Now, don’t get me wrong . . . it’s mildly entertaining, but it’s just terrible.
I “cut the cord” years ago, and watch either over-the-air HDTV, or stream. Right now, I’m on business travel, killing time watching a channel that has “Travel” in it’s title, but appears to be nothing but ghosts/UFOs/etc. Right now it’s a show called “Paranormal on Camera,” seemingly an hour-long mashup of shaky, cellphone videos of ‘orb ghosts,’ and lights in the sky. Think a spooky version of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” with lots of prepositions of “could be a ghost” or “might be a werewolf.”
I reckoned that a ‘Travel’ channel would have more along video tours of Greece, Africa, etc. Hell, I thought the “Channel of History” would have something on vikings, the Aztec empire, or Qin-era terra cotta statue tombs–nope, it’s the hairswept combover “Ancient Aliens” guy pontificating that “if aliens built the pyramids, they could have been built with flying technology. . .”
I’m glad I’m not paying $99.95/month for 50 channels of this crap.
Oh well. I’ll watch some ghost videos and yak with you guys until Rick Steves comes on in an hour.
Yeah, I still have a subscription to Sling which is just an app for a DishTV cable channel and I use it to watch things like CNN or old movies when I dont want to think too much. But yes, I think I’m going to drop it because its like going back in time to the late 90s and not much bang for the buck.
well with the travel channel they haven’t been able to have anything new on traveling… although this is the same travel channel that became the “texas hold 'em poker” channel for a few years Also discovery owns them so there’s a lot of recycling of one channel to another …
and yeah I remember when there was mostly actual history on the history channel … i mean they have some interesting things on pawn stars and the pickers but I miss a good old show on when the Romans stomped the Huns …
I fully concur. I have never had cable TV in this house in the nearly decade I’ve lived here. I’m way out in the burbs but we’re at a fairly high elevation and I get all the on-air HD channels I need with a small outdoor UHF antenna. I rarely watch broadcast television anyway but the antenna is zero ongoing cost.
TV is evil any way.
I pay for DISH network. Lots and lots of stuff the kids like.
We can’t stream out here. Internet is too shaky/weak or however you call it.
PBS, TCM and a few other channels are my best friends when I’m house bound.
Back on the road again this week, and I see your point @kenobi_65 . It’s "Mysteries at the Museum’ which has a tangential link to “local”** museums.
Yeah, with the new Discourse interface, the double asterisk is added just for comical effect. These episodes are a couple of years old, filmed in ‘stock footage “museums”’. There are embedded quotation marks there. . .
We cut the cable a little over two years ago, though in fairness we also added some streaming channels, so it’s not like we are fully cable free…we’re just cable-package free.
Actually, that’s not even 100% true. We do subscribe to something called basic/reception cable that’s $13.99 a month… we could use an antenna instead, but because we have subscribe to some form of cable, we get a $10 discount off our Internet.
Yeah real world happened right when the music companies decided videos weren’t worth hassle or money to the point that only the hip hop/rap which moved to bet and such made them regularly and after trl and the specific shows like headbangers ball etc died
I miss shows like Headbanger’s Ball! That and Beavis and Butthead were my “summer staples” as I got home at 2AM from working at my paint store/fast-food joint double header summer jobs.
Tripler
Some good memories from cable TV, but now they’re just memories.
One can argue that MTV’s pivot to scripted shows was quite brilliant. It wasn’t long after that when YouTube became a phenomenon. No music video heavy cable TV channel would have really survived after that.
You may not remember how much time passed between the two. MTV launched The Real World in 1992, and the 1994 season in San Francisco was what really made it a phenomenon. YouTube wasn’t even launched until 2005.
While it may be true that a music video channel wouldn’t have been able to compete with YouTube, MTV had largely abandoned music videos long before YouTube was a thing.
That was just the first scripted show though. MTV had a ton of music videos during the 90s. Total Request Live, which counted down the top music videos of the day, started in 1998, for example.
I read an article once about MTV and the CEO said something about how their audience ages out every so often. So they constantly have to appeal to a new group of kids.
@Tripler I 100% agree with you, and since I became a bill-paying adult (in the USA), I opted to never pay for cable TV. I figured I had a better use for this money and time.
Money: not going with comcast saved $1000 per year initially, which I used to pay for broadband internet and a new PC every few years.
Time: well, spent doing internet stuff and gaming. But at least the internet is interactive, compared to watching bland or silly stuff on TV.
Ah, TV… has anyone here noticed that, when you turn the sound off, the TV experience seems to go up by several IQ points? You can actually focus on what’s being shown (I find), and try to interpret things, rather than being fed bad, stream-of-consciousness type narrations.
