off.

You likely won't say what show that is. It sounds like a news/talk show which is entirely different than an emotional, dramatic series or something with visual impact. Also is it on broadcast or cable? Cable has lost a lot of subscribers and for good reason, but even when it was on top it seemed most viewers would tolerate anything. They'd complain about it maybe, but they wouldn't stop watching or subscribing. (I'd given up on cable by the early 90s for plenty of reasons, but of course you'll say I'm the exception.) It's one thing if the producers of an individual show want to load up the screen with text and graphics- it's another when the head of a network decrees that EVERY show on that network must do the same.



And why did people buy DVRs? Because there were too many COMMERCIALS and those let you easily skip them. I know shows are getting more expensive to produce but it's simply not realistic to expect viewers to sit through 20 minutes of them per hour, with or without clutter on the screen during the show itself. I don't have a good answer as to how to solve that, but if I ran a network I would be doing SOMETHING, ANYTHING to get people to watch shows live and not DVR them. (I don't have a DVR myself, so all they'd have to do in my case is give me a reason to tune in, period.) And if streaming is taking viewers away from the broadcasts, why allow the show on that in the first place? It used to be if you missed the initial airing, that was it until it was rerun in the off-season so you made damn well sure you were watching if you cared at all about it. Streaming probably gives scripted shows a bigger audience overall, but if broadcast networks and stations still depend on those to survive then they need to either give viewers a reason to watch them that way, or find some other way to innovate, the way radio shifted to music after TV took away the comedy and drama shows (yes, in the old days there were actual SHOWS on the radio, with no picture- you had to just imagine what was going on.)

In any event, giving up an hour of prime time is clearly admitting defeat. In the historical sense it's sad, but the way it's been the past 20+ years I won't miss it.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Aw, does this mean we won't have two interminable Dateline hours anymore? Two hours of a white-haired cadaver doing his best film-noir-narrator audition; or a fat, sarcastic guy with severe vocal fry; or Barney Rubble. Damn, I'd sure miss not watching it.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Google Netflix peak hours or whatever. 9-11 PM is their peak bandwidth. It's not hard figuring out total consumption for streaming video since they make up such a huge percentage of all Internet traffic, which ISPs constantly monitor.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

About more time for local news.

The NBC station here in Austin also runs the CW channel. At 9 central, they do a one hour newscast on the CW. They do the weather forecast like 4 times, and in the second half hour they repeat stories from the first half hour. Then at 10 central, they do their 35 minute newscast on NBC, with the exact same people and the exact same coverage.

And this is all after having local newscasts on the NBC channel from 4:00 - 5:30, and then another half hour at 6:00.

Whatever you have heard, Austin is NOT that interesting.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Same here In the Seattle area, the NBC station plays news all night on another channel they control repeating the same stories all night. This has zero benefit in our market when they will just put the same news on again for another hour..

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Most viewers don’t watch multiple local newscasts. Creating completely different content for each one is a waste of time.

And the weather is prominent because it is easily the number 1 thing local viewers tune in for.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

We have a channel here that has a ton of news broadcasts, and they're pretty much all the same besides breaking news (or a car chase, if there's a car chase going on forget the rest of the news because you're not seeing it): you see the exact same stories over and over again, though the poor reporter has to stay at the location where something happened at 10 in the morning giving the same spiel with minor variations.

It actually strikes me as super inefficient, especially the weather. I'm kind of surprised more stations especially sister stations don't just share a weather person.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

But as I posted before, if that hour is going to be dedicated to news, I am certain the NBC News division could put together something much more useful to viewers and society than turning the time over to locals so they can repeat the same news over and over.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

This bandwidth consumption isn't the issue. The issue is whether the time periods of peak consumption of Netflix in each time zone, is consistent (or inconsistent) with the 9-11 PM window.

From googling, the only obvious articles popping up which asserts a particular peak time period window for netflix, were some articles dating back to 2010 or 2011.

https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/27/tech/...dwith-mashable
https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home...e-u-s-traffic/


It takes some more googling to find the original source studies, from a company named Sandvine. More recent sandvine reports don't mention the daily/hourly time periods as much.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Considering how much station branding goes to the weather team and how much of a draw the weather forecast is, they'll never do that. And again, even if the stories are repeated, the viewers who are watching more than one newscast are power viewers and are okay with it. Otherwise, it's new to everyone else.

