NASA TV unavailable during US gov. shutdown

[Donovan's Monkey]

If there's anyone out there besides me who receives NASA TV on their service and ever actually watches it, you may have noticed this today.


http://www.space.com/23019-governmen...stronauts.html

"Due to the lapse in government funding NASA Television will be unavailable to the Public, News Organizations, Satellite Service Providers and Cable Television Distributors.

In addition, the NASA television feeds from www.nasa.gov also will be unavailable until further notice.

We sincerely regret this inconvenience."

[Randi]

Wow, drastic. Any other channel are owned by the government that are like this?

[Donovan's Monkey]

It's back on now.
I don't know of any other TV channels that were shut down. Articles and the late night talk shows mentioned a webcam showing giant pandas.

[Donovan's Monkey]

While this channel did return after the U.S. government shutdown, the quantity of programming was reduced to the point that I doubt anyone could justify it taking up a channel position on a cable/satellite/IPTV provider. It was borderline before the shutdown, but now there just seems to be the same hour of stuff repeated over and over again for weeks at a time. For the last three weeks, they just seem to keep repeating an automated robot rover competition between colleges, followed by the same series of items a few minutes long. Other than that, there's not much except a weekday half-hour thing about the International Space Station, and "This Week At Nasa" which has been reduced to only about three minutes in length, and live special event coverage (launches, landings, space walks, and press conferences) only on the rare and sporadic occasions when they occur.

You'd think, as before the shutdown, they could at least make an effort to show a less repetitive schedule of their archived programming (even though that was somewhat limited), but now it seems they can't be bothered, and should really stop trying to be a 24-hour TV channel. The website would still stream the live events.
http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv