Recently I realized that the all the television I’ve watched this fall has consisted of: Local on the 8’s a few times a week, Dennis Kucinich emptying his pockets on the Colbert Report, my kids singing the Spongebob Squarepants theme to wake me up one Saturday, a cool show on extrasolar planets, and a few instances of random channel flipping. I’ve heard that the average American watches 6 hours of TV a day, but I don’t see how that’s even possible.
It’s gotten to the point where I generally find TV difficult to watch, largely because of the constant interruption of commercials. I always mute the ads, but even so. More an more they go for disturbing, just to get me to buy things I don’t want. It’s like thought control from a Kurt Vonnegut story. It used to be when I was a kid there were 4 ad breaks an hour, totaling about 10 minutes an hour. Now it’s about 50-50 each of show and ads. It makes is hard to tolerate even if a show is good, and most of the shows out there are not. And with cable it’s even worse than regular TV. You’re paying twice to watch the show, cuz you’re paying for the channels and then you pay again by being shown ads.
I’ve been wanting to get rid of cable for a long time. For a few years we were getting our internet via cable in a bundle, so to drop cable wouldn’t’ve saved much money, but now we’re getting our internet thru the phone company via fiber. And the cable company just raised our rates to $650 a year! I’d go for a system where I could pay for just the channels or show I like, but the industry is too greedy to allow that sort of thing and they want me to support hundreds of channels I don’t like, so goodbye.
Plus we have NetFlix and a pretty good shelf of DVD’s so we can watch what we choose without ads pretty easily. I tend to like movies and documentaries. One thing I want to do this fall and winter is watch the entire (13 hour long) Lord of the Rings trilogy. I started in September and now it’s mid-December and I’m halfway thru The Two Towers. So I’m doing pretty good.
Now we’re back to plain old TV with rabbit ears. Have to figure out how to get the weather report from the internet or the radio or regular TV. Other than that I don’t miss it. I haven’t even seen how the channels come in yet. Our house never had a roof antenna but I might look into getting one if we need to. Meanwhile, I can take the $650 I saved and look into buying a drum set!