Television. Where do you get your content?
OK, call me old fashioned or just old, both are probably true. I’m one of those rare birds who still gets his television content solely via the free airwaves. One day about a decade ago, I realized something profound. I was coming home after a long day working for Sears Home Service and falling asleep in my recliner in front of the television. I had cable TV at the time. I calculated that it was costing me about $1.75/day to come home and sleep for those two hours in front of the TV each evening. I canceled the cable the next day.
Ever since then, I’ve been watching broadcast television only. I don’t really feel I’ve missed much. There are some channels that I did miss from cable, like AMC and Turner Movie Classics. Other than those two and a few more, I never cried many tears over the loss. I had about $52 extra in my pocket every month, too.
Sadly, most of the folks I know these days would probably shed some real tears if you took their cable or sat TV away from them. They’re seemingly addicted to it. Oddly enough, if you sit and watch TV with them, they never stay on one program more than five minutes. The CH Up and CH Dn buttons on their remotes have all the printing worn off of them.
People have the attention spans of gnats on crank nowadays. What’s up with that? I remember as a kid sitting for hours at a time watching television programs with mom and dad. How did we do it? I’ll tell you how. We had good acting. We had interesting and entertaining programs. It must be a sign that I’m getting old when I enjoy the “retro” programing more than the current day programing.
HA! What current day programing? You have reality (mostly staged, fake feces) programing. You have prime time soaps. You have medical/crime/police programs. You don’t have any decent movies. You don’t have any worthwhile news programing. Walt C. and Ed Murrow are long gone, folks. Now BIG Pharma and the Dems/Repubs sponsor the news programs on broadcast TV. I watch The News Hour on PBS. It’s not so blatantly biased.
Ah well, my world is moving on, it seems. I guess I’ll go watch Peter Gunn. Later this morning, I’ll catch Daniel Boone, too.
Until next time…
~Eric
Note: This article originally appeared on my Nocturnal Slacker/Lockergnome blog (now defunct).
Nocturnal Slacker v2.0 
We don’t pay for ‘programming’ either. 😉
It sits wrong with us. We already have to endure the commercials and they still want us to pay again!?!
Used to be you ‘paid’ for your free television by having to endure, errr, watching commercials. Now you still have to endure that, plus they want you to pay for the privilege again on top of what the advertisers already paid!
Now they say we are paying for the service, but the networks get paid once from the advertisers and again from the cable/satellite providers, and then we end up having to pay them.
There is something seriously wrong with that.
So, we get free digital television these days and refuse to pay for the rest. Course we rarely ever watch it anyway. We watch DVDs instead. No commercials.
If I could get unlimited cable/wired Internet, we would likely get some of the shows we enjoy with commercials from Hulu for free, or more of the ones we like by signing up for Hulu. And watch others on SyFy that we like.
But to tell you the truth. Commercial television leaves me cold. I really don’t think there’s much current that I would be willing to even sit through. Reruns from when I was a teen or when my kids were growing up…well, maybe.
I watch a lot of PBS (Tampa has two PBS stations w/ 4-5 substations. It’s pretty cool. I also watch a retro movie channel (This TV) and a another retro channel called MeTV. As a matter of fact, I just finished watching an episode of Bonanza and an episode of Big Valley. Kokak is currently on. My TV is usually not even on, but since I was given a hand-me-down 36″ RCA behemoth last night, I figured I’ll watch the darn thing for a bit. DAMN! This is a big TV. 😉
I like the idea of TV on demand. I don’t have time for their schedules.
My problem with TV on demand is that I would rarely ever demand any. 😉