Our 2 year obligation (but not a contract somehow) to Scumcast runs out in July. I’ve been looking at alternatives for some time. And I’m finding out that all alternatives to a cable subscription all have the same problem: THEY’RE STILL CENTERED ON TV. This means that in order to watch the shows YOU want, you have to take a whole bunch of channels filled with shows you DON’T want.
My wife sent me an article about Hulu soon offering live TV. It seems to be heavily centered around CBS, home of shows like NCIS and Big Bang Theory. Well, give me NCIS, and keep Big Bang Theory. Never watched it; and I never plan to. I’ve seen a few clips of it, which made me roll my eyes and leave the room.
And of course, you get ESPN. Never watched it. I don’t give two shits about sports. I’ve tried; I can’t get into it. Plus, as Vox Day has so well documented, ESPN and the NFL are pretty much sold out to SJWism and are going to die eventually.
I looked at a few other packages, such as Playstation Vue. Same thing. It’s all about packages of channels, just like shitty Comcast that I want to leave.
I’ll let you in on why. When I broke down and got a flat screen TV a couple years ago, I decided we wanted HD. It made no sense to not use the full screen of the new TV. $10 more a month for an HD cable box. But then, they wanted to sell us “Triple Play”. There is no freaking way to NOT have the stupid phone line. I never use it, but I have to pay for it. Then we got the “X1 Entertainment Operating System” because we wanted a DVR. I thought we had all the channels, even though we barely watch 20 of them between us. Nope, somehow we still had a limited package. And they started taking channels away from us, rolling them into higher priced packages.
We like to watch Bar Rescue. One day, Bar Rescue stopped showing up on the DVR. Spike wouldn’t show. My wife called. Now, Spike is in a higher priced package. We can get it back if we want to pay more. They’ve done that with a few other channels we like. And we seeth with rage; vowing that come July, Scumcast will be no more in our household.
That brings us back to the problem. Everything is centered around CHANNELS. Why don’t we have a paradigm built on SHOWS? I don’t care about the channels. SYFY has some shows I like, and many I don’t care about. Why can’t I just get the shows I want and scrap the rest?
My wife still watches TV. I haven’t used it in well over a year. I get my entertainment through Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, and if I can’t get a show I want that way, I have a few other alternatives…
Then there are commercials. Few, if any, are relevant to me. Most are annoying and patronizing and I work very hard to not have to watch a commercial. And even those that are relevant, entertaining, and informative, I only need to watch once.
We definitely need to change the way we create and watch our entertainment. Since there’s a big movement in alt-tech, let’s hope we get some alt-entertainment that is out of the mainstream.
