Blu-ray Review: Dolphin Tale

Dolphin Tale (+ UltraViolet Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]

Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
List Price: $35.99
Street Price: $18.99
Amazon.com: $12.95
Release Date: Dec 20, 2011
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Running Time: 0 minutes

Synopsis

Dolphin Tale is inspired by the amazing true story of a brave dolphin and the compassionate strangers who banded together to save her life. Swimming free, a young dolphin is caught in a crab trap, severely damaging her tail. She is rescued and transported to the Clearwater Marine Hospital, where she is named winter. But her fight for survival has just begun. Without a tail, Winter's prognosis is dire. It will take the expertise of a dedicated marine biologist, the ingenuity of a brilliant prosthetics doctor, and the unwavering devotion of a young boy to bring about a groundbreaking miracle-a miracle that might not only save Winter but could also help scores of people around the world. -- (C) Warner Bros

Review

Cute movie based on a true story, it’s a great movie to watch as a family. It is a heart-wrenching story that had the wife crying. The script is extremely well written. Nathan Gamble delivers a likeable performance as Sawyer, generating chemistry with both Cozi Zuehlsdorff and Winter. There's also strong support from Ashley Judd (as Sawyer's single mother) and Harry Connick Jr, while Morgan Freeman and Kris Kristofferson try to out-twinkle each other. The true story factor means this movie is very predictable; however you will still recommend it to everyone you know.  Superb movie…from beginning to the “Tale” end.

Posted by Ryan Gibbs, February 17, 2012 7:48 AM

FCC to Revisit “Must Carry” Rules

I’ve already written a bunch about the problems with retransmission fees and how pay-television subscribers get caught in the squeeze between their services and the content providers. Many people don’t realize that there is a fascinating flip-side to this problem, which is known as “must carry”. It works like this.

Every three years, local television broadcasters have to make a choice. They can either make their content available to local pay-TV services (cable, satellite, and telco) in return for a retransmission fee, or they can choose to forego the fee and just require the pay-TV service to carry their signal on the subscriber system. It’s a tricky proposition. If you’re sure that consumers will want your programming (note that the pay-TV service is not allowed to go to some adjacent market to replace yours if it’s from the same network), then you go for the gold. If you’re not sure that anyone would miss it if your programming gets left off, then you may want to invoke the “must carry” rule so that you can reach a bigger audience and get more money from your advertisers.

This whole system got more complicated with the digital transition. Cable companies started as community antennas, distributing the over-the-air signals through cables on the ground so that all homes in the area could get good reception. Originally, all cable systems were analog, and they just pumped the signals from the antennas through the wires. Then they got premium channels which they encrypted, which led to set top boxes to decrypt them. And then we got digital systems that offer improved image quality (and more secure encryption). The digital systems also made it possible to deliver high-definition images.

So now we have digital transmissions from almost all television broadcasters, but many cable companies still maintain analog distribution networks. This means that the digital signals have to be converted back to analog in order to be sent to analog subscribers. Cable companies would like to convert over to all-digital systems, but this requires capital investment and converter boxes for any subscribers who still don’t have a television set with a digital tuner.

Cable companies would like to free up some of their capacity by dropping local stations that don’t have much of an audience. Smaller broadcasters want to keep the “must carry” rule so that they don’t lose a major part of their audience (since so few people rely on over-the-air signals these days).

This issue has come to a head because cable services were given a three-year waiver from the requirement to not degrade the rebroadcast signal. This was required because the standard definition analog systems cannot display the high definition content of some digital broadcasts without scaling it down significantly. That waiver expires in June, and the FCC needs to decide whether or not to renew it. If it does not renew the waiver, then local cable companies may be forced to switch to digital networks unless the FCC makes other changes to the “must carry” rule as well. In preparation for these deliberations, the FCC has called for comments on the issue.

HDTV and Home Theater Podcast - Podcast #518: Cord Cutting A Financial Analysis

Today’s Show:

Cord Cutting – A Financial Analysis

Cord cutting has been in the news quite a bit lately.  A week doesn’t go by when we don’t receive an email from a listener telling us about how they have cut the cord and couldn’t be happier. Every email prompts us to consider a life without cable bills but inevitably there is something that keeps us from taking the plunge. A recent email from Van in Odenton Maryland got us thinking. Could we combine OTA with a Tivo Box and iTunes and a AppleTV and essentially eliminate our Pay TV bill altogether? For this paper study we will use Ara’s TV usage as the base.

