Big Brother live feeds started yesterday. There will be lots of stuff happening in anticipation of the Season 16 premiere on June 25, so you might as well sign up now! Plus, you get a discount if you do it before the season begins:
Big Brother Live Feeds Early-Bird offer now available – Save 20%!
I’m going to subscribe to the live feeds this year. As awful as the contestants were in the house last summer, I still kinda got hooked on the show. Believe it or not, I had never watched an episode. Besides the concept of douchebags living together, I didn’t realize there was real game play involved. I get why some people get addicted.
What surprised me the most about Big Brother was that it still hadn’t made the switch to High Definition. BB was the only regularly scheduled primetime program still shown in standard definition, but no longer! According to Vulture, the series will finally go HD this year.
Why did it take so long? It was a very complicated project:
In order to capture all that backstabbing and Game of Thrones–worthy maneuvering, the Big Brother house is packed with dozens of cameras — fixed and robotic, inside and outside — which collectively record thousands of hours of footage each week. Doing all of this with traditional SD cameras has always been a massive undertaking; transitioning the process from analog to digital required an equally monumental (and costly) effort. “It’s not just about swapping out cameras,” explains Rich Meehan, who exec-produces Brother alongside Grodner. “Everything had to be changed … and we couldn’t do anything that would jeopardize production of the series.”
Indeed, it turns out that CBS and the producers actually made the decision to go HD more than three years ago. But the changes to the show’s production infrastructure needed to make the leap were so complex, they had to be rolled out in waves. A new digital post-production system needed to be built, installed, and tested. Per Grodner, “14 miles of HD cables” had to replace the old wiring that had run through the house. And finally, in the last phase of the remodel, new cameras had to be installed and made to work with the new digital central nervous system of the house. “We only had six months at a time to do [the changes],” says Brother engineering-operations supervisor David Crivelli. “We had to do a heart transplant,” even as the “patient” — the Big Brother broadcasts each summer — continued to pump out new episodes.
I’m looking for folks who are interested in live blogging the show. Steven has volunteered to cover the live feeds, but as always, the more the merrier! If you are interested in blogging Big Brother, email me at mjsbigblog@gmail.com.
Big Brother 16 premieres on June 25 at 8/7c on CBS.
