MISCmedia for 1/25/01
Video Overload? Still Not Yet, Baby!

JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they've quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.

Among them, in no particular order:

• Toon Disney. Yes, Disney's TV animation division has amassed enough episodes in the past 15 years (starting with Adventures of the Gummi Bears for an entire channel to do nothing but rerun them. Some of them (i.e. DuckTales) hold up better than others.

• Newsworld International. The first of three Canadian-connected channels on today's list, this is the U.S. feed of the CBC's cable news channel; supplemented with English-language programs from other world broadcasters. Serious news coverage about non-U.S. residents who aren't even named Elian--what a concept!

• MuchMusic. Also Canada-based, this is cable's last non-Viacom-owned video music channel. And it's full of clips and tunes picked to entice audiences, rather than to fit Viacom's and the major labels' marketing synergies.

• Trio. Currently owned by USA Networks, but begun by the CBC, this channel (whose name is explained as standing for "Drama, Documentaries, and Film") offers "Television the Rest of the World Is Watching." In other words, English-language fare from Canadian, British, Australian and New Zealand producers that hadn't found any other U.S. home. Chief among this is Britain's #1-rated series, the 40-year-old primetime soap Coronation Street, of which Trio airs two half-hour episodes from mid-1995 each weekday. (CBC airs four episodes a week, same as the show's rate of production, on a three-month delay.)

• Bloomberg TV. Another financial channel, but simultaneously more hyped-up and more "real" than CNBC. Instead of celebrity reporters, it's got no-name news readers whose faces are crammed into a tiny upper-left corner of the screen, surrounded by ever-changing price stats. And instead of emphasizing NASDAQ tech stocks, it gives priority to such real-world financial figures as soybean futures!

• Tech TV (formerly ZDTV, from its roots in the Ziff-Davis computer magazines). Watch the dot-coms churn and the home-PC users burn on this channel, devoted half to reporting computer-biz news and half to hyping cool hardware and software gadgetry.

• GoodLife TV. G-rated doesn't have to mean dull, as this moldy-oldies channel proves with cool old '40s B-movies and strange old '60s reruns (Jimmy Durante Presents the Lennon Sisters).

• CNN/Sports Illustrated. Another sports-news wheel channel, a la ESPNews (which AT&T Digital cable already carries). Aside from the likes of fired-coaches' press conferences, there's really little need for more than one of these (especially since you can learn what your favorite team did tonight more quickly on the Net).

• The Outdoor Channel ("Real Outdoors for Real People"). Fishing, gold-panning, hunting, target shooting, power-boating, jet-skiing, RV-ing, bird watching, outdoor cooking. Even the occasional conservation topic here and there.

• Style. A women's magazine of the air, with shows about food, travel, decorating, makeup, and especially fashion. The latter programs include at least one see-thru runway-show shot per hour.

• WedMD/The Health Network. Medical and wellness-advice shows. One of them, Food for Life, co-stars none other than original MTV VJ Mark Goodman!

• ilifetv (short for "Inspirational Life TV"). Pat Robertson's 700 Club was originally conceived as an all-around lifestyle and talk show that just happened to be by and for born-again Christians. This channel brings back that concept as a 24-hour thang, funded by cable-subscriber fees (no pleas for viewer donations). You can see a recipe segment that smoothly segues into an interview with the leader of Teens For Abstinence; or an evangelist described in his PR as "an MTV-savvy minister."

• Playboy TV. The Spice channel is censored hardcore porn--depictions of real (though formulaic) sex, with all phallic shots edited out. Playboy TV is true softcore--professionally-choreographed (and halfway-professionally-photographed), semi-abstract segments intended to be both sexually and aesthetically intriguing; sometimes with real attempted stories and characters involved.

Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network's oldies channel).

NEXT: If you're really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.

IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): "A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era."

ELSEWHERE:

• Another site that condenses popular movies to their absurd essences....

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