It's been happening for the past couple of years for me- my desire and patience with television has been wearing thin, and I can say with some certainty that it's because of the internet.
I want to watch only a few specific programs, however I find myself scheduling my life around when they're on (which is impractical and downright foolish), and when I do get to it, I get wonderful commercial breaks which lately have prompted me to get up and leave. I don't have time and patience for this. I don't like that I'm paying a monthly bill to get cable television shows that feature about 1/3 of the program time as advertising, and I'd say ~90% of shows that just don't appeal to me.
But I have the internet. Whatever show I want, whenever I want it, and usually higher resolution than the shitty 480i were given on basic cable. I can find essentially everything fast, free, and high quality by a quick google search or a couple invites to a forum. Sometimes it involves a download of something, but even with the amount of media on youtube, you can usually just stream whatever, whenever, and be done with it. Also, no commercial interruptions every 8 minutes.
So here's what I'm leaving the content providers with: cheaper service/pay as you watch, less commercials, and a full menu of all the possible content whenever I want it. Other than that, as my television viewing decreases more and more, I'll probably fall off the bandwagon and give up on it all entirely and they lose a customer. I don't care about their profits and earnings, maybe it's time they took a cut in salary and these actors got paid something reasonable instead of raping our wallets. Just my two cents.
I used to not watch so many television shows because the airing times did not fit into my schedule. It is so much more convenient that these shows are now available online whenever I have the time to watch them. It enables me to be able to continue to watch my favorite television shows even with my busy schedule. I think this may cause TV ratings to decrease since the majority of society is aware that they can just watch the television shows online. On the other hand, the number of households that are using DVR has recently increased a lot over the last two years.
ReplyDeleteThis blog post relates a lot to my blog post except it has the opposite opinion. Traditional Television has died off because of the Internet and so has newspapers. I agree with you that television has become boring and most people would rather read the article on the Internet. However, would you still read information in newspapers if it became available quicker and more convenient? The reason I am wondering is because my blog post contained an attitude that supported the print media and newspapers. I am wondering if you would rather read the in-depth article in the newspaper rather than watching a 60 second news clip. I know that Professor Proctor told us to focus on one side (either newspaper or TV), but I am just curious if newspapers are boring to you.
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