美国国家公共电台 NPR Gather 'Round The Screen To Enjoy The Warmth Of The Streaming Yule Log（在线收听）

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Over the past 50 years, one of the most widely recognized holiday TV programs has been the WPIX "Yule Log." In case you're unfamiliar, it has no actors and no plot. It is a seven-minute looped video of a crackling fire. Now the "Yule Log" has been reinvented for the age of streamed videos. Oliver Whang reports.

OLIVER WHANG, BYLINE: Mitch Thrower recalls that in 1966, his late father, Fred, president of the independent New York City television station WPIX, was watching a Coca-Cola commercial with his wife when he had an idea.

MITCH THROWER: I think Santa was there, and there was a fireplace. And he said, oh my. Oh my, have I got an idea.

WHANG: There was a three-hour hole in the Christmas Eve programming on WPIX that year, and Thrower's idea was that they might fill the time with a looped video of a fire uninterrupted by commercials.

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UNIDENTIFIED TV ANNOUNCER: The WPIX "Yule Log."

WHANG: It was the start of an annual tradition on WPIX.

LAWRENCE ARCURI: Virtual fireplaces - I mean, this is the ultimate one. This was the granddaddy of them all. I mean, this - there's nothing before this.

WHANG: Lawrence Arcuri owns a fan site for the original "Yule Log." He says that after the program's surprise success, ratings declined over the years. It was canceled in 1990. But WPIX brought it back in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Ratings rebounded in a spectacular way. Mitch Thrower.

THROWER: There's something very special about the fact that you're watching the same burning fireplace that someone else is. I think it was, I think, a statement beyond just, you know, a burning fireplace on TV of, you know, us kind of being a connected society.

WHANG: Millions of people would tune in every year. And then in 2008, George Ford was watching and wondered why the fire hadn't been adapted to widescreen HD televisions and why it couldn't be filmed in one shot without any loops.

GEORGE FORD: I decided, hey, you know what? I'm going to challenge myself and make the best fireplace anyone has ever seen.

WHANG: Ford had no prior video-making experience, but two years, 200 fires and $35,000 later, in 2010, he got what he was looking for, a fire that burned perfectly for an hour. He called it "Fireplace For Your Home" and sent it out to some local television stations.

FORD: I'm kind of the dreamer type, so I always thought, hey, this could be big. This could be big.

WHANG: But what Ford didn't realize was just how big streaming platforms were about to become. So when Netflix asked if they could include his video on their budding streaming service, he wasn't quite sure what to expect. But...

FORD: It went crazy. And the next thing I knew, it was just everywhere. People just had never seen a fireplace that was made like that.

WHANG: "Fireplace For Your Home" is now consistently one of the most popular videos for Netflix's 160 million subscribers, a perfect fire on demand. Millions watch it every day, just as they did Fred Thrower's "Yule Log." It appears a new age of virtual fireplace has begun.

For NPR News, I'm Oliver Whang.

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