Until streaming services start finding ways to punish us for canceling/renewing, I will maintain one at a time and cancel it when I’ve binged everything I want to watch, then switch to another. There’s no longer any “water cooler” need to be caught up on the latest shows, I just watch them when I feel like it.
But I will NEVER subscribe to a service that interrupts a movie with a ticker about breaking news elsewhere unless that break in is part of the national Emergency Broadcast Network and they’re telling me the missiles are falling. That’s it. Period.
Oh, you know that 90-something percent of those “news alerts” will be total bullshit, and not vital warnings. (And given what the “breaking news” segments are on the news channels, 90 percent won’t even be significant news items.)
And it’s not even remotely sustainable on the business or creative side, either. The smart TV writers I listen to are certain that eventually the surviving companies will just end up re-inventing cable.
We let our subscription lapse when they rebranded as the super lame “Max.” When Hacks returns after the writer’s strike is over, we will probably subscribe again (just long enough to watch the series). But not if this is a thing, unless you can toggle it off.
If there was ACTUAL breaking news instead of calling long-expected events “Breaking News” I might not mind. Interrupting my movie to tell me, e.g. King Charles was just inaugurated" or “Game 7 of the World Series is Starting” is the kind of crap that got me to remove CNN from my phone.
If somebody in the theater 5 rows away opens their phone, it distracts me. Actually putting something on the screen is not going to be easy to ignore. Fuck the greedy bastards. I’m already PAYING for shows that run adds before they let me watch.
I wonder whether someone actually thinks that this is a good idea, or if there was some sort of boardroom knife fight where CNN won the right to use Max’s eyeball thralls to juice its viewership numbers; and the streaming side of the house is being told that they’ll just have to do some cramming until line goes up.
I certainly wouldn’t bet against hubris or being so out of touch you’re on the far side of the Karman Line(especially with Perrette musing hypothetically about “dynamic tiling” as though it was a high concept form the future; rather than the same thing that sucked back in Windows 8); but it also seems not unlikely that what a streaming subsidiary is directed to put into the sausage is at least in part a function of the perceived interests of its overlord rather than local initiative.
It’s like they are actively sabotaging CNN and HBO.
“CNN makes great documentaries, so hey let’s shut down that division.”
“HBO is a respected brand, so let’s rename our streaming service after our third-tier overflow channel.”
“CNN has some great reporters and newscasters so let’s fire all of them and put Kaitlyn Collins in prime time.” (And to be fair, I have nothing against her as a reporter or on-air personality, she’s just not a super charismatic headliner.)
“What the world needs is a show with Gayle King and Charles Barkley!” (Narrator: it doesn’t.)
“CNN has a reputation as being a leftist network, so let’s give a huge amount of airtime to right wing talking heads and people like Vivek Ramaswamy so we can say we’re balanced.”
“Let’s pull a bunch of HBO’s prestige content off the streaming service so we can overload it with garbage from the Discovery channel”
“Let’s give more CNN airtime to Michael Smirconish and less time to Fareed Zakaria”
It should be such an easy formula. Let CNN report on some of what Joe Biden’s administration is actually doing rather than breathless coverage of Trump’s rage fits and right-wing talking heads saying how he’s a useless and ineffective president. Talk more about what’s going in Ukraine rather than giving a bloc of airtime to Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie, or Will Hurd for the millionth time. Let CNN keep creating and pro-dicing top tier documentaries. Unlock HBO’s vault of amazing content. This shouldn’t be hard.
IT’s an elaborate plot by bookshops. A bookshop near me has both One Piece comics and cartoon on DVD. They have also Harlock movie on BD, but if you prefer some classic they have all the Sandokan saga on paperback, like The tigers of Mompracem and The Mystery of the black jungle.
I canceled my sub last week when they announced they’d be leaning into home improvement programming.
But while we’re on the subject of baffling choices, I never want to see “what’s around the web” “before I go” when I’m just trying to get back to the home feed, boingboing.