People care a LOT more about their local news than national news. And the affiliates want a good lead in - they'd be better served by getting it from a scripted show earlier in the evening than more news.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

I think that Alan is mistaken when he thinks that television in the past was a golden age when content mattered more than advertising. I think it was in the book The Making of Star Trek that someone tells the story of writing for television in the 1960s. The hero was being menaced by bad guys, and he was going to pick up a tire iron to defend himself. The advertisers didn't allow the scene to be broadcast like that, because it suggested a broken car. The writer had to change the tire iron to a brick.

I remember when network newscasters talked about the facts of the day, and then picked up a box of shampoo and said that it was the best.

Television has always been about the advertising first.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Don't worry. Once Alan passes away, somebody else will take up Alan's "logo bug cause" and rant about it constantly well into the future. ;)

If not an actual real person, an AI avatar will be conjured up or designed where such an entity will last for eternity.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Then who's watching Fox News, CNN and MSNBC?

What I am saying is that it very much seems to me that NBC is saying, "We've got this valuable hour in prime time every night, but it is too expensive to program, so let's give it away to the local stations to squander."
Or NBC could see this as an opportunity to take their "serve the public interest" responsibility seriously and maybe do some fucking good with that hour.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/dvdtalk...473cc71904.jpg


From Dallas Texas, the Flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 PM central standard time, some 38 minutes ago. [pause] And speaking of dead, do you have dry, lifeless hair? Then you need to use Prell shampoo

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/dvdtalk...ed940d00a0.png

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Have you watched Jay Leno's recent videos? The man is old. He moves slowly when he gets into a car. I doubt that he could handle a five days a week television program anymore.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

This. First television was used to sell and broadcast advertising. Then somebody came up with the idea of showing old movies in between the commercials. Then somebody had the idea of making original shows to put between the commercials.
The ads are a box of cereal. The show is the prize inside. The trick is to get people to buy a cereal they don't like just to get the prize inside. They've pull that trick off pretty well. The opposite is the Superbowl. People who never watch football just to see the ads.
Originally an advertiser would dictate what shows were on the schedule, on what day, at what time. Networks would sell a time slot to an advertiser and the advertiser would decide what show aired. Ford might own 8pm-9pm on NBC. Somebody makes a pilot and shows it to Ford. Ford likes it and tells NBC to put the show on at 8pm. Pilots were shopped around to the advertisers who owned the time slots, not the networks. That's why the products were actually mentioned in the shows. The networks would hold back a few time slots to show stuff they produced and sell advertising like it's done today.

It's like trading cards. They started as a premium with a pack of cigarettes. Topps is/was a bubble gum/candy company. They were not involved in any way with the manufacture of trading cards. They started giving cards away free with bubblegum. When you were buying a pack of Baseball or Star Wars cards the cards were free, you bought the bubblegum. TV is the same way.

This is a good analogy
Burger King is offering drinks in Star Wars character cups. You're paying for the drink, the cup is free. All you want is the cup. You go into Burger King and pay them the soft drink price for just the empty cup. You're buying what everybody else is getting for free. That's what you are doing if you pay to stream commercial tv shows ad free..

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

It's a joke, reminding people of NBC's previous genius plans for the 10 o'clock hour.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

He gets around pretty good for 72. He still does stand up all the time - that's 90 minutes on stage standing/moving around. No reason why he couldn't host a show again. Except, of course, that he doesn't want to. ;)

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Well, I'm going to question the economics you are describing. When I was a child, you could buy an individual piece of good bubble gum for a penny, but a pack of baseball cards with one piece of shitty gum cost a dime. So it would be crazy to think that I was buying the gum and getting the cards for free. I was clearly buying the cards I wanted with a crappy piece of gum included.

I understand that Topps was originally a just a candy company, but they diversified and went into the baseball card selling business.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Jay Leno has Jay Leno's Garage on CNBC and he seems fine though he has been out of the talk show game for 8 years now.

Maybe we should have saw this coming when NBC has not aired any new shows and all repeats on Sun nights.

AGT, Voice, and American Ninja rerurns WTF?

I thought Sun was the most or one of the most valuable days of real estate when it came to TV ratings?

It is like when Sunday Night Football is over they don't care what airs on Sundays.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Isn't that just during summer that they show reruns on Sunday night? I expect they'll have original programming on Sundays after football ends. I know they used to run Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist on Sundays but that was a few seasons ago now.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

They typically program Sun-Fri, so 12 hours.

L&O and Chicago Shows would take up half of these slots.

NBC will probably just do 10/13 episode season shows like La Brea, and not do the 22 unless its studio owned or they can heavily sell it.

