Noggin, ABBA and Slacker

It is no surprise that exactly at 7PM ET last night (4PM PT) that Dish Network switched off all of the local stations owned by Young Broadcasting.  This is one that needs to be fought out and hopefully both sides need to reach a middle ground soon.  As I said yesterday 30 cents a month for a free local station is a little too much that price is higher than some cable networks.

And while Dish Network is fighting with Young Broadcasting it reminds me that it’s still over a year later and Dish Network is still no using its Noggin.  Yes folks it has been over a year since the popular Viacom channel “Noggin” went from a 12 hour a day channel to a full 24 hour channel.

Dish Network is now the only service that I know of that is still only airing Noggin 12 hours a day (splitting the other half of the day with the teen channel “The N.”

On other cable and satellite providers “The N” was spun off to its own 24 hour channel and replaced Nick Games and Sports (or Nick GAS for short) on many of the providers.  Somehow Dish Network kept Noggin and The N together as one channel and also kept Nick GAS.  However my sources are now telling me that Viacom will be discontinuing Nick GAS in January, so what will Dish do?

I hope that Dish Network uses their Noggin and finally makes the kid safe television channel available 24 hours a day. 

ABBA Again?

Earlier this year Sirius Satellite Radio gave us a few weeks of ABBA Radio to promote the release of the movie “Mamma Mia” which was based on the music of ABBA.

In a surprising email yesterday from Sirius, I learned that ABBA radio is coming back for a 9 day encore.  And now that Sirius and XM have merged the music of ABBA will be available to both Sirius and XM customers.

ABBA Radio begins tonight at 6pm ET and will air through December 20^th on Sirius Channel 3 and XM Channel 31.

The question now is how much ABBA can you take?  I think I will skip it this time around.

Dumping Satellite Radio?

A lot of people have contacted me after Sirius and XM merged and dumped a bunch of music channels and have told me that they have moved to the Slacker music service.

I have never played with Slacker before so I went to Slacker.COM to see what it was about.  Since finding this gem the only time I have used my satellite radios was to listen to some talk shows.  This Slacker site is a free site that gives you many channels or music from all kinds of genres. And Slacker lets go out further by letting you make your own radio stations with your own favorite artists and fully customizing the channels to your liking.

In addition you can search for your favorite artists and have Slacker make a station with artists and songs that closely match the style of your favorite artists.

Last night just for laughs I did an artist’s channel of “Dr. Demento” and I was amazed at the channel that was put together for me with all kinds of wacky novelty songs!

Slacker offers a portable radio which lets you take the Slacker experience with you wherever you go.  You take the portable slacker radio and let it connect to your WIFI network or you can plug it into your PC and it will download your stations automatically to its built in storage.  Once your downloads are complete you can unplug the radio, and now your portable radio is full of your music that you love.

Some former satellite radio fans even went so far to create exact duplicates of stations that were removed from XM and Sirius, so now they have those channels back and are once again loving their music.

If you have a music nut in your family show them the Slacker.COM website and  if they like it, you might want to consider getting them a portable player for Christmas.

Slacker is an excellent replacement for satellite radio music fans!

Have a great weekend!