The bulk of what is watched in the Derderian household are the broadcast networks which can be made up via OTA with no issues at all. Its the cable shows and Sunday Ticket that pose the real problem.  Pay movie channels are nice but with Netflix and a deep video server library, there is seldom a lack of things available to watch moviewise. We’ll begin the study with outlining the current cost and capability followed by the replacement solution and finally what if anything has to be given up.

Current Cost for Programming

Ara subscribes to DirecTV Premier Package including locals. The Premier package includes just about every channel including pay channel that DirecTV has to offer. The total cost is $114, but its the fees and add ons that kill you! Check out the itemized list:

• Monthly Fee for the Premier Package $114
• Protection Plan $6.00
• HD Extra Pack $5.00
• HD Access $10.00
• DVR Service $7.00
• Whole Home DVR $3.00
• Additional Receiver $6.00
• Leased Receiver $6.00

Total cost $157 a month plus Taxes. Ara also subscribes to Sunday Ticket which adds an additional $300 a year or $25 more per month. So the base we have to work with is roughly $185 a month. An advantage that using DirecTV or other provider is that you don’t have to buy your equipment and if something goes wrong the provider will fix it for you

Tivo

Part of the solution is a Tivo box that can act as a DVR. Tivo comes with a monthly fee but its a far cry from what you pay at DirecTV. Our solution will use the Tivo Premier which goes for $99 and we’ll connect it to the antenna on the roof. We will have to buy three of them so our cost start up cost will be just about $300 plus tax. In addition to the purchase price Tivo will require $20 a month service fee and since we have three boxes it will cost us $60 a month.

The reason we are choosing Tivo over a basic DVR is that the recording features of the Tivo are quite nice and we have become accustomed to setting season passes and all the other cool features of a modern DVR. Tivo also offers connections to Netflix, Hulu+, Amazon, and Blockbuster so for most people you can stop right there and be quite happy!

AppleTV

AppleTV will be our means of getting cable content that we lose by cutting the cord. Many shows are available in iTunes the day after they air on cable. These shows are in HD and 5.1 audio. The quality is quite good. If you can wait a season, many, but not all, shows end up on Netflix or Amazon so you may not need this option. The AppleTV will run you $99 a piece and we’ll need three of these as well. Like the Tivo we are up to $300 plus tax. For the Derderian’s the season passes that we’ll have to buy are the following:

• Covert Affairs – $40
• Burn Notice – $38
• Sons of Guns – $25
• American Guns – $24
• various shows on ABC Family for the kids – $200
• Budget of another $200 for single episodes or new series not yet discovered.

Total cost for non OTA programming $527.

Now let’s add a budget for movies. We’ll allow 2 HD rentals at $5 and one purchases at $20.

Cost

Let’s add it up and see what it will cost us!

• Hardware (One time Cost)  - Let’s say $650 after you consider tax and incidentals
• Content
  • Season Passes and individual shows on iTunes $527
  • Movie rentals/Purchase $30 ($360 for the year)
  • Tivo Service $60 ($720 for the year)

Total content cost for the year – $1607
Total cost for DirecTV without Sunday Ticket – $1884
Savings $277 ($577 without Sunday Ticket)

In actuality your savings may be more. If you don’t rent or buy movies from iTunes and if you buy a generic OTA DVR without the niceties of the Tivo you can save over a Thousand dollars. In the Derderian scenario we have three DVRs but if you only have one or two you can save quite a bit of money. Finally, this plan requires you to pay upfront for the equipment. In the Derderian’s situation, breakeven would be in just over one year.

What do you give up?

In the Derderian case you give up Sunday ticket. That means about seven or eight less Chicago Bears football games a year. They also give up Food Network and the joy of discovering a program simply by flipping through channels. While this isn’t a big deal for us there have been some Saturdays where this was the only option. Maybe it will free me up to do other things like create more content for the show!

Conclusion

Cutting the cord is probably a great thing for most people out there. Whatever is being missed on the cable channels can be found through Amazon, Netflix, or iTunes so you really don’t have to do without. Live content like news and sports can be found via the old fashion airwaves in better quality than what you would get on cable so there is no loss there at all. The only drawback is that there is an initial outlay of cash that may take a year or two to payback. With all that said, Ara is not ready to cut the cord. He is ready to talk to DirecTV about his bill however! We’ll revisit the analysis in a year or so.

Download Episode #518

Posted by The HT Guys, February 16, 2012 11:18 PM

About The HT Guys

The HT Guys, Ara Derderian and Braden Russell, are Engineers who formerly worked for the Advanced Digital Systems Group (ADSG) of Sony Pictures Entertainment. ADSG was the R&D unit of the sound department producing products for movie theaters and movie studios.

