Summary: FEARnet, which I first experienced as an On Demand way to watch a number of ok horror movies, has been shutdown by Comcast. And Laird Barron has an audiobok coming out of my favorite collection by him.
FEARnet has gone dark, but...in better news, Laird Barron's Occultation And Other Stories is getting an audiobook treatment
BLOT: (01 Aug 2014 - 03:26:38 PM)
FEARnet has gone dark, but...in better news, Laird Barron's Occultation And Other Stories is getting an audiobook treatment
My first run in with FEARnet would have been...gosh...five or six years ago? We had, briefly, digital cable and it was in the On Demand section. It was a neat way to watch horror movies back then, before streaming movies were readily available on a broader platform, and I enjoyed catching up with a few series.
After we lost digital cable—and by "lost" I mean "grew tired of"—I would still catch the occasional movie online, though FEARnet's website (and why not FEAR.net, I don't know) become a lesser experience over time as the layout grew more confusing and, more importantly, the selection dropped. Since I did not have cable, I never got to see it as a channel, but I heard good things.
All for naught, though, since Comcast NBCUniversal has decided to shelve the entire FEARnet package in favor its Chiller network. And by "entire package", I mean everything including the website. You have to read that news on the Wayback Machine. That's ice cold. But, to quote:
You may or may not know this, but as of July 30th, FEARNET will shut its doors forever. In April, Comcast NBCUniversal bought out FEARNET. Because NBCUniversal already has Chiller and Syfy, it was decided that FEARNET was redundant. Most of the staff was laid off then, with a skeleton crew kept around to help with the transition.
There is also a bit in that article about they did it for the horror—*fist bump*—and how there is some confusion about why they didn't absorb the FEARnet team into the Chiller team. Confusion with which I agree. For FEARnet's ups and downs, they seem to have had a better grasp of the genre than Chiller. I realize that with things like Netflix making the On Demand portion of horror movie availability redundant, there may not be room for multiples, but surely amping up Chiller's ability to compete should have been a priority. Ah well, greater minds than I, as they say...
Just so this is not all doom and gloom, I did happen to find one bright spot in the world of horror and horror-like accessories that I found why trying to see where in the hell Wayne June's
The Audiobook is coming out on August 5, 2014. If you don't want to wait, then you can pick up the ebook at baenebooks.com for $6.00. Other ebook stores possibly have it—I know Amazon does—so you can hit them up as well.
OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: August 2014
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