Nice negotiating Sirius
Wow, he must pretty much be the only star left in their sky for them to give him that kind of money and privilege. His schtick got old for me years ago.
The above video was secretly recorded and leaked.
He completely changed his shtick around ten years ago to try to lure big name guests and gain ‘respectability’. He dropped booking controversial comedians like Gilbert Gottfried. His bits are now scripted and prerecorded. His fanbase has turned on him and it seems like he is only in it for the money.
Thanks for this information.
In fairness, Howard isn’t the only one taking this summer off. Trevor Noah went off the air a month ago and won’t be back until September, when he’ll be back in front of an audience. (Same format? Hoodies?)
John Oliver just said on Sunday’s show that he’ll be back to the live studio in September, so he’ll have 5 more shows in the void between now and then. So I guess September is the magical return-to-normal month in the comedy news circle.
Maybe when Howard comes back they’ll resume Robin’s news. I could see everyone returning to the studio except Howard (Hughes) and Robin (cancer survivor) staying remote indefinitely. And keep most guests remote, except maybe everyone comes in for live bands.
I’m not loving Wolfie replacing Shuli, but the moment Shuli moved his entire family to Alabama (?!) the writing was on the wall. The problem is that Wolfie is just some guy, and a pretty unlikable one at that. Shuli had actual comedic talent.
As an aside, I started watching hours of nightly news on election night (for obvious reasons), then couldn’t stop watching. I finally kicked the habit last month, but right as I did that it seemed like all my comedy news stopped at the same time. No Daily Show, no Robin’s news, I think John Oliver had been off a couple weeks, and Samantha Bee seems like a 20% chance to air a new episode in any given week. No clue how her schedule works. What am I supposed to do, read news on the internet? That’s how bubbles form!
I think it is okay. The music can be fairly good and I like listening to comedians. There is sometimes a little too much opinion talk, repetition and “this channel is not available due to a live sports event”, which if true they should just broadcast rather than repeating this annoying message.
But it is often a better alternative than most of the available public channels.
In your car when listening to SXM, does your signal drop from time to time? When I lose line-of-sight to the satellites, sometimes it drops and sometimes it doesn’t. Weird.
When I lose signal, even if only for a second or two, that really sucks.
I’ve really gotten to like Trevor working from home, John in the Void and Seth in the (mostly) empty stuido. As much as I was concerned that someone with the personality required to be a late night host might not do well without an audience to feed off of, they’ve both done really well and I look forward to getting 10 minutes (or 30 in John’s case) of information thrown at me without them reacting to the audience every few seconds.
Though Seth will clearly take anything he gets, feeding off even a camera man or cue card guy laughing in the background.
Jimmy, on the other hand, is the one I still worry about. I mean, I worry about him because I don’t watch him and have no idea how he’s doing. But, of all the late night hosts, Jimmy is the one that seems most likely to not be able to function if he doesn’t have a studio audience. Like David Letterman doing a top 10 list or The Great Carnac guessing what’s in the envelope without an audience (or Ed McMahon).
Sorry but you’ll need to be more specific. Jimmy who?
Agreed big time on Trevor Noah. I think his show’s better from home than it was in studio. Oliver worked better in front of an audience but has been doing pretty well in the void.
My understanding is that the car radios feature a buffer, so that a momentary loss of LOS to the satellites (such as when you pass under an overpass) doesn’t lead to the programming dropping. If my understanding is correct, however, that only covers a few seconds’ worth of programming, so heading into a long tunnel will still lead to a signal drop.
In addition, in major cities, they have terrestrial repeater antennas, to make sure that subscribers can still get uninterrupted service, as LOS to the satellites can regularly be cut off by tall buildings.
All of that said, there are still some areas that I drive through which seem to be prone to signal drops, and have nothing to do with a clear view of the sky. For example, driving past O’Hare International Airport on Interstate 294 pretty much always leads to some signal interruptions, as does driving through downtown Milwaukee. In those cases, my suspicion is that there’s some sort of radio signal that’s disrupting or interfering with the SXM satellite signal.
Fallon?
It’s cell phone towers. I believe some radios and some channels may be affected more than others. My 2008 Honda CRV has the XM radio (remember, this was about the time of the merge, and XM and Sirius radios were different) and my signal drops out at about 5 places on my route to work, all right next to cell towers. Clear views to the sky. Not sure if there is anything SXM can do about it. Pretty sure they don’t care.
Yes, Fallon. I don’t watch him to begin with, but he’s the one who seems like he would have the hardest time doing a show without an audience to play off of. A lot of his bits seem to require immediate audience feedback. Think about him and a guest doing his karaoke roulette game to an empty audience. But maybe that’s not fair. His show was never really meant to be a political (even educational) show like John Oliver or Trevor Noah’s shows.
Carson used to take almost all summer off for a long time. When he went to Europe nobody knew him since his show was not on there . One time the guest host canceled at the last minute and Vincent Price was the host. He did a good job. He sang rather than do a monologue.
There’s a new channel on SiriusXM called 88 Rising, channel 305. They play all Asian pop music: Korean, Japanese, Chinese, etc. It’s quite interesting. Certainly there’s nothing like it on terrestrial radio.
Alright then. Thanks guys. And all this time I’d been thinking that I could get an extended antenna for my car to help reception. So, I guess not.
Here’s a bit of a better explanation. The article suggests that a notch filter may be a solution, but I have not followed up with what that would entail.
So I’ll have to check and see if my signal drops occur in the same places. I often switch between SXM, AM, and FM but I’ll have to keep it on SXM as I commute.
I’m relieved to see I’m not the only one having reception issues. I upgraded my '09 Jeep’s stereo last year, and opted to reuse the factory-installed satellite radio antenna…I was starting to think I had done something wrong. The signal does seem to cut out at the same points during my daily drive, but it’s much more frequent now than it used to be (but no so often that it impacts my ability to enjoy the radio).
The talking over songs needs to stop. This goes for terrestrial radio too!
I do love the SiriusXM app; there’s a massive amount of content, and I really like being able to listen to shows that were broadcast earlier (particularly on the old time radio channel). It’s also possible to stream the app on a Bluetooth-enabled car stereo, which is great in vehicles that don’t have a satellite radio antenna.
This seems to be a channel-specific issue. Back in the day (1960s and 1970s, in particular), it was very common for DJs to talk over the “ramp,” or the instrumental introduction to a song, and from what I recall, the DJs often knew exactly how long each song’s ramp was, so that they (the DJs) could stop talking just before the song’s vocals began.
On a number of the SiriusXM channels which have actual DJs, they clearly try to replicate the experience of listening to an actual radio station from that era – on “60s on 6” and “70s on 7,” for example, I definitely notice the DJs talking on top of the songs (as well as promos and bumpers which sound like they could be from a station from that era). OTOH, I notice it rarely (if at all) on channels like Classic Rewind or The Spectrum, and, of course, it doesn’t happen at all on channels that don’t have DJs (like The Bridge or Yacht Rock Radio).