In the wake of the shocking appearance of — gasp — a breast on national television, CBS is continuing in it’s conservative tradition by implementing a combination audio/video delay on the next Grammy telecast.
CBS announced today plans to enhance their ability to edit out any inappropriate and unexpected events from the Sunday, Feb. 8 broadcast of the “46th Annual Grammy Awards” on CBS.
The enhancement will include the ability to delete both inappropriate audio and video footage from the broadcast. Using a five second delay, CBS has traditionally employed procedures that allow only for the elimination of inappropriate audio. This new enhancement will accomplish both. The precise length of the new delay has yet to be determined.
The new procedure, which is being coordinated with the Recording Academy, is being put in place to safeguard against any unexpected and inappropriate content being broadcast during the awards ceremony.
The uproar over the little stunt at the Superbowl is just bewildering to me. Television in general is so chock full of sex and violence, and yet the glimpse of a breast with a pastie over the nipple is enough to cause huge upheaval. I’m sure there wouldn’t have been a ripple if he’d just beaten the crap out of her on national TV instead. What a bizarre country we live in. People prefer to see horrible violence instead of a human body. It’s a typical conservative reaction: rail against the suggestive stuff on TV, but applaud the violence and the crass, tasteless commercials.
Just as an aside, TiVo sent out this press release:
SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson top the show during Sunday’s Super Bowl, attracting almost twice as many viewers as the most thrilling moments on the field, according to an annual measurement of second-by-second viewership in TiVo households.
The Jackson-Timberlake moment drew the biggest spike in audience reaction TiVo has ever measured. TiVo said viewership spiked up to 180 percent as hundreds of thousands of households used TiVo’s unique capabilities to pause and replay live television to view the incident again and again. Overall, the halftime extravaganza had a powerful grip on viewers. According to TiVo’s analysis of aggregated data from an anonymous sample of 20,000 households, viewership of the game’s intermission increased by 12 percent compared to last year’s halftime show.
Here’s my question: TiVo did a second-by-second measurement of viewership in TiVo households? Excuse me? In other words, my TiVo is reporting back to the mothership a second by second report of what I am watching?! I suddenly am no longer fond of my TiVo.
Gene, check out this article on the topic of TiVo reporting on what you’re watching (and yes, that information creeped me out, too), courtesy of Gizmodo: http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-5154219.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news
Interestingly, it notes “Those concerned about being part of the sporadic random samplings TiVo conducts, such as the one taken during the Super Bowl, can call an 800 number to opt out.” Though the articles doesn’t actually publish the number. I’m off to the TiVo site to look for it.