Roseholme Cottage is hardly high tech central: I just got my first multicore processor last month and my roommate actually uses the telegraph keys she collects, for heaven's sake, but this article about the looming demise of the traditional TV business hit home.
We were just talking about ditching the dish: I only use it to watch MSNBC weekend mornings and she'll occasionally nap to the History Channel of a Sunday afternoon, but that's about it.
The local news comes in for free over the airwaves. Generally, if there was a series we got interested in we just bought it on DVD, like House, (or nowadays over the little Roku box, like Archer,) but as far as actually sitting around the television at a given hour to catch Who Wants To Dance With A Talented Survivor? Uh, nope.
So why did we still have it? Y'know, that was a good question...
No HBO?!?!? Game of Thrones, etc...
ReplyDeleteEvery year Comcast rudely informs me that the special I was on has expired and the TV portion of my bill is now going up 300%. I have made arrangments. Next time, in the Fall, instead of squawking and dickering I will go to that Roku box thingy.
ReplyDeleteThen, the only thing holding me to Comcast is the email address, and I've been easing offa that to gmail. So if they pump up my internet bill a switch to FiOS from Verizon will be easier.
If they had just kept my bill bad instead of occasionally gargantuan, inertia would have kept me in place as a ignernt customer.
I've been off the adstream more than a year. Best. Move. Ever.
ReplyDeleteNetflix etc to the rescue! Over the air channels with a DVR is far more than enough, now that my dependency has subsided. I couldn't handle the commercials, the popup commercials, the lousy shows, and the really bad condescending commercials. Did you know a 30 minute spot is only 22 minutes of show, and 60 minute is 42? And with the foreshadowing and the recapping taking up half again.... whew. Best. Move. Ever.
Should have figured you for an Archer fan...
ReplyDeleteOh, and to by stung by the whopping huge comcast bill every month, I mean man, I'm paying HOW much for all this crap? Felt like an idiot. The HD signal was unimaginably bad, so overcompressed it looked much worse than a DVD ripped to play on a flip phone. Bah, bad memories, good riddance.
ReplyDeleteIf husband didn't have this football fetish....
ReplyDeleteWe punted almost a year ago and really haven't missed it. Anything I want to see I can via streaming video.
ReplyDeleteWe've had great success using the local Carnegie/government library to access the interlibrary loan network of DVDs. The only downside is we have to wait in queue for new releases, but if we wanted to be mental slaves to the entertainment industry we wouldn't have given up our dish.
ReplyDeleteWatching TV series on DVD is golden. No fastforwarding through commercials! #firstworldproblems
Bought an $80 HDTV antenna for local broadcasts, but that is rarely used too, except for Saturday night's BBC lineup.
My 3rd grade kid knows how to find TV series on youtube, so hey, screw the broadcasters.
It isn't just TV and newspaper- it is the entire entertainment industry that is now a dinosaur.
ReplyDeleteAll kinds of content has gone digital: books, magazines, newspapers, movies, etc. This means that the big distribution networks of book publishing, movie studios, television networks and the like are no longer needed or efficient enough to maintain what has become a failing business model. That is why the big companies have been using government to try and maintain the obsolete industry.
They are trying everything from new Federal laws to large lawsuits, but in the end, the coming evolution of the entertainment industry is inevitable.
Commercials in general... yeah, we watch a certain amount of tv, but commercials make me generally glad I'm not obligated to buy a lot of what they're selling.
ReplyDeleteI haven't had commercial TV (cable/satellite/etc.) in years. Netflix or other downloads on my 17" HD laptop were good enough for me, and if I wanted guaranteed access to a movie or tv show, I would buy the DVD.
ReplyDeleteWith my recent TV upgrade from an old 26" SD CRT to a 42" LED HDTV, I shelled out the extra for a BlueRay player with built-in wifi and Netflix/Hulu/etc. apps, and that plus a $10 set of rabbit ears for local stuff are all I've needed.
