A series broadcast by Sci Fi Channel from the channel's creation in 1992 until the end of 1996. It consisted of a series of short fake newscasts from 150 years in the future to the day they aired, airing every weekday throughout the year, repeated throughout the day and rerun on weekends. The clips were originally 30 seconds long, but returned in 60-second format after a 3-month hiatus in the middle of 1993, and stayed that way until it ended its run. The series was co-written by veteran sci-fi writers Matthew Costello and F. Paul Wilson. Only about half the episodes are available on YouTube, but transcripts of all of them are available at the FTL Newsfeed Wiki
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Tropes:
- Capture and Replicate: One story arc is about the NAU president being kidnapped and replaced by a clone.
- Expendable Clone: Clones are officially considered not people, although there is a burgeoning clone rights movement.
- Fun with Acronyms: SHIVA, the Society for Heuristic Investigation of Virtual Anomalies. There's also a nerd fanclub called FLAKE: Fans of Lovecraft, Asimov, King, and Extraterrestrials.
- Future Food Is Artificial: Something called Textured Fungal Protein can be used to create reasonable imitations of common foods.
- Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: The AI running CenBank becomes sentient and even gets its own human body.
- No Name Given: The show's anchor.
- Space-Filling Empire: The world is divided into a half-dozen economic combines:
- North American Union: union of US and Canada. Capital: Chicago.
- European Community: stretches from Ireland to Russia. Capital: Brussels.
- New Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere: all Pacific Rim and East Asia nations except for Australia. Capital: Singapore.
- Holy Islamic Federation: formed by Middle Eastern Islamic nations and exerts loose control over all of Africa. Capital: Cairo.
- Hispanic Commonwealth: Central and South America. Capital: Bogota.
- Fortress Israel: pretty much the same as today, except surrounded by a unified Islamic state. Capital: Jerusalem.
- There's also India, but no super-state wants it.
- Suddenly Significant City: Chicago is the capital of the North American Union.
- We Will Use WikiWords in the Future: The world's central bank is called CenBank. Also, 20th century 2-dimensional videos are called flatvids.
