Taking in Television

A little blog about TV shows, the changing technology for watching TV, resources for TV show fans, and so forth.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Aaron Spelling died at 6:25 p.m. Friday night

Aaron Spelling, passed away on the evening of Friday, June 24, 2006 at his 6 acre, 123-room mansion in the Holmby Hills suburb of Los Angeles.

He was at home when he died, recovering from a stroke he had been briefly hospitalized for the previous weekend.

Besides producing so many TV series, he had worked earlier as an actor and writer. Before that, he had a decorated military career.

Here is Aaron Spelling's biography, which credits him with 59 series.





DECEASED:

Aaron Spelling died:
Friday, June 24, 2006 at 6:25 PM WST-
at the Holmby Hills, California

Friday, June 23, 2006

Very cool TV social portal website: TV.com

There is a pretty cool website about TV shows called TV.com.

They feature: reviewing, rating, celebrity/industry news, etc. They also have forums, user profile pages, and a mechanism for sending private messages (internal email) to other users.

If you have any TV shows or want to find some more favorites, check the site out.

TV.com is run by CNET.

TiVo.com | TiVo Press Releases

Apparently, just over 4 out of 5 Americans eschew electronic censorship when it comes to their TV set.

TiVo.com | TiVo Press Releases:
81 percent of all Americans do not utilze any blocking technology that prevents programming with a certain rating from coming into their homes.


That is according to the results of a survey by Ipsos Research on behalf of TiVo, who just introduced a new TiVo KidZone.

With TiVo KidZone turned on, children can only watch shows that have been put on a special whitelist of shows picked as OK by their parents.

TiVo KidZone Guides will help parents find shows that other people think they should let their kids watch.

Hmmm....

Special Investigative Report on Global Warming
One Hour Special on Ronald Regan Lifetime Accomplishments
Expose on Big Scandal Involving Parent Company of One of the TV Networks
News Story on Health Benefits of Eating Cereal Made With Refined Sugar
In-depth Report on Next Year's Hybrid Cars
News Story Explaining Why We Cannot Do Anything About the High Price of Gasoline and It Is Nobody's Fault
Hot Story About Special Orders In Light of Recent Outbreak of Avian Flu
Special on Problems with the effectiveness of a new H5N1 vaccine
Two hour special on Traditional American Values
Expose about funding for Two hour special on Traditional American Values

The survey is pretty interesting and there are 4 different questions for which they report the survey results. If you have kids, you might be interested in reading it.

I am kind of skeptical about what shows a parent wants their kid to watch being something that can be picked by any panel of experts with both great precision and accuracy. Personally, I think parents are still going to be on the hook for glancing at what their kids are watching.

What would be kind of cool is if they had some way social website for reviewing TV shows. That is a little hard to do as far as specific episodes of specific TV shows go, since you cannot review/tag/rate it before you see it! But they could do it for TV series and TV movies that have already played/aired before.

That probably covers about 95 percent of what is on TV, except at the beginning of a new TV season.

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TiVo.com | TiVo Press Releases

Apparently, just over 4 out of 5 Americans eschew electronic censorship when it comes to their TV set.

TiVo.com | TiVo Press Releases:
81 percent of all Americans do not utilze any blocking technology that prevents programming with a certain rating from coming into their homes.


That is according to the results of a survey by Ipsos Research on behalf of TiVo, who just introduced a new TiVo KidZone.

With TiVo KidZone turned on, children can only watch shows that have been put on a special whitelist of shows picked as OK by their parents.

TiVo KidZone Guides will help parents find shows that other people think they should let their kids watch.

Hmmm....

Special Investigative Report on Global Warming
One Hour Special on Ronald Regan Lifetime Accomplishments
Expose on Big Scandal Involving Parent Company of One of the TV Networks
News Story on Health Benefits of Eating Cereal Made With Refined Sugar
In-depth Report on Next Year's Hybrid Cars
News Story Explaining Why We Cannot Do Anything About the High Price of Gasoline and It Is Nobody's Fault
Hot Story About Special Orders In Light of Recent Outbreak of Avian Flu
Special on Problems with the effectiveness of a new H5N1 vaccine
Two hour special on Traditional American Values
Expose about funding for Two hour special on Traditional American Values

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TiVo.com | New TiVo Online Services

TiVo.com | New TiVo Online Services:
Yahoo! PhotosYahoo! Photos is the easiest way to view slideshows right on your TV. Instantly access albums shared by your friends and family through your Yahoo! account.