Two of the products they worked on include the DCP-1000 and DADR-5000. The DCP is a digital cinema processor used in movie theaters around the world. The DADR-5000 is a disk-based audio dubber used on Hollywood sound stages.

ADSG was awarded a Technical Academy Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2000 for the development of the DADR-5000. Ara holds three patents for his development work in Digital Cinema and Digital Audio Recording.

Every week they put together a podcast about High Definition TV and Home Theater. Each episode brings news from the A/V world, helpful product reviews and insights and help in demystifying and simplifying HDTV and home theater.

HDTV Almanac - FCC to Revisit Must Carry Rules

I’ve already written a bunch about the problems with retransmission fees and how pay-television subscribers get caught in the squeeze between their services and the content providers. Many people don’t realize that there is a fascinating flip-side to this problem, which is known as “must carry”. It works like this.

Every three years, local television broadcasters have to make a choice. They can either make their content available to local pay-TV services (cable, satellite, and telco) in return for a retransmission fee, or they can choose to forego the fee and just require the pay-TV service to carry their signal on the subscriber system. It’s a tricky proposition. If you’re sure that consumers will want your programming (note that the pay-TV service is not allowed to go to some adjacent market to replace yours if it’s from the same network), then you go for the gold. If you’re not sure that anyone would miss it if your programming gets left off, then you may want to invoke the “must carry” rule so that you can reach a bigger audience and get more money from your advertisers.

This whole system got more complicated with the digital transition. Cable companies started as community antennas, distributing the over-the-air signals through cables on the ground so that all homes in the area could get good reception. Originally, all cable systems were analog, and they just pumped the signals from the antennas through the wires. Then they got premium channels which they encrypted, which led to set top boxes to decrypt them. And then we got digital systems that offer improved image quality (and more secure encryption). The digital systems also made it possible to deliver high-definition images.

So now we have digital transmissions from almost all television broadcasters, but many cable companies still maintain analog distribution networks. This means that the digital signals have to be converted back to analog in order to be sent to analog subscribers. Cable companies would like to convert over to all-digital systems, but this requires capital investment and converter boxes for any subscribers who still don’t have a television set with a digital tuner.

Cable companies would like to free up some of their capacity by dropping local stations that don’t have much of an audience. Smaller broadcasters want to keep the “must carry” rule so that they don’t lose a major part of their audience (since so few people rely on over-the-air signals these days).

This issue has come to a head because cable services were given a three-year waiver from the requirement to not degrade the rebroadcast signal. This was required because the standard definition analog systems cannot display the high definition content of some digital broadcasts without scaling it down significantly. That waiver expires in June, and the FCC needs to decide whether or not to renew it. If it does not renew the waiver, then local cable companies may be forced to switch to digital networks unless the FCC makes other changes to the “must carry” rule as well. In preparation for these deliberations, the FCC has called for comments on the issue.

Posted by Alfred Poor, February 17, 2012 5:00 AM

Over-the-Top Over-the-Air

Would you pay for a service that lets you watch over-the-air broadcasts on your tablet or smartphone? That’s what a company called Aereo (formerly known as “Bamboom“) plans to launch just such a service for New York City residents starting next month.

The company is building a system of thousands of tiny television antennas; each one is the size of a dime. These capture free broadcast television signals over the air, which are then encoded and made available as streaming data sent over the Internet. These arrays are positioned so that they get excellent reception, which is not a trivial matter in the concrete canyons of New York. Each subscriber is assigned a specific antenna, so all the service is doing is providing a feed from the antenna that you rent. The intent is that the service is not acting as a shared antenna like a cable company, which would be subject to retransmission fees. Instead, each subscriber gets their own dedicated antenna. The company also has massive amounts of data storage, so that they can offer DVR service as well; this means that subscribers can record the shows that they want to watch, and then view them later.

All the control and viewing is done over the Internet, and you can get HD quality programming. The service is starting with 20 channels. The system can also be accessed using a personal computer, an Apple TV, or a Roku network media player. The system comes with a 30-day free trial and a $12 per month membership fee. You must be a New York City resident to sign up.

If this system works, it could present an attractive and low-cost alternative to basic cable or satellite services in the Big Apple. And if it can make it there, it could probably make it anywhere (as the song goes), especially in other major urban markets.

The Big Three Networks

Everything seems to come in threes. We had the Big Three Automakers in Detroit. There were those little pigs. And then there were the major television networks: Netflix, Amazon, and Google.

Wait a minute; what happened to ABC, CBS, and NBC?

