[Infowarrior] - TV: Style versus Substance

[Richard Forno]

It never ceases to amaze me how Americans are more attracted to style versus
substance.

Given last week's market hijinks, and since I don't get Bloomberg, last
night I was watching an Internet stream of CNBC Asia to see how Asia would
deal with Friday's Wall Street action. Much to my amazement, the CNBC Asia
video stream had NONE of the following, unlike its CNBC-US counterpart:

- animated "floating" 3-d graphs and magical Warcraft-like sprinkle-sounds
when they change to a new graph.

- line-printer audio and visual sound effects when showing price changes for
companies in a given sector.

- realtime clocks on their graphs, let alone one that shows the time down to
the hundredth-second.

- needless animations elsewhere on the screen to give the appearance of
'activity'

- no 'countdown' to the various market opens; they just opened and the
newsreader says "....and Taiwan is now open" while doing his news report.

- even when showing day-old taped segments from CNBC USA, they replaced the
animated USA stock charts with the less-flashy CNBC Asia ones.

There are probably other positives, but this is what I was able to glean
thus far. The hour I watched was noticeably more "newsy" and "analytical"
than its glitzy US counterpart and felt more Bloomberg-esque as well.

Frankly I wonder at times how CNBC-US can call itself a serious financial
news network given not only its use of glitzy stuff mentioned above but also
when it makes a conscious decision to ignore world market coverage on
weeknights (to run taped gameshows) and its desire to run paid programming
commercials all weekend instead of the (surprisingly-decent) international
financial programming they run on CNBC World.  I guess after the US markets
close it's all about advertising revenue.  :(

That said, I will confess CNBC has done a great job with their streaming
video on CNBC Plus. No commercials and high video quality.  Plus it's free
on Sunday nights for the weekly Asian market open!  And there ARE people and
aspects of CNBC-US that I appreciate, so I'm not totally-negative about the
network -- just about some of its production decisions.

</rant>

-rick
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