Koo’s Corner

Today we’re going to try something different. Lots of blogs vent, mock, and throw stones at whatever topic comes into their sights that warrant the mean spirited energy to blast. I try to avoid that….but not today.

Its Wednesday night, and the only day of the year that has no professional sporting games. This irks me greatly in combination with a lot of other thigns, so for this one day I am going to break from tradition and just be a complainiing, whining asshole. Below are some things that really grind my gears.

The now resoloved writer’s strike:

Yeah its over, but its affects are being felt this summer. When the strike started in late fall, production shut down on the majority of television shows. Other shows that were scheduled to start shooting, were delayed months as the strike dragged on. Since the culmination of the NHL and NBA playoffs, its been pretty rough with my favorite shows on hiatus or recently retired. The novelty of Ice Road Truckers is wearing off, Penn and Teller’s Bullshit is only weekly (just discovered and love it), and I find myself watching nostalgic looks at history like the drug years and I love the Seventies on VH1.

Gone for now are the likes of Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Flight of the Conchords, The Office, Lost, The Hills (shutup), and South Park.

Gone for good are personal favorites Sopranos, Rob and Big, and The Wire.

Maybe its that my new apartment does not have an on screen guide, but the combined affect of all of the above shows being out of season or wrapped for good is making me lose my mind.

Yahoo email

Lately, I have been getting a lot of error messages when trying to open various emails in my account. Emails that are spam get into my inbox at a high rate. Even emails with the word “spam” in the title seem to not trigger any flags for the spam filter. What’s even worse though is that reply emails, emails from long time acquaintances, and mailings that I have opted in for go to the spam folder at a high frequency. Every day I have to go “fishing” for lost emails, and I only noticed the need in the last couple of months and fret over what emails I never saw because of the schottiness of Yahoo email. Gmail is much much better and Yahoo deciding to give @ymail email addresses is not going to be of any help.

Etrade.

Not sure if its Etrade of the SEC, but I just opened an account with them and wanted to buy some stock in Jet Blue last Friday. I have had accounts with Etrade in the past and currently have a checking account with them and wanted to take advantage of the really low price dip in Jet Blue. Unfortunately I got the error message below even though the money in the account was started with Etrade checking money.

I have had to sit on the sidelines watching Jet Blue’s stock go up around 20% in the last 3 days. What kind of BS rule is this?

Its a tough time for me right now. The all star break serves as the roughest time of the year for the sports fan. The day after the all stay game, is actually the only day of the year with not a single professional sports game.

Anyways I wanted to bring light to what I view as a sports broadcasting tragedy. No I am not talking about Billy Packer leaving CBS, Bryan Gumbel’s horrible announcing, or Joe Buck in general. Rather the fact that Fox has held the rights to all the BCS games, minus the Rose Bowl, over the last 2 years. However the contract is up for negotiations this fall, with ABC and Fox both vying for the rights.

In my opinion Fox does an inferior job covering these huge games. All the way around (editing, commentary, in studio analysis, camera angles, replays, graphics) its just not as good as ABC and the broadcasts really suffer.

I decided to poll some large and knowledgable fan bases on their preference.

Click below to see image full size

The above graphic has reduced the text but the totals are 86% prefer ABC (95 votes) with 13% preferring Fox (15 votes).

I ran the poll again on another site but this time reversed the options with Fox being the top option on the form. The results were pretty much the same with 84% preferring ABC.

The point of all of this, was to prove my hypothesis that the college football die hards prefer ABC by more than a 4-1 ratio. I’ll spare you the pretty stinging comments blasting Fox.

Even the ABC BCS logo is better than the amateur looking Fox logo

With ratings down over the last 2 years and a clear preference for ABC, the BCS would be wise to take a lesser or equal offer to switch back to ABC. Fox has no college football games all year which hurts the marketing, commentator knowledge, and production quality of their broadcasts. It was believed that Fox was going to make a run at broadcasting some regular season games, but nothing has happened other than the butchering of some of the year’s biggest games.

I’ll be tracking this closely, simply because I love applauding smart decisions and blasting stupid ones.

Awhile back I read an article about how Sony has lost 3 billion dollars on the PS3 (2.16 billion in 2006, 1.16 billion in 2007). The artile does point out that losing money on gaming hardware is actually normal (money made on software) and PS3 sales have been better in 2008.

