Comments about ‘How Nickelodeon’s new iPad app tries to tie families to cable TV’

A little parenting is all it takes to keep the sky from falling.

[Nickelodeon designed its first app as a noisy, colorful smorgasbord of animated clips, irreverent music videos and the occasional deluge of the network’s trademark green slime.]

This is exactly what they did for their "Nickelodeon Online" channel/application on AOL nearly 15 years ago. It was a "zany smorgasbord" of stuff.

And as for tying consumers to cable subscriptions, that's what HBO has been doing for a couple years now with HBO Go.

So a cable TV station has an app that allows cable TV subscribers to watch TV on electronic devices other than the TV - and a very poorly written headline (and possibly the accompanying article, which is also poorly written and never actually addresses the points raised in the headline - which is not unusual for this paper. Do the people who write the headlines even read the articles?) tries to convince us this is a bad thing instead of just a "duh" thing.

As a technology story - cable TV becoming available on electronic devices other than TV's - it might have merit and interest.

But to bemoan the fact that you still have to have a subscription to a subscription service in order to access the subscription service, is rather ridiculous. Of course you must have a subscription to access a subscription service. Why would the method of access change that?