Cable

In an annual rite known as Upfront Week, NBC, Fox, ABC, CBS, and the CW just presented their lineups for the 2012-13 TV season to advertisers in New York. The ceremonies took place in some of the city's most august concert Halls (Carnegie, Avery Fisher, Radio City Music) over four days. The broadcast companies introduced only 20 new series for the fall (down from 27 last season). NBC led the pack with six new shows. Fox and the CW had half that many. Like it or not, an awful lot of familiar faces will be returning in the fall.

When I turned on the television and the picture quality was so poor that Lawrence Welk looked like Pamela Anderson, I told myself that things would eventually get better. When my children couldn't see "Mama's Family" through blizzardlike screen interference, I convinced them to turn it off and watch Solomon's Family instead. When my wife, LaVeta, said that she considered public television stations to be premium channels, I knew she was putting a happy face on our sad situation.

Q: I recently went shopping for a cable-ready TV. A salesman told me there's "no such thing" anymore. What gives? A: New Federal Communications Commission guidelines for cable TV and consumer electronics compatibility went into effect Nov. 1, and no manufacturer yet met them. In fact, the cable and electronics industries are still hammering out details as to how they're going to "interface" their products so you won't need to use a separate descrambler box and two remote controls to tune in shows.

If you're looking for ways to save on next year's budget while shopping for gifts, combine your two goals by canceling your cable service and setting up your home for optimal television viewing without cable. The good news is that your viewing choices have grown tremendously over the last few years, making life without cable seem less of a sacrifice. By setting up your home to be cable-free, you can save on costly monthly cable bills while having copious quantities of content to enjoy.

WASHINGTON - Relations between Venezuela and the United States sank so low in recent years that even a McDonald's combo meal and a two-for-one offer from Domino's Pizza were the subject of acrimony. The tale of the fast-food kerfuffle is one of a multitude of snapshots offered by U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and released to McClatchy Newspapers that shed light on steadily rising tensions between the United States and the government of fiery populist Hugo Chavez. Many of the snapshots are of singular events such as a tussle over a diplomatic pouch, the parsing of an insult by Chavez, and the travails of U.S. companies operating in Venezuela.

Has it really been 10 years? Wasn't it only yesterday that cable TV graduated from rural areas to start saturating America, and started making an endless stream of thus-far unfulfilled promises? Prism celebrates its 10th anniversary Monday, an impressive success story in a field littered with the graves of regional and national "premium" services. HBO, as a national cable network, marked its 10th anniversary a year ago and this week celebrates the 10th anniversary of its oldest regular series, Inside the NFL. The success of both of these operations is due in no small part to the unswerving loyalty and unquenchable appetites of sports enthusiasts.

After completing its most successful summer season ever, cable television is aiming for an auspicious autumn that will entice even more viewers to its improving attractions. For two weeks in June and again for two weeks in July, the combined audience for cable channels outnumbered the total viewers for the six broadcast networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, UPN, and WB. That never happened before in TV history. With more than 20 channels now posting solid annual profits, cable has more money than ever to buy better scripts and hire higher-profile stars.

Cable is where people go to have sex. And drugs, and cigarettes, and too much alcohol. But mostly, of late, sex. If the venerable networks are a tepid variety show, cable is a Roman orgy. The language on cable was always salty, a verbal Wild West without the FCC as sheriff. Now, the behavior lives up to the talk, especially with Showtime's Californication and HBO's forthcoming Tell Me You Love Me , which is sex, sex, sex, and then a whole lot of talk about sex. Showtime's Californication , debuting at 10:30 p.m. Monday, makes up - big time - for David Duchovny's lack of carnal knowledge during the nine lonely seasons he spent with extraterrestrials and a flashlight on The X-Files . If Fox Mulder worked all the time, Duchovny's dissolute novelist Hank Moody plays all the time, usually horizontally with inappropriate women.

Look for the 76ers to settle their television contract situation this week with a revised schedule that will leave just seven regular-season games on free broadcast for the 1991-92 season. According to sources close to the negotiations, WPHL-TV (Channel 17) has been cut into the new deal for those seven games as the Sixers try to avoid the public relations fallout from going totally cable. As in the past, Prism will carry all home games not blacked out by national television, and in the new alignment, Prism and its sister station, SportsChannel, will split the 34 road games left after WPHL's token allotment.

