Braindead media

Has Media gone brain dead? It looks to me as if it really has. Specially the TV news channel. There is not a single news channel which truly delivers news. The amount of real news they give to the viewers out of their 24 hours of constant feeding is very less. With 24 hours to fill in and rat race of improving own TRP among hundreds of other channels, news channels are stooping to any level to produce what they call the "news". Suddenly, every news is breaking news. Prof matuknaath deciding to follow Osho is a breaking news. Investigation journalism today means, finding out the love affairs of the bollywood stars. Today there was a whole half an hour program focusing on how Salmaan is over protective about Katrina and scared of loosing her to Akshay kumar...WTF???
And besides, the whole motive of such programs appears as if they want to deliberately create some kind of spark so that they can claim they delivered the news first. Every news channel is in search of some controversy. If they don't find it, they create one. They would fuel Ganguly and Chappel fight with their day long program and all sorts of "expert comments". Media plays a role like that of a vamp in hindi movies/serial, which tries to create rift between two people for its own benefits. Its so cheap...
Recently, there was an incidence where a police officer manhandled a media reporter and broke his camera. Though it was not right on officer's part, I don't think he was the only one responsible for it. I am sure media person would have crossed the line to get the news for its channel so that they can claim that they are "sabse tej". Like its said in "Spiderman", "with power comes a great responsibility". I don't think media are acting responsible for the power they have.
Some times, I think I would have been happy with just 1 hours of news a day, like they used to have in just DD-1 era. There were some quality programs like "parakh", "Surabhi" which don't have any parallel now a days, despite having so many channels.
Media is such a huge weapon which, if well used, can benefit so much to the society. No wonder its called the forth pillar of democracy. Recently, the Jessica Lal judgment has shown its power.
But not a single channel is working with that agenda. I had expectations from channels like "IBN", "NDTV", but even they are falling for this madness. Its not that they don't produce quality programs at all. But still they are not doing enough, and are rather focusing on TRP. Rather than being a news channel, they are trying to become wholesome entertainment channel. I call such news channels as "page 3" news channel, like they have a page-3 in news paper. Only difference is, there is only one page3 in the news paper, but here most of the news content is page3.
We don't need news channel to entertain us. There are hundreds other channel for that. You do what you are supposed to do. Raise questions concerning people, raise questions about corruption, murders, state of roads, electricity..expose politicians, corrupt bureaucrats. Media in my opinion,is the only way we could improve the system around us only if they will.

Freedom from cable TV .. welcome Satellite TV

It was worth the 8 months of wait..Satellite TV has everything that I wanted, including the freedom from local gundas who run the cable TV service.
1500rs non-refundable deposit and 410 rs per month subscription is what those guys quoted for cable plus everything as per their terms. I had decided to go against it and was thinking of getting dish TV (another satellite tv). The only problem I had was about the concealing the wires. My builder had provided the concealed wiring for cable wires with input to it outside the apartment. Cable agency didn't want to give the input outside the apartment fearing I might connect more than one TV or someone might steal cable from my wire. And I didn't want to have any wire inside my home hanging anywhere.
so, all these things made my mind of getting a satellite TV instead. But the problem of concealed wiring was still there..I was not sure if those guys would somehow give me concealed wiring...

After I returned from US two weeks back, I heard about the Tata's venture of satellite TV - Tata Sky. The offer looked interesting. I was OK with initial investment of 4000rs. I was also pleased to find the good customer care service that they have..so I ordered one.
They delivered the hardware a couple of days ago and did the installation of Dish and activation yesterday. The best part was that those guys took care of concealing the wire. They did something..drilling, pulling wire from switchboard and what not..but they did exactly what I wanted.

And the features...just amazing. Everything what digital world stands for..channel indexing, program guide (upto next one week), setting of alerts, info about the program..plenty of them.
they have additional features called Active..
In Active Sports, you can truly enjoy watching any sport..one window within the main screen shows the live match, another window continuously shows highlights of the game till now so that you can always come back and see how Tendulkar got out in case you were away from the seat answering the door at the exact moment when he got out, another window shows virtual camera..then you can also anytime go and take a look at score board, team listing so that you are not at the mercy of channel showing what you wanted and when..

Active news room, shows multiple windows within a screen with different news channel..one of them being active (means you can here the active window) and the rest only shows video..so you can select any news channel you want depending on what they are showing and enjoy the news...

everything is great..only downside is the speed..using the active features and home screen features is bit slow..infact very slow ...this can little bit frustrate you. But with all the other benefits you are getting, you probably would be ok with it, I am at least.