With the fragmentation of television audiences and the advent of cable and on-demand services, the prestige of being an anchor is not what it was in the days of Walter Cronkite.
I’ve appeared three times on ‘The Good Wife.’ I’m proud of being associated with the show. ‘Time’ magazine called it ‘the best thing on TV outside cable.’ Did I mention that I also appear on cable?
The cable model is just a better model. Dual revenue stream: advertising-supported and subscription-supported revenues.
It’s much easier to get your material out to the public now than it was in 1988, when you basically had to get onto cable to have a joke heard across the country. Now all you need is an iPhone, and you can get your joke heard across the country.
As for the device we now call a TV or a cable box, I want it to be fast with a clean interface and seamlessly upgradeable to the latest software. I want it to be the primary source of all TV, not an ancillary device.
The country is polarized. And I think part of it – it is not just social media. We get our facts from different places. People self-select with so many different cable channels and so many sources. I think that is a huge problem.
There were times when we didn’t have hot water or a phone line. But I guarantee you, we always had cable, and it was always on.
The failure of The Cable Guy impacted my career. I had to start writing and acting again.
I did the first HBO special ever in 1975 at Haverford College. Cable was new then: HBO was a Time-Life entity, with maybe 400,000 or 500,000 subscribers and maybe 50 employees.
Disclosure of the full monthly costs that consumers pay is the first step to ensuring that cable companies stop taking advantage of consumers.
When I was little I adored the windy beaches of Ventor and the dinosaur cliffs at Alum Bay. I was thrilled to take the cable car, and I coveted the layers of coloured sand in tiny jars in the gift shop.
I wanted to move between film and theater – I never felt like I fit into TV. And I’m very anti-TV, like, ‘I’m never going to do TV,’ but also, TV didn’t want me either, so it was kind of perfect. And then, of course, cable happened, and suddenly it was like, ‘Oh, I could do that kind of stuff.’
I don’t have ADD, but I only like to pay attention to the things I like to pay attention to, and things like getting a TV and getting the cable working are beyond me, and so I let such things lapse, sometimes for years. This applies to keeping my apartment clean.
Streaming TV shows, movies, and other types of video over the Internet to all manner of devices, once a fringe habit, is now a squarely mainstream practice. Even people still paying for cable or satellite service often also have Netflix or Hulu accounts.
I really missed what I’d done on Rogers Cable, which was shooting and editing all my own stuff.
Look at the Chandra Levy case. It’s become a Star Chamber. The major networks, the cable networks, they’re being prosecutors. They’re judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c’mon, that’s ridiculous. But they’re doing it.
There’s discussion in athletics about how sport – where they say ‘SportsCenter’ has ruined the fundamentals of basketball because it’s – it only applauds dunks and three point shots and blocks, and I think, you know, the cable news has done the same thing for politics.
What MSNBC is, what cable news prime time has become in the shows that get the ratings, is the oped page of the newspaper.
We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They’ve heard it on the radio. They’ve seen it on the Internet. They’ve seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different.
With all the cable and Internet channels you have available, you have so much opportunity. If you want to say something, you can say it and have people see it.
When the kids were growing up, we didn’t have a television in the house connected to a cable or an antenna. If something bad happened in the world, I wanted the kids to hear about it from me.
Most Americans don’t think about antitrust law when they look at their cable bill, flip channels on TV, or worry about what their favorite website knows about them. But they should.
I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television’s most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options.
Television is really fertile ground, and it’s because of platforms like Netflix and Hulu and, of course, the cable channels like HBO and Showtime.
Cable and satellite businesses are competing against fixed-line telephone companies and wireless companies.
Deadpool was intended, as Cable was, to be tied into Wolverine’s history.
Just classic immigrant story – I mean, child of immigrant story – did not grow up with cable and so felt constantly like I was being spoken to in a foreign language when I would go to school. And people would be like, did you watch this? Did you watch that? I’d be like, no, but I did watch ‘SNL.’
In New York, I get people coming up to me because ‘The History Boys’ was such a hit on Broadway, and they show the film all the time on cable over there, so people recognise you.
If you go to certain cable news shows, you’re generally going to hear the viewpoints that you already have reported back to you. I think there’s no harm in that.
Cable news is nothing more than entertainment, except for the International version of CNN and perhaps the BBC.
‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ is a piece of sleight of hand presented as a cable news show. It is TV entertainment at its finest.
Television and cable have become the new independent films, in a sense, for writers and actors to gravitate towards. That’s why I like short films, too; I love doing readings, audio books, working with young filmmakers; anything that keeps you from getting blase about yourself or in a rut.
I feel like my competition is everything else that’s competing for people’s attention, not just other print magazines, newspapers and cable. It’s your kid’s report card and the games you want to play, all the things that compete for people’s time.
This generation is so dead. You ask a kid, ‘What are you doing this Saturday?’ and they’ll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, ‘Man, I’m really into remote-controlled steamboats.’
‘Fox lies’ has become a favorite mantra of the Left, yet there is a reason Fox News blows away the other cable networks in ratings and is more trusted as a news source than any other television network.
I believe that the Internet is the information highway. I’m religious about this. I don’t think it’s cable television.
The first ‘Interdimensional Cable’ episode is amazing because it’s filled with such absolute drunken nonsense.
It’s the cable shows that are really the most interesting – ‘Mad Men,’ ‘Breaking Bad,’ those shows are really the premiere shows on television right now.
Baseball is a game that shouts, ‘Slow Down’ to America. Stop tweeting, texting, blogging, watching cable news, and obsessing about polls, lost planes, and focus-group-driven politicians.
Broadcasting for advertisers is still the best game in town, and they know it. Look, I admire a lot of the shows on cable. I think ‘Mad Men’ is wonderful. I think ‘Breaking Bad’ is wonderful. But let’s remember they’re about one-tenth the audience of NCIS.
Summer is a great opportunity for all of cable. People love to find original episodes.
I was a home-schooled kid, living in the forest, and I didn’t even have cable. I’m serious.
There seems to be a vulnerability at the networks in late night. They are losing more and more audience, particularly young viewers who are now looking at cable television. ‘Tonight’ is an old show. CBS has reruns, and having a public affairs series like ‘Nightline’ on ABC is a big mistake.
For years, broadcasters didn’t get a nickel out of retransmission consent. But broadcast content is what the cable industry was selling to customers.
Flip through the channels, and there is no denying it: The world of cable news – and their network chat-show brethren – is very, very white.
Classic cable TV may have hit its peak, but it’s still a huge force, and the streaming apps of many cable networks still require you to authenticate that you’re a paying cable customer every time you want to use a new such TV app.
I did a pilot for Fox years ago called ‘Faceless,’ with Sean Bean. I always thought it was such a cool show because it was really raw. I thought we were pushing it. This was back at a time before there was the ‘cable standard.’
I grew up in Toronto and as long as I can remember, as long as there was cable, even those old cable boxes that were wired to the TV, there have been Bollywood movies on Toronto TV.
I went door-to-door selling cable television subscriptions when I was in college. Not to date myself, but cable was just coming on. I had terrible territories, and they would give me $25, if I got somebody to let them come and just put the little cord in their house.
A rule against paid fast lanes would encourage additional capacity; a rule permitting paid fast lanes would simply encourage cable companies to create congested slow lanes on the Internet so they could make money by selling fast lanes to big companies.