Broadcast just doesn't matter anymore. They would rather drive the consumers to their respective streamers where all the other expensive content is, waiting to get paid for. NBC got out of the Hulu deal a year early for a reason, and dumping 10pm next season makes sense. They already trained the Hulu filks to head to Peacock.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

That was the only original show and Good Girls but other than those shows it was and still all repeats on the Sun night primetime block.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

A piece of Bazooka (made by Topps) sells for a penny. How do they get more people to buy a penny piece of bubblegum? They license baseball players, pay to have the cards printed, and included 5 cards with a piece of gum for a nickel. The extra four cents covers the cost of the cards. Everytime a pack of cards sells, they've sold another penny piece of gum.

When a fast food place has movie tie in soft drink cups they don't raise the price. They just want to sell the drinks.

Pepsi bought Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and KFC in order to sell pop. They don't give a shit about the food. They break even on that. The food is to lure people in to buy Pepsi products. They are not in the food business. They exist to sell Pepsi products and nothing else.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

He hosts the daily reboot of "You Bet Your Life" in syndication, but likely tapes an entire week's worth in one day.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Those are networks with a global reach. Per capita, local news trounces them.

NBC would be better served giving that time to affiliates. They won't be able to program news that draws as much as the primetime content they are ditching and that will hurt the affiliates who depend on the network for a good lead-in to their 10/11PM news.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

So, if I want a piece of bubble gum, I'm not going to do the obvious thing and buy a piece of gum for a penny, I'm going to buy a pack of baseball cards for a nickel?

I don't know what was going through the minds of Topps executives 70 years ago when they started down this road, but pretty quickly and fairly obviously, they put themselves in the business of selling baseball cards ALONG WITH running a separate business that sells gum and candy.

For example, Pepsi is in the business of selling soda. Pepsi is also in the business of selling water. Pepsi is also in the business of selling fried chicken. Pepsi is also in the business of selling tacos. Pepsi is also in the business of selling pizza.


Actually, they want to draw people into their restaurants to buy meals (food and drinks) to get the cups. It's been decades since I bought any of this stuff, but I remember (if you asked) they would give you your drink in a regular cup and give you a pristine promo cup separately.[/quote]

That's not true.

If it was true, then Pepsi would not be in the pizza delivery business, where relatively few customers buy drinks.

Also, since Pepsi makes billions of dollars in profits selling their drinks in stores, going to all the trouble to own and run restaurants all over the world JUST to sell more drinks is economic insanity. It is true that soft drinks have the highest price to cost ratio, but for example, the price to cost ratio of potatoes boiled in soybean oil is also very high.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

So a better lead-in to the 10/11 local news is more local news before that?

If the arrangement ends up being that the affiliates get that primetime hour, but The Tonight Show now starts at 10/11, then I get it. Otherwise NBC is just creating (IMO) a 90 minute programming wasteland between the end of primetime programming and the start of late night programming.

Or maybe this is just the first obvious step in what will be the process of broadcast television completely abandoning scripted programming all together.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

I'd much rather see Jimmy Fallon bumped up to 10pm than cutting an hour of primetime.
NBC has already given up the slot after Seth Meyers. Heck, they could then bump up Seth Meyers
an hour earlier and ditch his old slot too...

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

That absolutely seems like something to do. If people watch Fallon at 11;30/10:30, wouldn't more people watch it at 10/9? Except NBC would be terrified to try that after the Jay Leno Show failure.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

It could be a good idea but could they also fill the current Seth Meyers with a new host so maybe you could have 3 1 hr talk shows back to back to back?

Maybe talk shows are less expensive to produce?

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Woah woah woah. People still watch the talk shows at night? What's the age demographic on that? It must be cheap enough (or the local syndicators don't see value in those slots).

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

Here in Austin, after Seth Meyers, it's a Friends rerun, a replay of an earlier NBC news show, Dr Phil, and then the Today branded programming starts at 3 am.
If NBC doesn't want to be bothered with programming an hour of primetime, no reason to think they'd bother to do another original hour after Midnight.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

I agree what was alluded to earlier that depending on what market it is, sometimes local news broadcasts in some smaller markets are just not that interesting. And I don’t think giving the 10pm hour back to them really benefits.

Obviously Los Angeles and New York can fill an hour or half hour newscast easily and they have more ad revenue coming in. But a lot of small towns in middle America just don’t have the budget and resources to program another hour.

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

So reruns of THE OFFICE which probably would outrage some of their 10pm shows anyway

Re: NBC is Considering Cutting an Hour of Primetime
 

But remember the affiliates are paying for that Office rerun. It can be cheaper to produce a local show instead.