Category Archives: Television

City of Peoria, Television

Support your home team

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I’ll let this video speak for itself, except to say I support keeping our local news local:

You can get more information on their Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/peoriaaftra. They’re encouraging everyone to contact their boss, their boss’s boss, and their boss’s boss’s boss:

Who to Contact:

Mark DeSantis
General Manager
WEEK/WHOI
2907 Springfield Road
East Peoria, IL 61611
mdesantis@week.com
309-698-2525

Granite Broadcasting
Mr. Peter Markham, Chairman of Granite Broadcasting
p.markham@granitetv.com

Mr. Duane Lammers, Chief Operating Officer of Granite Broadcasting
d.lammers@granitetv.com

767 Third Ave, 34th Floor
New York, NY 10017

(212) 826-2530

Peoria Journal Star, Television

Bar Louie is gone

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I thought this was kind of funny. On page B1 of the Journal Star Thursday, December 30, there’s this little blurb:

What’s up with Bar Louie?

Blogger and entertainment editor Danielle Hatch is still trying to find out details on why there’s a closed sign on the door at the Bar Louie restaurant a the Shoppes at Grand Prairie. If you know more, join the conversation online.

So I go online and just type “Bar Louie Peoria” into Google. WEEK’s site pops up, where this story is posted with a date of Wednesday, December 29:

The General Manager at the Shoppes, Dawn Shipman says Bar Louie has closed “as a normal course of business.”

Bar Louie’s lease at the Shoppes has expired and closed immediately.

Mystery solved! Can someone from WEEK drop the Journal Star a line letting them know what’s going on over there at the Shoppes? They’re looking for details….

Television

It’s like MTV was in the 80s, but it’s over the air

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There’s a new subchannel for those who get their television over the air. It’s 43.2, a subchannel to WYZZ Fox 43. They’re showing “The Cool TV,” which plays music videos like you may remember seeing (if you’re old enough) back when MTV used to show music videos. “The Cool TV” says their programming is customized to the demographic of the city. On a recent evening, I saw “Wang Chung” sing their big hit “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” followed by the more recent song “One” performed by Bono and Mary J. Blige. Then they showed a performance of “Born to Be Wild” by Steppenwolf. As I write this, they’re showing Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream (Remix).” I’m not sure what these selections say about the demographic of Peoria.

Television

WYZZ leaves baseball fans with no signal

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WYZZ-TV, channel 43, went off the air tonight during the eighth inning of the National League Championship Series. It could have been the final game, as the Giants led the series three games to one. As it turned out, the Phillies won, sending the series back to Philadelphia. Not that WYZZ viewers could know. All they could see was “No Signal.”

Nothing has been posted even yet on their website explaining the outage or apologizing. If you call the studio for information, forget it — you get sent to someone’s voice mail. I did get a real person in the news room who politely informed me that they were having “technical difficulties” and that “engineers are working on the problem and will get the station back on the air as soon as possible.” It wasn’t soon enough. The game ended with WYZZ still off the air.

I hope they get their “technical difficulties” fixed before the World Series starts.

City Council, City of Peoria, Comcast, Television

City to temporarily extend Comcast franchise agreement … again

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Comcast’s 20-year cable franchise agreement with the City of Peoria expired in April 2006. Since then, that franchise agreement has been extended temporarily numerous times while the City and Comcast have been negotiating a new agreement. Tuesday, the council will consider a request to extend it once again — this time until November 30, 2010. The reason is so we can see what kind of agreement Comcast makes with other communities in Illinois (Rockford, Champaign, and Urbana). City staff believes this will somehow be advantageous to Peoria.

Meanwhile, Comcast has jettisoned oversight and execution of public access (technically known as “PEG”) programming, off-loading it to the City, which has in turn outsourced it to a third-party organization. Comcast has also closed their local customer service center. And Comcast can, at any time, get a franchise agreement from the State of Illinois, thanks to legislation pushed through by AT&T.

Comcast, thanks to the complicity of the State, has the City over a barrel. So, all these extensions appear to be only delaying the inevitable: a franchise agreement on Comcast’s terms. It’s hard to see what good these temporary extensions are doing.

Nation/World, Television

Opponents of Comcast-NBCU merger speak out at hearing

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The Federal Communications Commission held a public hearing in Chicago Tuesday on the Comcast/NBC Universal merger. Free Speech Radio Network has a good overview of the hearing. I particularly liked this comment from Josh Silver of the Free Press:

He says the merger would be yet another giveaway to industry giants at the public expense:

JOSH SILVER: Policymaking at the behest of the largest companies across industries is threatening our economy, our oceans, our security and the very viability of our democracy. Just look at the ongoing recession or the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico for the most recent examples.