Regardless of what the bottom line says, the PS3 will end up being a huge cash cow for Sony. Why you ask?

Royalties, blu ray royalties.

I blogged pretty extensively about the HD format war between HD DVD and  Blu Ray and accurately predicted their demise and subsequent surrender. So while accountants and Wall street throw stones at Sony for bleeding money, you have to consider that the PS3 was essentially the biggest difference maker in the format war.

With blu ray prevailing, the Blu Ray consortuim (1/3 of IP believed to belong to Sony) can sit back and collect money as the technology is slowly adopted. CNET has a great article about the royalties Sony will be seeing.

The article points out that hardware manufacturers had to pay $15-$20 in royalties to install DVD drives in computers, dvd players, cameras, etc. But for every player in the market came dozens or sometimes even hundreds of DVD disks. Royalties for the disks ranged from 7 cents to 4 cents over the years.

While Sony will only get about a 1/3 of these hardware and disk royalties, Blu Ray via the PS3 is entrenched to replace DVD in terms of consumer adoption sometime in the next 3-6 years. Its going to take time but as more shelf space at Blockbuster, Best Buy, Circuit City, push Blu Ray Players, and the the Blu Ray drive begins shipping in new computers, its only matter of time until Sony dwarfs their loss with substantial profits.

Didn’t see any commercial that blew my mind, but did see a teaser while watching television for an upcoming movie. Definitely peeked my interest. Not sure if this is the initial commercial I watched, but it’s suffice for now.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=eEp7OEYt77c]

If you watch ESPN ever so often, then you are well versed in Stephen A Smith. For those who know him, feel free to skip the video below and paragraph below

Stephen A on a typical tirade

Smith came to ESPN in 2005 and was tabbed as a rising star in sports broadcasting with columns with the Philadelphia Inquirer, his own national radio show, his own show “Quite Frankly” on ESPN, as well as appareances on a variety of other ESPN shows. He covered a variety of sports, but his bread and butter was basketball.

There was one problem though, Stephen A Smith earned the repuation “Screaming A Smith” as he always seemed outrage, agitated, and on the verge of major stroke. He bashed anything and everything and the schtick grew thin. Some enjoyed it but most including myself hated him.

Slowly he started coming back to Earth. His radio show and weekly column ended, Quite Frankly got canceled, and ESPN seemed to be limiting his role in NBA coverage. I am sure this didn’t sit well Mr. Smith, but the real dagger came when ESPN removed him from the stage of this past NBA draft and relegated him to interviewing draft picks on the side. Smith had spent the past 2 years as one of key analysts of the draft.

Smith’s demotion and general angry demeanor has been the talk of the sports blogoshpere for quite awhile, but recently I came across the organization known as Stephen A Smith Heckling Society of Gentleman that I wanted to share.

The backstory is short and sweet. A couple of buddies, / loud mouth wise asses (that’s a compliment), attended the 2006 NBA draft and videotaped various exchanges with Stephen A Smith. In particular they poked fun of the fact that Smith ate a copious amount of Cheese Doodles when off camera. Their jeers and impressions of Smith were ridiculously on target and quickly became a viral hit on youtube.

The following year, the same tandem guys (sobriety again in question), returned to the draft and once again jeered Smith. This time they added a new twist by chasing after players, pretending that a on camera sock puppet was Smith. The sock impersonating Smith was actually slapped by Joahkim Noah and was extremely affective and entertaining with numerous cliche sound bites like “I am Stephen A Smith, and everything I say is important” “Quite Frankly….” “HowEVER….”.

Oblivious to internet phenomena mocking him, Smith served up a gem by going on a tirade on his National radio show touting his love of Cheese Doodles. Once again the Stephen A Smith Heckling Society of Gentleman produced another classic youtube video.

With three popular videos produced, the guys once again took to it to mock one of the most annoying sports personality since Dennis Miller. Below are their efforts

All of the above is just another great and comedic example of web2.0/social media’s impact on traditional media. Tired of Smith, the two friends took a silly day at the draft and grew it to an internet phenomen. Smith has been demoted multiple times while the videos above have garnered almost a million views as well acknowledgements by Tony Kornheiser and Kevin Love.

