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JerseySmarts.com

When Will Comcast NJ Receive Spike HD?

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Enough is enough already with waiting… I’ve been asking the folks at Comcast when we’re going to be able to receive Spike HD in the Monmouth/Ocean county area and they keep telling me that it’s coming soon. I’ve been asking for over a year – close to a year and a half, actually. Does anyone out there know when we’re supposed to receive the Spike HD channel in this market?

I wish I knew more about the process of delivering a channel to a specific area. I feel like it probably isn’t much more than coming to an agreement with the channel’s ownership (in this case, Viacom) and then flipping a few switches. Makes you wonder what is taking so long to get this otherwise simple process completed.

One of the reasons that I’m a little bit angered over this delay is because Comcast recently added Spike HD to certain markets in New Jersey. Why couldn’t our market be included in that update?! Anyway, if anyone knows when we’re going to receive the Spike HD channel in the Monmouth/Ocean market, please let me know. Thanks!

Twenty Hours of TNA Wrestling Last Weekend

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Like many people with a DVR, I have a bad habit of letting certain shows build up over time before I sit down to watch them. It’s not that you want to build up this backlog of shows to watch, it’s just that the demands on a person’s time these days are so crazy that it’s hard to spend any time watching a television show. Not good news for the broadcast networks, I guess. Anyway, this past weekend was a great example of what happens when those shows continue to build up on my DVR…I watched some 20 hours of Total Nonstop Action’s wrestling show – Impact.

Maybe it wasn’t 20 hours of action (you have to factor in commercials), but it was ten of their weekly, two-hour shows that I had to push through. I’m not complaining, since I thought it was a pretty entertaining 20 hours. However, I have to do a better job of watching Impact on a more consistent basis. Between a two hour Impact every week and an hour and a half of Cheers every night, my DVR gets clogged up to the point of insanity.

In any event, I thought that the Impact shows were fun to watching and entertaining. There was a lot of focus on the Main Event Mafia, which grew to be tiresome, and only a minimal focus on some of the undercard talent. That’s a shame because there are really some talented folks under contract to TNA. The two best developments that I saw on the ten episodes of the show were 1) the removal of Don West from the color commentator position and having his replaced by Taz and 2) the creation of a tag team championship for the Knockout division. Those are two major steps in the right direction for the company, but adding new tag team titles will probably mean that there will need to be more television time in order to showcase all of the talent.

If I were TNA, I’d try to get a one hour show on one of the Viacom channels (either VH1 or MTV or even staying on Spike). There’s no reason that the promotion couldn’t get a one hour slot on one of those channels and focus on advancing some of the undercard storylines.

Anyway, overall I’m glad I made the switch from being a primarily WWE fan to a primarily TNA fan. Not that TNA doesn’t have a variety of areas that it needs some help with (it’s time to break out of the Impact Zone and have a traveling show already!), but it’s just a better product in my mind.

The Howard Stern Vacation Schedule

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Sometimes I really wish that I was told that Howard Stern and his crew of miscreants would be taking off most of the summer before I purchased my Sirius Satellite Radio and subscription. The Stern crew just took off the last week…and I’m not sure why. They took off the first full week of August and the last full week. And I’m sure that they’ll be off next week, too (because why would you take off Monday for Labor Day and then only work a 3-day work week?).

Bear in mind they also took off the first two weeks of July. Ummm…that’s four full weeks off in the summer months. I know that Howard’s brainwashed fans will say that he’s earned the break, but there are many millions more of us who are just fans of the show and feel like they’ve been sold a bill of goods with the Howard Stern gang. We were told about commercial-free radio before he made the jump – we now get frequent 15-minute, non-live content breaks in the middle of his shows.

We were told that the show would be in the studio on the occasional Friday to surprise the audience. Bullshit on that! He spent a few Fridays in the studio when he started Sirius – more than two and a half years ago now.

Then we were told about all of the great content that we’d get after Sirius XM and Stern bought back his tapes from CBS Radio/Viacom. What do they give us? A completely randomized selection of shows from all over Howard’s history with no rhyme or reason as to why they were playing certain shows. This crappy “Master Tape Theater” was so poorly received that the Stern folks were forced to move it into some weird Sunday afternoon time slot when no one is listening anyway.

Before he made the jump, Stern sold us on something like 33 cents per day or 45 cents per day to hear him on Sirius. Okay – then let me pay just the 45 cents on each day that he’s in the building. In August, I would have paid $3.60 to hear Howard and his crew.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that the merger went through. I really do like satellite radio and I really do enjoy listening to the Howard Stern Show. But paying the $14 that I pay each month (tax included) is not worth what I’m getting in terms of service. I hear that with the merger there will be an option to get 50 channels of your choice and pay $6.99 per month. Let’s get that figured out and in motion already!