Kiosk.net

The show was too long! The hostess wasn’t funny enough! I’ve barely even heard of most of the movies that were nominated!

Everything about the Academy Awards is rather underwhelming, except for the length of the proceedings. The whole affair seems to be either missing the mark or setting its sights too low to begin with. It doesn’t do a very good job of promoting movie watching, Oscar bumps notwithstanding. The show itself isn’t particularly entertaining. Or entertaining at all, to be frank. People like watching movies. Watching people watching one or two people talking about some aspect or another of movie-making is just at dull as it sounds. As the popular TV-show American Idol has demonstrated, the real entertainment is to be found in the process that ends in the crowning of the winner, not the crowning itself. But viewers get to see nothing at all of the back-door dealing, the lobbying, the back scratching, the back stabbing, the vendettas, agendas, pettiness, and eventual voting that creates winners and losers.

That would have been acceptable had the Awards and their subjects had the kind of seriousness that commands respect, but they do not. A s a viewing event the Awards could be salvaged by making them as viewer-friendly as possible, but instead they are uniformly tedious spectacles of unearned pomposity.

Most of the value that the Oscars create is captured by The E! Channel, MTV, network-television entertainment shows, glossy celebrity-gossip magazines and other hangarounds that subsist on cheap or scandalous content.

Las Vegas Business Press has a write-up on kiosk DVD-rental vendor TRN Entertainment’s push into Sin City and its competition there against Red Box. Blockbuster is quoted as saying that the DVD-vending box didn’t work for them. Red Box has 1,800 kiosks across the country against TRN’s 1,300.

Let’s revisit a popular item: The awful DVR boxes that Comcast and other cable providers dump on their customers.

Blindsquirrel has an excellent summary of the Motorola boxes:

The Motorola 6412 DVR that Comcast gives to its customers is the worst piece of technology I have ever used. It is slow, it hangs, it’s slow, it crashes, it’s slow, it records things and then you can’t watch them. It is a complete mess and I can’t believe Comcast still offers it to its customers.

I second every word. One could say that the 6412 DVR is the… Iridium of DVR boxes. In fact, it’s worse than Iridium. At least Iridium works.

A couple of months ago Omar Shahine quoted an article by Wall Street Journal’s tech columnist Walt Mossberg who reached the quite frankly inescapable conclusion that Motorola’s DVR box “is just awful.”

Jason Weill sent a letter to Comcast over a year ago in which he detailed the shortcomings of the DVR box.

Cory at The Underserved has put together a nice little grid that compares Motorola’s garbage DVR to the one used by DishNetwork.

And then there’s John Battelle’s rant on the subject. It’s a good one.

It could be that things will get better, as D-Mac on Phildadelphia Will Do points out. And it could happen as soon as next year. Maybe. (Next year? Wow, that’s only scores of hours of television programming shredded by the Motorla box from today!). One can dream, can one not?