TMINE

Here’s the Sci Fi Channel’s reason why Stargate SG-1 (running for 10 years and 200 episodes) is the world’s longest running science-fiction show, not Doctor Who (running for 40 years on and off and approximately a billion episodes):

Guinness awarded the title of longest-running sci-fi series in tv history to Stargate, which took the title away from X-Files (at the 203rd episode, technically). Both shows overshadow Doctor Who in that they had consecutive episodes. Doctor Who while it ran several hundred episodes, had long gaps of not being in production, far longer than a regular hiatus. The show was revived several times and I’m told one of the gaps between production was over ten years.

All they had to do was say “longest running US sci-fi series” and they’d have been off the hook, but no, they just had to start making stuff up…

Turns out RSS feeds are hard to cope with. So I’ve just made a few changes to the blog to make it easier for everyone.

If you’d like to get into this feeds thing, get yourself an account with Bloglines. Then, whenever you see a feed you’d like to subscribe to, just click the “Subscribe with Bloglines” button next to the feed and you should be able to add it your account’s list of feeds.

Let me know if you have any problems!

Remember Aquaman? No? Not surprising really. Almost no one’s seen it until today, because it was a failed pilot for new network The CW. But in a move that echoes Nobody’s Watching‘s emergence on YouTube, NBC is selling it on iTunes in the US.

Could this be the way of the future? Networks making money from pilots they never even turned into series?

I hope not. When you consider some of the shows that do become series, you have to wonder how bad some of those failed pilots have to be to avoid being turned into series. And then be asked to pay to for them? No thank you.

Got a bit of junk mail through my door last week. It was extolling the virtues of Sky. I have Sky. What a waste of paper.

I’d normally just have junked it, but things change and sometimes you miss new services, so I decided to leaf through it anyway.

I got to the “mixes” section. Sky works like this: as well as the free channels and the premium channels, such as Sky Sports, that you pay for separately, there are a whole range of paid-for channels like Sky One that you get in bundles with other channels. You decide which of the six entertainment “mixes” contain the channels you’d like it and order none, two, four or six of them.

So I looked through the mixes, noted that there were only two that had channels in that I liked, noted further that I was paying for six mixes and immediately cancelled my subscription to the unwanted four.

The result? A poorly targeted marketing mailshot actually cost the offending company subscription revenue. Result! What a heart-warming tale.

Actually, I did have to decide whether I’d prefer the “style and culture” mix or the “knowledge” mix, since you can’t subscribe to just three mixes (two or four only). I went for ‘knowledge’ rather than ‘style’. Not sure if that was a mistake.

Which would you have picked? You can find the list on the Sky web site.