While its hard to say that these videos played a role in Smith’s plight back to earth, social media serves more and more as the first line into emerging trends, opininons, movements, etc. These videos served as the centerpiece of the anti Smith general opinion that has relegated to a second tier ESPN personality. Their popularity only confirmed what most viewers and maybe even the ESPN brass already suspected :

Stephen A Smith needed to be taken down a peg or two and more importantly should seek therapy.

Props to the guys who have made it a priority in their lives to lead this movement. Also good to see they haven’t tried to monetize their viral hit, but have rather decided to plug a very worthy cause.

Today on a wimb I did a Google News search on the Big Ten Network looking to see if they had mady any progress to strike a distribution deal with Comcast.

I found an article around noon with an update was iminent in the coming week. Fast forward to a couple hours later when I was visiting Yardbarker blog, Awful Announcing, to see that indeed the a deal had been finalzed bringing the Big Ten Network to basic cable in the Big Ten Region . The deal also means that the Big Ten Network will become avaiable on sports packages for those with Comcast outside of the Big Ten region.

The bottom line is that the agreement means “Just 40 percent of the homes equipped with cable or satellite dishes will be able to receive BTN in Ohio as things stand. That compares to the new totals of 89 percent in Indiana, 87 percent in Illinois, 83 percent in Pennsylvania and 79 percent in Michigan.”

The agreement is a HUGE win for the Big Ten Network which now has legitimate staying power as a cable network. Regardless if Charter or Time Warner pick up the network, BTN has enough distribution through ATT, Comcast, Dish, Direct TV and most likely Verizon Fios in the near future to survive the two remaining holdouts.

Let’s hope the NFL network is able to find similar success in the coming months as we approach fall.

This past weekend a handful of interesting things stood out to me on the Entertainment front. Below are some highlights.

- A couple of coworkers told me about the play- Point Break Live. At first it sounded too good to be a true. A play based on the riduculouly over the top and entertaining action flick Point Break? It gets better though. The role of Keanu Reeves is played by………….. an audience member selected by the audience.

G4’s video of the play below

I freaked out and bought a whopping 5 tickets, only to find out I picked a day on which I had an obligation already. Luckily they let me switch to another night. So, if you’re interested in going let me know. Should be a blast.

- An indie movie that is making some waves is The Promotion. Recently released to limited screens the movie is getting some good reviews. The cast is pretty solid with Stiffler, John C Reilly, and Pam from the Office (Jenna Fischer)

I say I am going to see a movie in theaters almost every month and end up going less than 3-4x a year. Most likely I’ll have to catch this one on Vudu. Feel free to let me know your thoughts if you have seen it.

- So as soon as the NBA finals wrap up, I am planning on venting about the lack of good shows on TV now. Probably tied to the writer’s strike, any show that I enjoy has either ended (The Wire, Sopranos, Rob and Big) or is out of season (The Office, Flight of the Conchords, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and yes The Hills)

So what to watch in lieu of the programming above a lot of shows on my radar are the influx of reality tv blue collar shows. It seems white collar America is now obsessed with the everyday lives of many uncommon and intriguing careers. With series’ documenting airline employees, parking enforcement officers, Alaska Crab fisherman, bounty hunters, Nevada prostitutes, and loggers, there is now a wide spectrum of compelling careers to learn about.

But the one that really sticks out to me is History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers.

The premise is pretty simple and interesting. The show follows seasonal truckers who make dangerous trips across frozen lakes, rivers, and oceans driving large loads to places like mines, research facilities, and oil drilling locations.

The characters are entertaining and with a steady dose of on road and off road incidents, the show is quickly earning some time in my rotation of shows.

- Finally I wanted to plug a movie I am anxiously awaiting to watch when I get back home this week. I came home from the bars and turned on the TV to cap a fun night this past weekend. I quickly flipped away from a movie titled Eagle vs Shark, only to flip back to see this scene below. The only reason I flipped back was that I thought I recognized Flight of the Conchord star, Jermaine Clement and wanted to confirm it was him and check out the movie briefly. I really only watched the scene below before deciding to watch it in it’s entirety later on.

From what I can gather its similar to Napolean Dynamite in style but not plot. Lots of dry slow humor with some ridiculous dialogue. I’ll let you know how it is when I see it.

I hope in the coming years that I can avoid a quarter life crisis by attending events like the one below.

The back story for the videos below is that the London mayor banned consumption of alcohol on the public transit system. Via Facebook alcoholics, party goers, and rebels with a cause organized a drinking party on the transit system.

