CNN will always be the channel people turn on when wars and horrible disasters happen. The 'trick' is getting people to also want to watch it when there aren't hundreds or thousands of people somewhere in the world currently in mortal peril.
Cable boxes are, almost without exception, awful. They're under-powered computers running very badly designed software. Their channel guides are slow, poorly laid out, and usually riddled with ads.
It's been possible for years to use a PC to watch and record over-the-air television broadcasts, and unencrypted cable television tuners have been available almost as long. But for a long time, you could only watch copyright-protected channels with a cable company-leased box.
CNN's problem goes to its very core and to the identity it's sought ever since the rise of Fox News, on its right: CNN is the channel for people who don't want to watch the other channels! That's a stupid strategy.
I sort of forgot about 'Z Channel' after it went off the air in 1989, but once Jason Resnick of Focus Features made the suggestion, I became obsessed all over again. I still am. I'll probably be this way until I'm 80, babbling about 'Z Channel.'
I was on Tumblr when I was 12 or 13. I was on YouTube, too. I had a channel and made music videos. It had 50,000 subscribers.
So I had this fascination with old bones and being able to diagnose disease in old bones. And I was doing that, and started to do bone reports for the Channel 4 series 'Time Team'.
YouTube clips get millions, billions of hits. Reality TV programs have their own channels. How can movies attempt to compete with these kinds of numbers? And do we even need to? Are we scaring ourselves by unnecessary comparisons, by not comparing apples with apples?
We watch a lot of Discovery Channel, shows like 'The Biggest Loser' and even 'Amazing Race.' You learn a lot about the world, it's fun and nobody's interested in beating anybody down. And then the opposite: I'm a huge fan of 'Survivor.'
Back in the late 1980s I was programme editor of Channel Four's Business Daily. Day after day we broadcast the latest news, views and analysis for the City in a period when its visibility was as high as it has ever been.
