Tag: the Super Bowl

An Afternoon With The Eagles

For the third consecutive week the Philadelphia Eagles were featured on local television. That meant Helaine and I were glued to the TV.

Wow! They beat the Detroit Lions, and it was never close.

I don’t want to put some sort of curse on the team, but maybe this is the year? Of course as a real Eagles fan, my fear is the unknown. Who will get injured? Who will under perform? Will some competing coach figure out what makes the Eagles tick and turn the season around?

Next week, foolishly, local TV will carry the New York Giants game. We’ll listen to the radio broadcast over the computer.

Until the final gun sounds for the Super Bowl we will walk on eggshells waiting for the disappointment that’s become an Eagles tradition.

Living and Dying With the Eagles

The Philadelphia Eagles are on Monday Night Football tonight. If you’re not a fan, let me make an analogy. Monday Night is to football as Carnegie Hall is to music. It is a showcase venue with no other games competing. All the fans, all the other players, are watching.

As Eagles fans, this game is especially important for Helaine and me.

OK – I’ll admit it. My wife is the bigger fan than I am. She’s been a fan longer and is more knowledgeable. And she lives and dies with the team.

Right now the Eagles are ahead – though I know she’s sitting there at home worrying about everything the Eagles can possibly do wrong. If the Vikings go ahead, she’ll turn the volume on the TV down and watch without listening.

If the Eagles win, tomorrow she’ll read every sports story, listen to every radio show, even stay up tonight for the post-game interviews on ESPN. If they lose, she’ll be incommunicado.

The shame of it all is no matter how the season ends, unless they win the Super Bowl, it will be a disappointment.

Mel and Viacom

After the Super Bowl, and the attendant fallout over what’s appropriate on-the-air, I predicted Howard Stern would be gone from Viacom (his home base). Of course that hasn’t happened.

Today, Mel Karmazin, Stern’s biggest backer, resigned his position at Viacom.

There’s nothing in any of what I’ve read that connect these two events – and they probably aren’t connected. But, I’ll renew my prediction.

Without Karmazin, there is no one with power at Viacom who is in Stern’s corner (or at least no one with the track record of doing so in the past). I can’t imagine Viacom’s management won’t worry about the downside of Stern’s freewheeling show.

Of course, I’ve been wrong on this subject before.

Victoria’s Secret

There is a comedian whose name escapes me at the moment. He has a line, “I know Victoria’s secret. She’s a slut.”

Good line.

Today, Victoria’s Secret announced they’re not staging their yearly TV fashion show. It has run on CBS for the past few years, though I seem to vaguely remember it being on ABC at one time.

I am privy to no inside information, still I wonder if this is the real story. After the Super Bowl and Howard Stern, how anxious was CBS to run this? And, if CBS dropped it, how anxious would anyone else be to pick it up?

This story probably does not have legs. It will soon be forgotten. Still, it would have been interesting to have been a fly on the wall… especially if CBS allowed Victoria’s Secret to claim they weren’t cancelled.

Fun With Numbers

Every weekday morning when I wake up, sitting in my email inbox are the TV ratings from the night before. It is enlightening and horrifying at the same time.

It hasn’t always been this way. In the not too distant past, ratings were taken a few times a year, during the ‘sweeps’ period. That was nerve wracking in its own insidious way.

The amount of time I dwell on the numbers is often dependent on how we’re doing. During the bad times, I didn’t look at all. Too depressing. It’s probably the same thing for CNBC. Who wants to watch if they’re only talking about the money you’re losing.

Right now, we’re in moderately good times. We’re not #1, but we’re moving in the right direction – and we’re watching others who probably don’t want to be looking at the numbers on a daily basis.

Ratings are based on 15 minute blocks. So, a one hour show will have an aggregate rating made up of the four quarter hours. It can be fascinating to track those quarter hour numbers – but misleading. Even in a market the size of Connecticut, if a few people with ‘meters’ get a phone call or need to go to the bathroom at the wrong time, a significant chunk of your ratings go away.

A recent day had 440 households making up the entire ratings universe. During our early evening news there were probably 175-250 households with their TV’s on, divided by all the channels you can get. Now you see where the horrifying comes from.

When ratings go down, TV stations and networks blame methodology. Could be – I don’t know. When ratings go up, it’s sharp programming.

After the Super Bowl, the folks at Tivo publicized the fact that the Janet Jackson / Justin Timberlake moment was the most re-watched moment in TV. That means Tivo knows what everyone’s watching, every second! I would guess cable companies can do the same with addressable cable boxes (though there are more serious regulatory restrictions placed on cable companies).

If we can have accurate, massively sampled, instantaneous TV ratings, will we be better or worse off? There’s already lots of concern that TV plays for ratings – and to a great extent it does.

Imagine TV programmers could watch their numbers second by second. I shudder to think. There’s probably no putting this genie back in the bottle. Soon, we’ll have to live with it.

My MTV Prediction

This is going to be very brief, because this site is not about political commentary. In fact, I avoid it on purpose.

However, after the Super Bowl, I did make a prediction that the whole Janet Jackson debacle would impact MTV and they would be forced to make some programming changes. I didn’t realize it would happen so quickly.

From the LA Times

By Jeff Leeds

Times Staff Writer

February 9, 2004

Under intense scrutiny following Janet Jackson’s breast-baring performance during last week’s Super Bowl, MTV has quietly plucked a number of its edgiest music videos out of its daytime rotation.

The Viacom Inc.-owned cable network, which produced the Super Bowl halftime extravaganza, notified several major record companies last week that at least eight of their videos would now be played only during overnight programming, generally between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., sources said.

MTV shifted most of the videos

Where Will Janet Lead Us

Last night I made a bet with someone I work with. I bet a cup of coffee that within six months, there are changes at MTV because of what happened Sunday night at the Super Bowl.

I believe CBS’s protestation that they didn’t know the specifics of what would happen. Still, it should be no surprise at Viacom or CBS, because what MTV produced was pretty much mainstream MTV. And, if there’s a claim that the Super Bowl was seen by a young audience – who do they think is watching MTV?

Without a 16 year old in the house, I wouldn’t know. If you don’t watch MTV, or just remember it for what it was, you don’t know. The “M” in MTV might once have stood for music, but music is hardly what drives MTV.

Much of MTV’s schedule is made up of reality programming. Instead of contests of skill or guile or athleticism, these reality shows are about hot young bodies in close proximity. There is plenty of liquor and plenty of hooking up.

After a while, especially to a teenage fed a steady diet, this stuff starts seeming mainstream.

Recently, Steffie has been trying to convince me that in one Real World epsiode a 19 year old was drinking alcohol. I didn’t believe it – couldn’t believe it. Now, I’m not so sure.

So, why do I think MTV will tbe the sacrificial lamb? CBS has tried to divorce itself from the Janet Jackson breast baring, saying it was an MTV production. Still, they are owned by the same company, Viacom. This half time show debacle was one of those synergistic things that companies bragged about as we witnessed consolidation of mass media outlets over the past decade.

At some point someone with an agenda will start showing that what ran on the Super Bowl is closer to the MTV norm than non-viewers realize. That’s when the you know what will hit the fan.

I’m thinking I get coffee out of this.

Now I’m Blind

I watched the halftime show at the Super Bowl. I didn’t notice Janet Jackson’s breast come loose.

I have just looked at a photo (more explicit than I feel comfortable to post here). It is larger than life (pun intended)!

What planet was I on? How was it possible to miss that!

It does, however, give new meaning to the phrase, “wide and to the right.”