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My wife is currently watching the one movie they have on the Hallmark Channel.
You know the one ... with the somewhat roundabout love story, and the cute kid, the small town, and no major plot complications. It's the only movie they show, but they've made the same movie hundreds of times.
According to Business Insider, they churn these out in about three weeks with a budget of about $2 million. And they consistently achieve high ratings (way higher than CNN or ESPN), despite the fact that they don't bother trying to position themselves on social media.
I personally find it too insipid to watch, but I've gotta hand it to them ... they have a winning formula. People don't want to be force fed the debauchery the big networks are shoveling out, and they turn to Hallmark Channel as an alternative. Bravo to them.
Holy crap.... We celebrated Thanksgiving a week early, while family was up visiting for "Thanksgiving" someone turned on the Hallmark channel. I don't watch TV, I think the TV was on all day, I would walk into the room and ask "This movie is still be on?" One of the people staring at the screen would say, "no this is a different movie." They were all the same idea.
Someone wanted to do something special, make the cranky old person be happy, save some Christmas tradition and fall in love. It happened every episode.
I get it, though. Mainstream television is full of violence, debauchery, and companies like Disney trying to force-feed their social non-values onto their viewers. The one movie that Hallmark shows in its hundreds of variations is lightweight, easy to watch, and does not strain the soul or the brain.
The lesson is that people want their entertainment to be entertaining. More media companies should learn this lesson.
Meanwhile, I want to hang out with zooer's family. It's got to be entertaining when people construct sentences like "This movie is still be on". Anything's better than Aahz's Bravo puns.
BRAVO!! BRAVO!!!
What is in a typical tv package that sells for 50-60$?!
We use a combination of Netflix (about 10€/month), Amazon Prime (30€/year or so? not sure) and iTunes (pay per series/movie. currently 35-60€ for a series season, depending on the amount of episodes).
I tried Sky Ticket, but they and Amazon are to stupid to get streaming going with a decent bandwidth. The last GoT season looked like a bad VHS rip filmed off an analog tv and then pressed on a VCD at times.
I don't know how it works elsewhere, but in the United States there are negotiations that go on between the networks and the cable/satellite operators. The networks, which usually operate a number of different channels, get the cable/satellite operators to carry the less popular channels in order to have reasonable prices on the more popular channels. Most subscribers would rather select individual channels, but that is never offered. So for your $50-60 channel package (which is over and above the base cost of the cable itself, equipment rental, Internet and telephone service) you usually end up with about a hundred different channels. You get a bunch of news channels, a bunch of entertainment channels, a bunch of lifestyle channels, a few weather channels, and the channels you would have picked up with your antenna if you had one.
It's generally considered a ripoff at any price, and most people end up just watching their favorite two or three channels anyway.
To make the service more "sticky", most cable operators find a way to make "just Internet" more expensive than a combination Internet/TV/Phone package.
Again, though, I think this will inevitably change. The growing number of cord cutters, cord shavers, and cord nevers, are creating a market force that at some point will have to be addressed. Hopefully, it will take the form of network and system operators being forced to offer a-la-carte channel packages. On the other hand, some future oppressive regime might add fees to Internet services to subsidize television industry pigopolists, much in the same way as the cost of blank cassette tapes once included a fee to subsidize music industry pigopolists.
All I know is that I'm not subsidizing CNN and ESPN hate speech anymore.
This morning, I reminisced about some of the old cartoons we watched.
I was walking to the break room with the spoon I had forgotten (wanted to mix some oatmeal heating in the microwave), and it reminded me of The Tick, and his ridiculous catch phrase.
Someone a bit younger than me was using the other microwave. I asked him if he had heard of The Tick, but he said he only saw something like that on Amazon (I'm guessing the live action version, which kind of pales in comparison to the animation, if I have it right). I mentioned the bit with 'Spooooon!', which he seemed to find amusing.
But he hadn't heard of it. Nor did he know Eek the Cat.
"It never hurts to help!"
Man, that was some clean, funny humor that didn't have as questionable a set of moral lessons as many of the children's animation today.