Yahoo! Weather
Your local 5-day forecast is just a few TiVo remote clicks away.

Yahoo! Traffic
Skip the morning jam! Before embarking on your daily commute, check out traffic reports from the comfort of your couch.

Live365 Radio Network
Explore the latest on the music scene or enjoy the oldies with Live365, the Internet's largest radio network, offering hundreds of diverse stations to satisfy your every mood.

Fandango
TiVo partners with Fandango to bring you convenient movie information. Check show times for your local movie theaters and purchase tickets in advance!

Podcasts
Listen to thought-provoking and entertaining talk shows with the new Podcaster feature.
That is not all. They also include several computer games.

Since the partnership with Yahoo (above) was announced, they also added a couple more services.

1. the daily Rocket Boom vlog broadcast hosted by Amanda Congden, and
2. optional ability to subscribe to commercials on topics that interest you

They do not let you rate individual commercials yet. I have a hunch that will not be far behind.

By the end of this decade, people will have a pretty good idea who the Cleo winner for the year is going to be, as soon as it airs - if TiVo ever adds this capability.

Anyway, if you have been wondering, what has TiVo done lately - now you know!

By the way, still no new details on the upcoming TiVo Series 3. Hopefully, it will be out in time for TiVo to start selling them by Black Friday. If they do, they are probably a shoe-in to sell a lot of machines during the Christmas season in 2006.

TiVo VP Jim Denney talks Desktop 2.3 - Engadget

Wow, engadget reported some exciting new yesterday.

TiVo VP Jim Denney talks Desktop 2.3 - Engadget:
As we reported yesterday, TiVo Desktop 2.3 has been released for Windows with a few new tricks up it's sleeve. Enhancements include scheduled series downloads and MPEG-4 to MPEG-2 video transcoding for a variety of portable devices. While we've been using unsupported methods for massaging video onto the iPod and PSP, official support is now provided at a cost of $24.95.
It would have been nice if TiVo supported using a Macintosh to copy TV shows to a video iPod.

Ironically, though - at least for now - you will have to have a Microsoft Windows PC in order to save a TV show to your Apple iPod. You cannot use an Apple computer running the Apple Mac operating system to save a TV show to your iPod.

That does sound like a rather silly limitation. The article indicated TiVo was working on it but wants to make no announcement about that capability at all at this time.

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Just in case you are curious, here is the page with the information about TiVo Desktop 2.3, the software you will need to make it happen.

And, unfortunately, the Mac is still on version 1.x.

Starting a journal about things having to do with television

Television has been with us now longer than most people have been alive.

People praise its ability to do good and curse its ability to do bad.

The fact is it probably does a little bit of both. But like it or not, it exists.

Not only that, it is evolving, and causing other things to evolve too.

The way news is reported and credible facts are conveyed is much faster than before. Likewise, completely untrue things can be created, stated, and spread faster than ever before.

Of course, I am talking about fiction, which is by definition untrue - though not dishonest, so long as people know it is a fiction.

The technology of television has changed a lot.

Forty years ago, pretty much all televisions were black and white. Since then, the change to color has happened, and the change from NTSC to ATSC (HDTV and digital TV) is occurring now.

It is kind of interesting to watch that change occur.

Also, it is interesting to watch the rapid adoption of TV into computers in the 1990s, and now computers into TVs.

Also, television has thoroughly invaded the web. You can go to any major public web portal and find a TV section with a TV schedule, possibly a way to mark your favorites, and some reviews or summaries of at least some popular TV shows.

The web has also invaded TV. WebTV, now owned by Microsoft, lets someone browse the web from their TV set using a wireless keyboard and a special device hooked up to their TV set.

While that product was sort of a mixed success the last half dozen years or so, it might really take off soon. After all, HDTV resolution tends to be about the same as computer screen resolutions.

So now, the modern HDTV screens might be a suitable display for the WebTV devices.

Anyway, a lot of things are changing in the world of television and that makes these interesting times for TV viewers.

And the people who hatelove them.