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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: RIP - Monsters HD
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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 01-29-2009 04:05 PM
If it makes you feel any better, Joe, MonstersHD sounded a lot better than it was in reality. They had a comparatively small library of films that they played over and over again. I had it for a few years, and all they seem to have were the Halloween, Friday the 13th and Puppet Master films with ALL of the sequels that that they ran and ran ad nauseum, plus an occasional grade B low budget mid-fifties schlocker along the lines of From Hell It Came, Earth Vs. The Spider, Monster From Pieadras Blancas, The Flesh Eaters et.al.. I mean, Horror of Party Beach can be a fun movie to watch, but not ten times in one week. Occasionally they would license some decent films for a brief period, last fall they had all the Planet Of The Apes pictures for a month or so. Ironically they had just brought in some good new titles a few weeks before they folded. Aside from that, it was pretty repetitious.
I’ll give them one thing, though; whoever did their transfers did a bang-up job for them. Everything looked great, no matter how originally low budget the original picture. They seemed to find the best possible copies of everything they had, and it was all technically pretty high quality. The same goes for Kung Fu HD, one their sister channels. I was watching Flying Snake-fist of the Seven Shaolin Assholes or somesuch thing when the plug got pulled.
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Mark J. Marshall
Film God
Posts: 3188
From: New Castle, DE, USA
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted 01-30-2009 06:53 AM
Dish doesn't really care about who is watching what. If they did, they wouldn't put the cable news network that no one watches on their lowest level service, and the #1 cable news network on their higher priced service. Obviously that's a money making decision, I guess. I'm still waiting for the #1 cable news network to be in HD. #2 is. We'll see how long that takes.
MonstersHD did repeat a lot of their content, yet people were watching anyway. I don't know how many times I watched Halloween, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc. But that's ok, because I love that genre, and so do a LOT of other people, and movies like that don't typically play ANYWHERE in HD. I've talked to people who would have loved to see that channel, and they never got a chance. So what happened? Dish replaced the Voom! channels with other incomparable channels. There was clearly viewership on the Voom! channels - mostly because their content was different and interesting, and the picture was phenomenal (Yes, Bobby, that does matter). And Dish yanked them and replaced them with other channels that in some cases (like Monsters) have completely unrelated content and an inferior picture. That just makes no sense, no matter how badly Dish's feelings were hurt.
I wonder if they ever got any complaints about MonstersHD being repetitious. Because when you read the feedback on various forums about MonstersHD (and some of the other Voom! channels) being yanked, the number of people who are upset outnumber those who either aren't upset or who think it was a good decision by a pretty substantial margin. Yet Dish seems to think it was a good idea. And now a channel that had a lot of potential is gone. And now there's a vacuum. Someone should pickup the ball and run with it.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-30-2009 09:36 AM
quote: Mark J. Marshall
Dish doesn't really care about who is watching what. If they did, they wouldn't put the cable news network that no one watches on their lowest level service, and the #1 cable news network on their higher priced service.
If you're talking about Fox News that's a totally different matter. Dish Network and News Corp. have been in negotiations for more than a year trying to hammer out some sort of deal on carrying the HD versions of News Corp. owned channels. No deal has been reached yet.
Dish only just recently reached a deal with Viacom. We'll see what HD channels get added in February once the new Ciel II satellite now just reaching its 129° position finishes testing.
quote: Mark J. Marshall
MonstersHD did repeat a lot of their content, yet people were watching anyway.
And there were plenty of people calling up Dish Network and doing some ass chewing over the endless repeats and contrasting the nonstop Voom regurge to all the national HD channels Dish did not have. Voom was wasting precious satellite bandwidth on Dish' service while DirecTV was adding a lot more HD channels that viewers really wanted. Dish lost lots of customers over the past year due to this.
On the video quality thing, if I really want to watch the same movie repeatedly over and over again just for the picture quality I'll get a movie on Blu-ray Disc. Nothing on any broadcast, cable or satellite service compares to Blu-ray. I don't even watch the movies I own on Blu-ray anywhere near as often as Voom repeated movies and other programs on its channels.
Some people loved Voom, but most people didn't. The service had very limited appeal. That's echoed in the various satellite TV forums like dbstalk.com or satelliteguys.us. A Monsters HD forum is going to be rife with fanboy bias.
If Rainbow Media really cared about Voom they wouldn't have been such freaking cheapskates when it came to licensing programming. What Rainbow should have done was move faster to get their national channels like AMC, IFC, Sundance and We into HD format and fold that into the Voom package so it would have at least some modicum of variety, along with shows like Mad Men that a lot more people really want to watch.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-30-2009 10:22 PM
quote: Mark J. Marshall
I don't know what MonstersHD forum you're talking about, Bobby. I'm talking about the forums you mentioned, along with some others.
If you're talking about the forums I mentioned, anytime someone mentions Voom in those places these days a chorus of laughter typically follows. I was under the impression you were referring to a forum operated under a MonstersHD web site.
quote: Mark J. Marshall
Dish pulled Voom! in May of 2008. So if they continued to lose that many customers last year... I dunno what to tell ya. Maybe those people were only hanging around because of the unique programming the Voom! channels offered. I know I've thought about leaving.
Dish Network was losing lots of customers before May of 2008. There was lots of complaints about Voom regurging the same old programs over and over again with hardly anything new/current.
If any of the various Voom channels, such as MonstersHD, were really desired as much as some people insist, Rainbow Media would have launched channels like that as nationally available networks on their own -like they did with AMC, IFC, etc. Instead, MonstersHD was bundled in with a dozen other channels with comparatively limited appeal and an unrivaled amount of repeated on end content.
People can scoff about channels like Spike repeating The Godfather, Star Wars or various James Bond movies. Yet channels like that had new and highly desirable content like the latest Ultimate Fighter shows and some other original programs. Dish is still experiencing negative churn because it doesn't carry SpikeHD.
DirecTV has never offered any of the Voom channels, yet it has been kicking Dish Network's ass all over the place -mainly due to having national HD channels more people find uninteresting. Meanwhile Voom became 100% irrelevant over endless old program regurging.
[ 01-31-2009, 10:05 AM: Message edited by: Bobby Henderson ]
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Joe Tommassello
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 547
From: Coatesville, PA, USA
Registered: Jan 2008
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posted 02-02-2009 12:49 PM
Bob -
Let me tell you what I find uninteresting. Improperly presented, edited for time and content, commercially-interrupted, visually-obscured movie presentations. I can say without exception I would NEVER watch any movie on AMC, Spike, UniversalHD, Fearnet, TNT, etc. I want my movies uncut, uninterrupted, in HD and Widescreen (when appropriate)...and without MONK dancing across the bottom of the screen every four minutes.
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