At 1 minute to midnight August 19, Al Jazeera English went scrambled!
We lost it on broadcast TV 30.5 WNVC from Falls Church, Virginia, serving the Washington, DC market. That channel now carries Blue Ocean Network, a supposedly privately owned Chinese network broadcast in English (and looking like it is programmed by Chinese nationals who have read that American TV viewers are very gullible).
That sucks. Another failed broadcaster.
More like, another success story. Universal Sports wasn't a failure, and ESPN used to be broadcast unscrambled and they even paid cable companies ten cents per customer to carry them.
I'll move my fixed dish back over to 58 tomorrow and find out if its there! Why couldn't they scramble that stupid RT channel instead, lol.
Russia Today is owned by the Russian government. In the Washington, DC DMA, there are so many Russians here that there is actually a simulcast Russia Today on 30.8, dubbed in Spanish.
I'm kind of late to the party on this. Why does AJ want to scramble? Don't they want to get their viewpoints out to Americans? Kind of hard to do that if they are scrambled and don't stream. Who does carry them?
Their website has a zip code search feature. In my zip, there are half a dozen different ways I can get it if I subscribe through one of them.
Well they just lost 99% of their viewers in the U.S. maybe AJ America will net them 1%...
"We", the geek TV aficionados, are statistically insignificant and can't be regionally targeted for advertising if we watch the channel on a national feed.
I still haven't seen any rational explanation as to why they had to take down the international news when their new channel is supposed to be all American news.
I don't think that there is anything that could be called all American news. The Al Jazerra that service my local, broadcast television station had been carrying was called Al Jazerra English. Is that what you had on FTA satellite? It carried world stories of interest to globally minded American citizens, with an obvious (to me) pro Arab slant. Even then, I never did detect their Shiite/Sunni slant. I think they were slightly Shiite, but that could be because more Sunnis are less hostile towards Israel. "The friend of my enemy is my enemy. The enemy of my friend is my enemy." Etc., etc.)
Over the weekend, Al Jazerra English ran a really well produced documentary on the history of colonial France raping Africa and continuing to do so even into the post-colonial era, and they ran it in prime time. I hope they keep producing and showing documentaries like that, but it could be that they will find they get larger audiences for celebrity interviews.
I guess this is just another demonstration of my longstanding belief that economics is a religion rather than a science, and thus should have no place as a decisionmaking factor in a free society.
Physicist Ed Teller once said that if you see things one way and I see them another, it is tempting for me to conclude that you see them differently because you are stupid. Al Jazerra is owned and managed by billion dollar interests who know how to make financial decisions.
Yes-they wanted to get their signal out to Americans-BUT cable companies refuse to carry them unless they scramble the signal. Why give anything away to a handful of fta watchers? Sorry, but this is the way it works here. To get carriage, you conform to their rules.
Give that man the cupie doll!
And yet RT (Russia Today) seems to be carried by some of the satellite/cable companies despite their online AND FTA streams.
It could be that Russia Today was less demanding of the cable companies than was Al Jazerra, and also that there is less backlash to carrying a TV channel with more babe news readers than Fox News, that has American born and bred hosts, and that reports to us tidings from the vanquished Evil Empire
But my understanding is that it isn't just the fta signal in the U.S that is blocked...also on line too...unless you work around it...just my opinion but I think they underestimated the number of fta and web viewers they had...probably more than they have today on the pay service. Turbo I agree with your last line but still don't like it lol
I still don't watch cable channels that have three digit numbers, but I guess that younger viewers will be more able to find this channel than will people of my generation. I still service off-air broadcast TV customers in highrise buildings with community broadcast antenna systems who don't grasp that Fox is a fourth network. I imagine that there are ways to steer prospective viewers to inconveniently numbered cable channels that I am not aware of.
Maybe they can get Geritol as an advertiser. I doubt they'll ever have millions of viewers on pay TV, most will die off before they ever find Al Jazeera up there in the stratosphere of the dial.
I'm afraid that Geritol just blew its TV budget sponsoring the newly launched Larry King show on Russia Today at 9:00 PM and rebroadcast at 11:00 PM. Last night's guest was (gulp) Oprah Winfrey!
