Dear Mr. Dolan,
Your vision was brave and beuatiful. Because of you, I've enjoyed a year filled with television the way it *should* be in the twenty-first century.
With network affiliates multicasting in some ill-conceived desire to degrade their product so that it looks just as bad as what we get from a second-rate cable or satellite provider, you alone took the opposite tack and poured all of your resources into crystal clear high-definition feeds.
My local PBS station splits their digital bandwidth between *four* channels. Thanks to you, and the PBS-derived content on EquatorHD and Rave, I get to actually see shows like Smart Travels and Soundstage the way they were meant to be seen.
I love Voom's content. Voom has raised the bar as far as how many HD channels a satellite provider can offer. And while I know Voom hasn't been cheap to fund, I think the programming Voom has acquired for its service is remarkable in its value and diversity.
I don't know what'll happen to Voom in the future. Every day seems to bring new hyperbole about the status of the service. Is it going under? Will it be expanded? Will our boxes just go dark some morning? I've decided I don't care. Or more precisely, I've decided not to think much about it. It's nothing I can control. Instead, I choose to revel in my Voom while it lasts.
I do have one small request, if I may be so bold: Could you ask whoever handles Rave to play some more videos? I was born in the early 1970s, and spent my formative years in the age of MTV, back when MTV actually played videos. As such, they're a personal favorite of mine. And while watching the same concert twice is as dull as watching paint dry, seeing a video two or three times in a day isn't bad at all.
HDTV is worth the fight. I pray that the greedy mediocrity of innumerable low-quality, standard definition channels doesn't win the war for the souls of our nation's television sets. If quality wins out, we'll have Voom to thank for it.
Sincerely,
Jared Kendall
jedkendall@aol.com