Welcome To Mr. Zucker’s Neighborhood

COMMENTS (9)

• Keep an eye on how Comcast/NBC/U leverages their sports list. Comcast Sports in New England is making a major investment in talent and programming at a time when everyone else is cutting back. They just hired one of the top newspaper beat writers for the Red Sox to appear on their channel and more importantly write for their new and vastly improved website. With newspapers on the ropes look for the new Comcast and others like them to poach all the major talent that can make the transition to the new cable/web reality that is journalism in the 21st century.

  Comcast also recently took control of New England Cable News from the Boston Globe. It would be easy to see a news partnership with NBC/MSNBC and the WX Channel with this regional 24 hour news channel.

  Comment by NHBill — Thursday December 3, 2009 @ 8:11am PST  Reply to this post

  • They did the same thing in the San Francisco Bay Area when they took over the Fox Sports Net franchises here. Previously, once a Sharks or Warriors game ended the channel went either to some national sports report or professional darts; now there are full pre- and post-game shows with local talent. It’s just like in the big city!

    Sidenote: The baseball Giants have a contract to air 30 or so games with KNTV (the local owned and operated NBC station); all the rest air on Comcast SportsNet. That contract ends in 2010; will it be renewed to keep the people with antennas happy, or will it go all CSN to push digital cable subscriptions?

    Comment by osmiridium — Thursday December 3, 2009 @ 11:39am PST  Reply to this post

• interesting how Universal is listed as the 6th bullet point on their list of brands…

  Comment by William — Thursday December 3, 2009 @ 9:54am PST  Reply to this post

• How does Jeff Zucker still have a job?

  Comment by Peter — Thursday December 3, 2009 @ 12:10pm PST  Reply to this post

• Does this mean Comcast can change Syfy’s name back to Sci-Fi?

  Comment by Lou — Thursday December 3, 2009 @ 3:52pm PST  Reply to this post

• Hmmm … 3000 tv episodes = about 300 worth watching if you’re really interested in spending another precious moment of life watching a rerun. 4000 feature films in the Uni library = 500 comic book adaptations, 500 video game adaptations, 2,000 B&W movies from 1930-1958 that nobody cares about, 500 tv series adaptations, and 500 SNL skit adaptations (or were they released by Paramount? – eh – it’s all the same). Oh, and Brokeback Mountain – I love how they say Universal Pictures PRODUCED this movie; I know the producers and don’t know if they’d appreciate that wording. Nor do I think Imagine Ron Howard and that wacky spiky haired partner of his would appreciate Universal getting credit for “producing” Beautiful Mind. Of course, I can “produce” huge volumes of noxious gas from my colon … which is probably more entertaining than about 95% of the 4,000 movies in their library. Seriously, in a press release where they want to promote the “jewels in the crown,” all they can come up with in features is Atonement (which my wife liked, and I thought was well-acted, but it still made me want to attack random people in the parking lot when the movie was over), Beautiful Mind (eh?), Brokeback Mountain (have you seen this movie twice?), and the Bourne Identity or Ultimatum or Magnification or Stupification.

  Weak.

  Oh, and their cable lineup? USA, Bravo, CNBC, MSNBC, Syfy, E!, Style, Versus and the Golf Channel. NBCU DESTROYED Bravo as a place to find offbeat and out of the box entertainment; I couldn’t find SyFy on my cable box if you had a gun to my head, I’ve never heard or seen Style or Versus, E! should be banned for gross offenses against good taste, and CNBC is responsible for TWO major economic meltdowns in ten years! And I didn’t even know USA was still a channel. Do they still call it the Super Station, or was that TBS? Does USA have “The First 48.” Amazing that following overweight, badly-dressed cops in second tier cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Memphis can be so incredibly fascinating. But even they’re falling into the COPS syndrome. After a while, I get sick of seeing people of color getting arrested for being poor or addicted. I wish someone would do a reality crime series where fraudulent mortgage brokers, and those “Positive Thinking” seminar dudes get arrested each week. White people commit the VAST majority of crime in America; why aren’t they on television being shown getting arrested? Oh, and there’s “Intervention” on A&E. I love this freakin’ show. If any of the people on “Intervention” getting treatment for their “diseases” were black or Latino, you’d have COPS. “We found some crack cocaine on the suspect, and uh, yeah, it was only the size of a mustard seed, but that’s still a felony and he’ll be facing 20 years and a ruined life.” Ugh. I wish someone would put COPS out of its misery.

  I think that’s all for now.

  Comment by Certainly Not Jeff Zucker — Thursday December 3, 2009 @ 4:35pm PST  Reply to this post

  • I care about the old 2000 movies from 1930-1958- aren’t they the old Paramount titles? And Bravo’s programming is fairly entertaining time killing- sometimes that’s all TV is meant to be..stuff to distract us from life. Universal’s assets are no better or worse than the other majors..

    Comment by Mush — Friday December 4, 2009 @ 7:48am PST  Reply to this post

    • They own Paramount’s library from 1929-49, and almost everything made by Universal (that still exists, they didn’t sell off/forget to renew copyright on) from the silent era to date.

      A TCM-type channel makes sense.

      Comment by dr.giraud — Friday December 4, 2009 @ 1:35pm PST  Reply to this post

• RE their film library… as much as I adore old movies and enjoy B&W pics, one has to point out that today’s lead demographic, the 16-34 group, dislike “old movies” intensely. They won’t see them. I’ve talked to many Teeners, Tweeners, Gen X & Gen Y, and they simply don’t want to see any movie that came out earlier than 1990 or ’85. And if it’s B&W, jeeze, forget it! I mean, even Disney won’t DARE show a single movie made by Walt on their own channels! just think of it! Unless it’s a classic animated feature, and even then – when was the last time the Disney channel or ABC ran SNOW WHITE, FANTASIA, PETER PAN, JUNGLE BOOK, or MULAN? I can’t remember… (ROGER RABIT doesn’t count – it’s actually a live action flick with cartoon characters mixed in…)

  It would be nice to see if Comcast-Universal starts its own Turner Classics/AMC type channels to get some mileage out of the old library. Other than rumaging through it looking for movies & TV series to REMAKE/REBOOT, I can’t see it really being of much value. Every time I read these incredible, sky-high valuations of film libraries, I have to laugh thinking about all the crap that’s within each. As one exec told me, at least 80% of their movies are just plain lousy.

  I keep expecting to read about a revitalization of that old trend in Colorizing. It will be interesting to see how Comcast-Universal uses that library of movies & TV shows from days past . . .

  Comment by Larry Brooks — Friday December 4, 2009 @ 2:50am PST  Reply to this post