It’s telling that this hearing was attended by only one FCC commissioner, Michael Copps. He spoke in opposition to the merger, but industry experts expect the FCC to ultimately approve it, with conditions. Copps was interviewed by the Philadelphia Inquirer and made a good point:

Copps warned that other media companies would seek government approval for their own mergers if Comcast were allowed to move forward with its proposed acquisition of NBC Universal. And that, he said, could lead the nation down a dangerous path of diminished newsrooms and fewer independent voices on television.

“If you let our competitor get big, you have to let us get big” would be the attitude among Comcast’s competitors, Copps said. Control of the Internet could consolidate into the hands of a few big corporations, in a manner similar to control of radio stations across the country, he said.

Television

News 25 Today now in HD (UPDATED)

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I’m not sure when they started this (I don’t normally watch early-morning TV), but I just noticed this morning that WEEK’s “News 25 Today” local show with Garry Moore and Sandy Gallant is now being broadcast in high definition. It looks really good! There were very few technical glitches this morning, too.

UPDATE: All of WEEK’s news shows are evidently in 16:9 HD. I’m watching News 25 at 10 now. They also have some new computer graphics, including “pillars” that fill in the side margins of (some of) the 4:3 footage they’re still using for national news stories. Their shots and CG are composed so they can use a center cut for standard def broadcasts (i.e., no letterboxing on older 4:3 sets — the picture appears full frame). Their ad bumpers are still standard def. Still, they’re the first local news to broadcast in HD.

Television

21 groups form coalition against Comcast-NBCU merger

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Bloomberg, Parents Television Council, National Organization of Women, Writer’s Guild of America, Free Press, and sixteen other groups have banded together to oppose the proposed Comcast-NBC Universal merger. They call themselves The Coalition for Competition in Media. Here’s a full-page ad they recently placed in the Chicago Sun-Times:

The deal is still being reviewed by the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department. More information on the coalition, including reaction from Comcast, can be found in Bloomberg Businessweek (click here).

Television

WEEK-TV’s robotic cameras profiled in trade magazine

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Broadcast Engineering, a TV industry trade publication, recently profiled our own WEEK-TV, channel 25. The station has installed some new robotic HD cameras for their newsroom:

WEEK-DT, the NBC affiliate in Peoria, IL, is using a robotic camera system made up of technology from Hitachi Kokusai, Tekskil Industries and Eagle to produce its nightly local HD newscast in a highly cost-effective way.

Working with a limited budget, Fred Roe, chief engineer of WEEK-DT, oversaw the installation of three Hitachi HV-HD30 cameras, a Tekskil 15R-DBC prompter and Eagle PT-250 pan and tilt camera control panel.

I’m sure you’re all fascinated by the technical information — there’s more if you want to read the whole article. I found a couple things interesting about this article.

First, I didn’t realize WEEK was producing its newscast in HD now. I watched the newscast last night, and it didn’t look high-def to me. Perhaps some other equipment needs to be upgraded before they can utilize the HD functions of their new cameras.

Second, I thought the headline of the article was sort of ironic: “Small station in Illinois produces local news cost-effectively with robotics.” Of course it’s a small station; the more they automate, the smaller it gets! It wasn’t that long ago that a newscast meant a dozen people buzzing around the studio — floor directors, camera operators, audio engineers, prompter operator, etc. Those people are all gone now, replaced with robotic cameras and computer scripts.

While these changes may be “cost-effective,” they certainly haven’t improved or even maintained the quality of the newscast. The number of technical glitches in last night’s 10:00 newscast was comical. My favorite part was when they showed the Peoria Heights Tower camera at the end of the broadcast for two or three minutes, well into the intro for The Tonight Show. They apparently take the green screen camera and key in the Tower camera, because we all got to see Tom McIntyre and Lee Hall leave the set during this segment.

Television

NBC restricts online Olympic coverage to cable subscribers

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I went to NBC’s official web page for Olympic coverage, hoping to see a replay of some of the events. Well, it turns out you can only watch those replays if you’re a cable subscriber–and not just a basic cable subscriber, either. So NBC, even before being purchased by cable giant Comcast, is now making certain web content basically an extension of expanded cable service. No use trying to watch other countries’ coverage. They block you out based on your IP’s country of origin.

What a bust. If I had expanded cable service, why would I need to watch the content on the Internet? Why can’t they offer Olympic content like they do all their other shows — sprinkled with commercials here and there to get the revenue they need? Why the need to tie the coverage to payment of a monthly fee to a cable company, denying access to over-the-air viewers and those whose cable companies don’t have a “partnership” with NBC? Even if you do have a cable subscription, you still have to go through an authentication process that is irritating in itself.

If I wasn’t already soured on NBC enough after the whole Conan fiasco, I certainly have no use for the network now. I’m sure they’ll be back in fourth place again after the Olympics anyway.