Two big-money Michaels - Jackson and Milken - are joining forces to create an educational TV cable network, the junk-bond king's spokeswoman announced yesterday in L.A. "He wants to put on programs . . . everything from pre- school to job training, cradle to retirement," she said. Thursday, in his first public appearance since leaving prison and completing a halfway house stint this month, Milken - who is battling prostate cancer - addressed an educational conference sponsored by his Milken Family Foundation.

Five of the nation's largest cable companies — Comcast Corp., Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable — are creating a seamless national WiFi network to enable cable broadband subscribers to stream data or access the Internet through smart phones, tablets or laptop computers, the companies said Monday. The initial network consists of 50,000 WiFi hot spots, most of them currently in the Philadelphia-to-New York corridor. A top Comcast official, Neil Smit, said the nation's largest cable company with 18 million residential broadband customers would likely build out the WiFi network in the Northeast, between Washington and Boston.

The Emmy for bad taste goes to ... Lifetime! The cabler has greenlighted a documentary series about the lives of Whitney Houston's surviving family members in the wake of the diva's death. "The multi-generations of the ... family will bravely reveal their lives as they bond together to heal," says Lifetime suit Rob Sharenow. Houston Family Chronicles is the brainchild of Whitney's brother Gary's wife, Pat, who pitched it before Whitney's untimely death. "The unexpected passing of Whitney certainly affects the direction of the show," Pat says.

It's a long and twisty trail that leads from Alexander the Great to Larry the Cable Guy, but the History Channel would gladly travel it again. The cable outlet launched on New Year's Day in 1995 with lofty aspirations befitting its name. It offered a library of documentaries about everything from the Precambrian Era to the Crusades to the Korean War. Ladies and gentlemen, we have discovered the cure for insomnia. The subject matter was too dry for TV's heightened narrative style.

Topping this week's DVD picks are a first-rate action film and a top-notch cable TV comedy. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Grade A: Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) goes into action when the IMF is shut down. If the goal of the latest big-screen version of the television series is to make the most eye-popping, bone-shaking, heart-pounding installment yet, then there's only one thing to say: Mission accomplished. Cruise brings a confidence, charm, and energy to the role. He's the fuse that lights every explosive moment.

So much for Netflix and other over-the-top Internet services quickly wiping out the cable-TV business. Comcast Corp. said Wednesday that it had virtually arrested the drain of cable-TV subscribers in the fourth quarter, and analysts speculated that the nation's largest cable company could soon add TV customers after five years of steep and damaging losses that threatened its legacy business. A quarterly loss of 17,000 cable-TV subscribers marked Comcast's best numbers since the first quarter of 2007, when it added 83,000 subscribers.

IT'S HARDLY the dream-fulfilled of pick-your-own (or "a la carte") channel bundling, which some TV viewers have been craving. But Cox Cable's plan to go national with its bargain-priced ($25 to start, $35 after six months) TV Economy service, eliminating the mighty ESPN and other pricey channels, certainly represents a crack in the cable industry's wall of wills.

The DVD pickings are slim this week, but there are a few good new releases. The Ides of March, Grade B: An idealistic staffer for a presidential candidate learns about dirty politics. George Clooney and Ryan Gosling star. The battle between two Democrats in Ohio's primary is just the scenery for this tale of ambition, loyalty, sex, betrayal, and abuse of power. In other words, it's a lot like real-world politics. Gosling plays a whiz-kid consultant who believes a charismatic governor (Clooney)

WASHINGTON - In colorful give-and-take, the Supreme Court debated whether policing curse words and nudity on broadcast television makes sense in the cable era, with one justice suggesting that the policy is fast becoming moot as broadcast TV heads the way of "vinyl records and 8-track tapes. " The case heard Tuesday, FCC v. Fox Television Stations , involves programming that is available to all viewers free over the air - even though many now receive it through paid cable connections - during hours when children are likely to be watching.

The homeowner didn't have a clue, so neither did the cable TV repairman as he ducked into the basement. Then he heard a noise. "He heard growling, and he thought it was the guy upstairs," a witness told New York's Fox5 TV station. "And when he turned around he saw the bear laying there. . . . He left all his equipment there and ran out. " A large black bear. A 500-pounder, officials estimated. The incident unfolded Wednesday afternoon in a crowded neighborhood Hopatcong, Sussex County, where the bear had been spotted earlier in the day. The basement was accessible from outside.

Neil Smit, a top executive at Comcast Corp., has added title of chief executive officer of its cable division to his job description. He has been president of the division and will keep that designation as well. Comcast hired Smit in March 2010 and he now heads the company's core cable/Internet/phone businesses and reports to Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian L. Roberts.    - Bob Fernandez