The party’s poplarity blew up and rather than one station or one train being consumed by the grassroots effort, the party goers essentially shutdown the train system completely.

Looks pretty fun though…

Awhile back I gave South Park kudos to satirizing a large contingent of Youtube celebrities in a recent episode. Now it seems Weezer has joined the party in making overtures to the Youtube viewing community in their latest music video, Pork and Beans.

Thus far the reaction to the video has been very positive with the video on the cusp of being typical water cooler conversation for younger crowds. The videos’ success has led to over 5 million views in just under a week.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=muP9eH2p2PI]

Whats’ cool about the video, is many of the online celebrities helped in the video’s making. By poking fun of themselves, they extend their 15 minutes of fame while showing that they understand the ridiculousness of their youtube stardom.

Per wikipedia, the video stars youtube stars like ” Gary Brolsma, Matt McAllister, Mark Allen Hicks (”Afro Ninja”), Chris Crocker, Caitlin Upton, Judson Laipply, Kicesie, Tay Zonday, Kevin Federline (archival footage), Liam Kyle Sullivan, Ryan Weiber, Michael “Dorkman” Scott, Jeong-Hyun Lim, and the Star Wars kid, as well as references to the Dramatic Prairie Dog, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz’s Diet Coke and Mentos eruptions, parody G.I. Joe PSAs, catching Raybans with one’s face, the Free Hugs Campaign, the Dancing Banana, Will It Blend?, All Your Base Are Belong to Us, Daft Hands, Daft Bodies, the Sneezing Panda, the Soulja Boy dance, a CGI Donald Duck and King Kong, Charlie the Unicorn”

Good song with a very compelling and entertaining video. Great concept by one of my favorite bands.

While Pork and Beans is up there on my list of favorite videos, its still has 30 million views behind my all time favorite OK Go’s Here We Go Again.

If you are anything like me, you probably have a love hate relationship with ESPN. I love the live coverage, Baseball 2night, Sportscenter, College Gameday, and lots of other great programming but could do without Skip Bayless, Steven A Smith, and gimicky crap like Who’s Now and 50 States in 50 days.

But rather analyzing what’s on ESPN, its also important to take into consideration what’s not on ESPN. In particular, its been 3 years since a NHL game was broadcasted on the sport’s leader. Meanwhile coverage of pro and in some cases collegiate sport like football, basketball, baseball, and soccer have thrived on the network. So why no NHL on ESPN?

In a nutshell, upstart network Outdoor life (now Versus) made a big play for hockey after the 2004 strike hoping to buy the TV rights for a deflated price. Wikipedia has a great article about the NHL on Versus you can read found here.

I have watched the NHL on Versus on occasion, and have to say its quality. But the fact remains having games on the network is detrimental to the league regardless what they are paying.

First off Versus is distributed to about 73 million households compared to the 91 million households ESPN reaches in the US. Right off the bat thats almost 20 million households who no longer have the opportunity to watch the NHL via their cable provider.

However the largest issue is that Versus is still an emerging entity on cable television. Typically viewers have a rotation of channels they surf and ESPN is a staple in many viewers rotations. Versus is getting there, but sometimes its odd channel number (on DirecTv ESPN IS73, Versus is……603) keeps its programming away from interested viewers.

ESPN through its website, radio network, and other programs also is very skilled in self promotion of their events. In a nutshell, they can build buzz for an event with reminders about games, updates on the Bottom Line, previews on SportsCenter, and radio show discussion of games and storylines. Although they wont admit it, when the NHL moved to Versus to ESPN marketing machine turned against the NHL.

ESPN analyst Don Cherry…known for is sense of style

Versus has leveraged their NHL contract and grown as a network and the ratings are on the rise. But the truth is that never has the NHL been so distant from the mainstream American sports fan. The real bummer is that despite the speculation that hockey would be coming back to ESPN next year, Versus inked an extension with the NHL which will keep hockey on the network for the next 3 seasons (Deal valued at about 75 million a year).

Its really a shame as the NHL really needs to get back to “The Sports Leader” if they have any chance to stay competitive with other pro leagues and emerging sports like Nascar, MMA, and a hoard of others.

Plus I miss Darren Pang and Gary Thorne and Steve Levy are better suited for hockey.