From where I sit, that is ancient history. The traditional networks are dead men walking, and just don’t know it. They are trying to stick with the old models of providing the conduit for video entertainment, and they are failing. Streaming content over the Internet bypasses the traditional network, making it an unnecessary intermediary in the system between content producer and consumer. And it may also squeeze out the traditional role of “advertiser” at the same time. If we have learned one thing from the Internet, it is death to the middleman; Amazon Kindle, Square, and Zappos are just a few examples.

Most of the content shown on online systems such as Netflix and Amazon are reruns. The traditional networks and Hollywood movie studios try to wring out some additional value from these leftovers so they license the content for streaming. And in the process, they have sowed the seeds of their own demise. They have provided the fuel for the fire that is the consumer demand to watch what they want, when they want, where they want. And that is a fire that can’t be put out at this point.

But can the networks be replaced? Netflix has launched its original content with the series “Lilyhammer” and will follow up with “House of Cards” with Kevin Spacey and a revival of the popular “Arrested Development” next year. Google’s YouTube is investing in original content as well, and is providing full-length programming of all sorts.

And here comes GigaOM with a breaking story that Amazon has posted job openings for creative positions with the goal of creating its own content. The service is a bit of a sleeper in the streaming video arena at this point, but its Amazon Prime members get to watch all sorts of content for free (along with many other useful bonuses) in return for a Netflix-like monthly fee. Many consumers may find that they can get a better combined value from Amazon, and if the company starts producing compelling content, it could be a major force.

The new world of video entertainment is going to require a new world of ways to pay for the content’s creation. Who do you think is in a better position to deliver a new model: ABC, CBS, and NBC, or Google, Netflix, and Amazon?

I rest my case.

HDTV Almanac - The Big Three Networks

Everything seems to come in threes. We had the Big Three Automakers in Detroit. There were those little pigs. And then there were the major television networks: Netflix, Amazon, and Google.

Wait a minute; what happened to ABC, CBS, and NBC?

From where I sit, that is ancient history. The traditional networks are dead men walking, and just don’t know it. They are trying to stick with the old models of providing the conduit for video entertainment, and they are failing. Streaming content over the Internet bypasses the traditional network, making it an unnecessary intermediary in the system between content producer and consumer. And it may also squeeze out the traditional role of “advertiser” at the same time. If we have learned one thing from the Internet, it is death to the middleman; Amazon Kindle, Square, and Zappos are just a few examples.

Most of the content shown on online systems such as Netflix and Amazon are reruns. The traditional networks and Hollywood movie studios try to wring out some additional value from these leftovers so they license the content for streaming. And in the process, they have sowed the seeds of their own demise. They have provided the fuel for the fire that is the consumer demand to watch what they want, when they want, where they want. And that is a fire that can’t be put out at this point.

But can the networks be replaced? Netflix has launched its original content with the series “Lilyhammer” and will follow up with “House of Cards” with Kevin Spacey and a revival of the popular “Arrested Development” next year. Google’s YouTube is investing in original content as well, and is providing full-length programming of all sorts.

And here comes GigaOM with a breaking story that Amazon has posted job openings for creative positions with the goal of creating its own content. The service is a bit of a sleeper in the streaming video arena at this point, but its Amazon Prime members get to watch all sorts of content for free (along with many other useful bonuses) in return for a Netflix-like monthly fee. Many consumers may find that they can get a better combined value from Amazon, and if the company starts producing compelling content, it could be a major force.

The new world of video entertainment is going to require a new world of ways to pay for the content’s creation. Who do you think is in a better position to deliver a new model: ABC, CBS, and NBC, or Google, Netflix, and Amazon?

I rest my case.

Posted by Alfred Poor, February 15, 2012 5:00 AM

Re: HDTV Almanac - The Big Three Networks

videograbber • Feb 15, 7:51am
> And then there were the major television networks: Netflix, Amazon, and Google. Wait a minute; what happened to ABC, CBS, and NBC? From where I sit, that is ancient history. The traditional networks are dead men walking, and just don’t know it.

Wow. That's quite a leap. Usually I can't find too much to fault in your commentaries, Alfred, but you're way off base with this one, IMO. Why do I say that? Because content is king. And your new, so called "big 3" haven't got any. How much content do I watch each week from the "dead men walking"? About 30 hours. How much from your trio? Zero.

Why do you think the big whoop-de-do launch of Google TV fell flat on it's face? And the hardware products got withdrawn or flushed at fire-sale prices? No content. Sure, I can see that your trio is making the very first tentative steps in that direction (developing their own content). ...