People have been complaining about cable* TV since what seems like forever. We are no longer surprised at the fact that The Travel Channel seems to be mostly about poker and the paranormal, and we are resigned to the fact that SyFy, similarly fixated on the paranormal and supernatural rarely airs anything in prime-time that could really be called sci-fi (which was, of course, why they changed their name). The Learning Channel has now been The Labor Channel for years; AE has dropped the full spellings out of their names so they wouldn’t feel obligated to provide arts, or entertainment. I don’t think the History Channel can even be called the Hitler Channel anymore, because that would require them to show actual history programming. And NatGeo seems to have mostly gone in for the likes of Doomsday Preppers.
For a scandalously high satellite bill, we figure about half the content offered to us is sports, in which we have zero interest, and most of the rest is reality programming, shopping channels, or infomercials. We have HBO, but except for series like True Blood, it’s hardly any better than the “free” channels. They mostly show movies that are ten or twenty years old and have already been on ad nauseam. And the other “premium” channels are just as bad. (The whole point of movie channels used to be that you’d get to see recent movies without having to pay any more beyond the price of the subscription. All this has been bad enough for as long as I can remember, but it seems to have gotten so much worse in the past two or three months.
If you have HBO On Demand, you can watch all or most of old but excellent HBO shows you may have missed – The Sopranos, Deadwood, Carnivale, The Wire, Six Feet Under, etc.
I agree that Pay TV’s movie selection isn’t very good. We just reinstalled DirecTV because we finally got an HD set and our cable company doesn’t have HD capability. DTV offers all the movie channels free for three months. I was momentarily excited, but it was disappointing to look through 30-40 selections and not find anything I wanted to see.
If you want to see good movies, the answer is streaming.
Unfortunately we still only have analog TVs, although I think there must be a way to get streamed content into the set-top box then to the TV. Other than that, we do have DVR, which is needed to enable video on demand. We’ve already watched most of the shows you mentioned.
As for streaming, I’m sure it will soon be something we resort to a good deal, as soon as we upgrade our TVs or otherwise work around the technical issues. But it’s sad that our TVs seem to have become little more than playback devices. Sometimes you want to be able to turn on the TV and watch something, rather than always being on hunt for more and more recorded content.
Color me confused (and technologically deficient). How are you getting all those channels --SyFy and History and Travel, etc.? You’re getting them with just an antenna? No digital signal?
No, we do have a digital signal, because we have DirecTV. The set-top box does the necessary reformatting from digital to analog. Additionally a second input line comes from our broadband cable modem to support video-on-demand. I’m pretty sure that in order to use Netflix and similar services, we’d have to get an xBox or similar gaming console just to support Netflix–which isn’t to say it’s absolutely a deal breaker, but it’s still a hassle.
That’s what I used before I got DirecTV. Amazon had the basic Roku on sale awhile back for $40.
That might not work for Spectre though, since he has a DirecTV receiver on an older TV set. I had to give up the Roku because the DTV Genie uses the inputs previously used for the Roku.
If he didn’t have DirecTV and if he had WiFi, Roku would be a great option. I’m really going to miss the Roku. I can still stream on the HD set using the wireless Blu-Ray player, but the Roku was much faster and easier to use.
I’ve gave up on so-called pay tv years ago because I got tired of paying twice (a monthly bill PLUS plenty of commercials on most channels). Now I read up on what’s good and download it via iTunes for about $20 per season for SD or $30 for HD. I fill in the gaps with some light fare from netflix. Sure beats the heck out of a $1200 a year cable bill.
Getting rid of DirecTV would almost certainly be part of the plan. But deciding to cut the cord is difficult–as I understand things, this would mean losing all access to broadcast TV, which would then make my set just a dedicated playback device. I know, news on the TV is pretty much a wasteland, but sometimes I do want to tune in to watch news about something major currently going on. Ideally, there’d be a solution that lets me use one or more of the alternate content providers suggested upthread, but also provides some access to local channels.
Where do you live, the moon? A $15 antenna will probably work fine if you’re near a city, but there are stronger models that’ll work if you live out in the boonies.
I’ve found that since the switch to digital those $15 antennas work like crap, and I’m very much near a city. In the analog days a middling signal would give you a fuzzy picture. Today a middling signal gives you a [NO SIGNAL] box on screen.
If you’re just planning on using a cheap antenna on a secondary set like in the kitchen or something, it might be okay, but for your primary viewing, you’re really gonna want to go for something better.
Cable companies usually have some really cheap ultra basic plan (mainly just the locals, public access, and maybe a home shopping or sports channel or two) that might be a better option for some people than putting up a big antenna.
Unfortunately, this is quite true. What would have been a slight bit of static before, now causes the audio to drop and the picture to break up. Anything less than optimum signal can make a show nearly-unwatchable.
Really, it makes you wonder why this is considered an advancement. From the customer’s perspective, I’m still trying to find an upside to the switch.
I get so much good stuff between Netflix and Hulu, and they both stream beautifully from my Wii, which I haven’t touched in ages for actual games. You can get a used Wii from Gamestop for $80 by the way, no hassle and totally worth it for the streaming alone
Broadcast TV over antenna really, really depends on where you live. I live 20 miles from Cleveland and get clear-as-a-bell digital television on a $20 antenna. I don’t know if the model of the antenna makes a difference or not. My only issue is that I don’t get PBS as well in the summer when all the trees have leaves
You can also mount an antenna outside the house, on the roof, for better reception.
If you have an analog TV you can hook an antenna up to the converter box. You also can plug a computer into the TV as long as you have the right cables (which you can find at monoprice.com) I had a cheap computer hooked up to my television for years before HDMI was common, going S-video out with RCA audio. Once you do that, you can watch anything you want on your TV.
Near the city, but not in it, in my case. There are just too many utility poles and overhead cables in L.A. I’ve never seen a TV work well with an aerial, except way back in the day, pre-CATV, when homeowners in the canyons would set up aerials on the hillsides, high above their houses. The line from the antenna to the house could be 100 feet long or more. Even those didn’t work that great; pretty much everyone had CATV by the early 1970s. Back then you got cable for the reception, not the programming content, with a couple of exceptions. For the first time ever, you could watch KCET without it looking like a blizzard, and then, not long after, the first dedicated movie channels made their appearance.
There’s a lot of good stuff, but the bad stuff is truly, spectacularly bad–as opposed to a vasty wasteland of mediocrity that TV used to be, with rare gems here and there. And I’d say there’s more bad than good. I try to focus on the good stuff, m’self.
