Free Republic

During the June 13 monologue on Conan, host Conan O’Brien referenced the Orlando terror attack and said no one should be able to own “a semiautomatic rifle.” He described semiautomatic rifles as “weapons of war” that “have no place in civilian life.”

Over the past couple of weeks, Time Warner high speed here around Columbia has been randomly dropping out due to DNS getting lost. An outage can be a few minutes to pushing half an hour. I've changed DNS to some of the open ones, found a firmware update for the router and applied it just to rule out things at home. I was looking to see if anyone else was experiencing the frustration. If I posted this incorrectly, I'm sure the mods will handle it.

I'm considering doing this. Roku, Sling, and HD cable antenna with 50 mile radius. Anyone here already cut the cable cord? My main concern is catching sports during football season. Thanks for any tips.

ISPs, who once fed us lines about excessive bandwidth usage and network congestion in order to upsell people on higher-tier “business class” Internet packages, are now essentially using the same tactics to punish cord-cutters, many of which were likely former cable subscribers.

Cancelled DishTV today. I have "cut the cord" on and off for many years, and it's time again. I was paying $60/month on a discount plan and it went up to $120 for the same programming. I'm just not getting that kind of benefit from the cable channels. On a personal level, I don't see the value. A recent article found that more than 1,000,000 [US] consumers cancelled paid TV subscriptions in 2015, according to SNL Kagan, a division of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Last year's decline was four times greater than the losses of 2014, and it represents the...

Who else is having problems today with their Comcast TV? From what I'm seeing online it looks like a nationwide problem. I can't get through to anyone in customer support. Does anyone have any information from Comcast about this issue? Thanks.

Commentary: A proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler calls for cable companies like Comcast to "unlock the set-top box." Unlocking isn't enough. The box should die, once and for all, and be replaced by apps. There's no technological reason that Comcast, or Time Warner Cable, or Charter or any other cable TV provider needs to provide physical hardware at all. There's no need for warehouses full of cable boxes or arduous "service windows" where the technician supposedly shows up "sometime between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m."-- or not--to fix (or more likely just replace) your device. Full-fledged pay...

Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios Networks along with the National Association of African-American Owned Media (NAAAOM) Wednesday filed a $10 billion lawsuit in United States District Court for engaging in “racial discrimination” by not launching African-American owned networks. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday night in filed in United States District Court in Central District of California, comes less than a month after Entertainment Studios settled a similar discrimination lawsuit against AT&T and DirecTV after AT&T signed to carry Entertainment Studios’ portfolio of networks.

For those of you who have not cut the cord and ditched your cable/satellite service, a new cable channel could be joining your programming line-up: GunTV. It's a 24-hour shopping channel for firearms and firearms accessories. The channel will roll out on January 20, 2016 and will start with a six-hour daily broadcast and then move to a 24-hour programming schedule beginning 2017. The New York Times writes, "The project is the brainchild of Valerie Castle and Doug Bornstein, two home shopping industry veterans based in Rancho Mirage, Calif., who saw what looked to them like an untapped market." And...

Your favorite sports team is massively overvalued right now. It’s not that you ought to be losing sleep over Jerry Jones’s or Mark Cuban’s finances—they were rich before and will be rich after. But the popping and cracking noises emanating from the key support beam in our Temple of Athletics—the TV sports business—foreshadow wild disruptions ahead for the world of sports. Like the barking dogs that sense an earth tremor before we do, ESPN’s annus horribilis is a harbinger of the Internet’s coming disintermediation of America’s half-trillion dollar sports industry. Just since mid-summer, the Disney-owned 800-pound linebacker of sports TV...

Kelly Riddell at the Washington Times has some shocking news which will doubtless send many of you to the fainting couch. If you check the number of journalists covering politics in America today who can be identified as belonging to one party or the other, the spread is actually nowhere near the breakdown you find among all the voters in the country. A mere 7 percent of journalists identify as Republicans, and when they do give money to political campaigns they usually donate to Democrats, lending evidence to Republican presidential candidates' claims that they are facing a hostile audience when...

RUSH: ESPN is in trouble economically, financially. ESPN just announced that they're gonna have to cut a minimum of 350 jobs. And the reason why is subscribers are abandoning cable. Many people do not understand how all of this works, the cable bundle. I mean, you understand that you have to pay a minimum amount per month to get a bunch of channels, the vast majority of which you never watch, but the channels you want are in that bundle, and you have to pay for the bundle. So let's say you want your local stations, you want ESPN, maybe...

Myles UdlandSeptember 23,2015It seems like people just aren't watching TV anymore. A report from Ad Age on Wednesday paints a bleak picture of Tuesday's overnight TV ratings, which come during one of the industry's most important weeks of the year as new shows are rolled out on the major networks. Ad Age, citing figures from Nielsen, reported that every returning drama that aired Tuesday night saw viewers decline by double digits while debuts were a "mixed bag." But aside from the performance of individual shows, the number of people using TV in the coveted 18-to-49 demographic was down 8% against...

If you have dropped cable, but have a household full of sports nuts, what if any, solutions have others come up with to drop cable, go Roku, and still watch the games?

Cut your cable cord. This is what 3.2 million Americans have done over the last year or so. The result is not only a massive loss of revenue for ESPN but ESPN is poisoning -7.2% fewer U.S. households.

Then CIA-Director David Petraeus objected to the final talking points the Obama administration used after the deadly assault on a U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, because he wanted to see more details revealed to the public, according to emails released Wednesday by the White House. Under pressure in the investigation that continues eight months after the attacks, the White House on Wednesday released 99 pages of emails and a single page of hand-written notes made by Petraeus' deputy, Mike Morell, after a meeting at the White House on Saturday, Sept. 15. On that page, Morell scratched out from the...

A New York Magazine writer and author of the 2014 book about Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, "The Loudest Voice in the Room," said in a recent televised interview the cable station's biggest star, Megyn Kelly, may not be re-engaging in public disputes with presidential hopeful Donald Trump because she doesn't want to hurt her chances to move to a more mainstream network, like CNN. Kelly, on the heels of widespread criticism of her debate night questioning of Trump – after which the billionaire businessman called her a "bimbo" in a tweet – went on what she and Fox officials...

Please tell me if you think Netflix's basic service is worthwhile. If you have it, do you regret it or recommend it? I know they have plenty of movies, but do they stream any current TV shows after they air on cable (say next day, or something like that)?

Sports-TV powerhouse ESPN, a profit machine that has long towered over the media landscape, is showing signs of stress as the pay-TV industry goes through an unprecedented period of upheaval. A decline in subscribers as customers trim their cable bills, coupled with rising content costs and increased competition, has ESPN in belt-tightening mode, people familiar with the situation say. The company, majority owned by Walt Disney Co., has lost 3.2 million subscribers in a little over a year, according to Nielsen data, as people have “cut the cord” by dropping their cable-TV subscriptions or downgraded to cheaper, slimmed-down TV packages...

Attention, voters: Bernie Sanders is just like you, which is to say he’s tired of paying too much for cable. The independent Vermont senator and 2016 Democratic presidential hopeful joined three fellow senators Thursday in asking the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the “ridiculous prices” charged by pay-TV and broadband services. In a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, Sanders -- along with Democratic Sens. Al Franken of Minnesota and Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts -- said American consumers are being burdened by ever-increasing monthly bills and a thicket of hidden fees. Citing lack of competition and increased...