I may consider a Roku box for the Amazon video capability, which my BlueRay player doesn't have, but I'm not sure I'd use that enough to justify the cost of the box.
Every year since we had a kid, someone gives us Amazon Prime. Cancelled Netflix when the price jumped, and the only local channel we ever got was when setting up the new TV...it came up once, and never could get it again. So DVDs and Amazon streaming is all we ever use. Don't miss it a bit.
ReplyDeleteMy son is an absolute believer in Netflix, but streaming a 2 hour movie on our internet access system would probably take just under a month to load. Our 'high speed' interweb service is actually slower than the old dial-up.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to rural America.
I'm no fan of Direct TV, but it is more accessible than the nearest 'good' library which is over 40 miles away.
But I do enjoy GAME OF THRONES and MAGIC CITY on the tube. However even with 500 channels it is a struggle most evenings to find something 'entertaining'...
All The Best,
Frank W. James
Tam, there has to be a better healthier way to get your heart rate and blood pressure up of a weekend morning than watching MSNBC.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't your yelling at the teewee bother the neighbors?
I was just mentioning the idea to my wife of putting away the TV antenna for the summer, since there is only one broadcast TV show that we watch (Castle) and it's not running new episodes over the summer. If I can figure out how to watch it on ABC's website on my internet-connected TV or the Wii, we'll dump the antenna altogether. I refuse to watch local TV news anymore. It makes me sick, it's always either reporting a crime or a crash or something stupid I don't care anything about, or they're running some moronic hysterical report about deadly dihydrogen-monoxide contaminating our water supply.
ReplyDeleteWe punted the Telephone land-line since we never got the dish in the first place. Tivo grabs the old episodes of Combat! that pop-up at 2:00AM on the free broadcast retro channel.
ReplyDelete*sigh* This started with the end of the Lawrence Welk show.
ReplyDeleteLawrence Welk was hugely successful with their audience, but the over-60 crowd didn't generate advertising dollars (Geritol could only afford so much, and it didn't compare to competing program ad revenues). So despite impressive and sustained audience ratings, the show was canceled. Millions of Star Trek fans cheered; we were tired of having to put up with our folks dragging us into the living room for that old fogey stuff.
But it was the beginning of the end of TV. And I miss My Favorite Martian, too. And The Real McCoys. And Marcus Welby and even Nash Bridges. And All In The Family. Those were the days.
I recommend devices like Roku or the older Western Digital Live Plus (hackable at http://wiki.wdlxtv.com/Main_Page). For broadcast TV I'm going to get a HDHomeRun, in the meantime I watch (Swamp People/etc) on work trips and over at my friends house.
ReplyDeleteAt this point, if you don't watch live sports, there's no reason to have live TV. We've been on the Roku for over a year now, and the only time I've regretted it is this year when the 'Yotes went deep into the Cup Finals.
ReplyDeleteGonna have to take a gander at this "Roku" thingy. I will occasionally watch some "Pawn Stars" (they buy gunz!) and "American Pickers", but that's about it. Did manage to DVR the HBO "Hatfields & McCoys" over the Memorial weekend, but other than that, its pretty much set on Disney Junior. And our munchkin just likes it on for background noise, as she's usually found bugging Mom or Dad or generally getting in trouble elsewhere, rather than watching "Good Luck, Charlie". 1000 channels, and there's never anything on. Why are we paying for this, again?
ReplyDeleteI keep tryig this. Never works, but once again -
ReplyDeleteUsenet , especially "alt.binaries.teevee"
Your internet provider may have a small (3 day) server for free, if so test with it: then GigaNews (15 month) or other paid service
Tip: down load of "groups" list is HUGE. Easy, delete all but alt.binary.* then select what looks interesting.
Most shows that are at all worth watching show up about three hours after broadcast.
The gals and I are just using rabbit ears out here in farm country... that keeps my male-dominating clicker controlling down to surfing 32 channels... although we stream a lot of vid over the DSL...
ReplyDeleteDann in Ohio