Good riddance. I cut the cord about a year and a half ago and replaced my cable box with a Roku box. There was a brief period where I missed the background noise but now I find broadcast/cable television unbearably grating. Frankly I think the cable companies brought it upon themselves with the constant loud commercial interruptions, the garbage programming, and the utterly miserable cable box interfaces.
I'm in the same position. I cut the cord five years ago and have just been using Apple TV for Netflix.
TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying. When I'm visiting my family I just have to turn off the TV, it's impossible to concentrate on conversation otherwise.
> TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying.
The worst part is that TV ads are a major part of shared culture. People watch many different channels and many different shows, but the large ad campaigns transcend those boundaries. They squat in the shared mind-space and instruct everyone that 'buying your kids junk-food will make you a happy family' (or more insidiously 'your parents should buy you junk-food, because that's what happy, normal families do'). I actually saw one today which discouraged you from asking your friends for help, apparently it's better to pay the company to do repairs than go through all the hassle of having to repay a favour. These sort of campaigns beggar belief, either they are ineffective, or they must surely do serious collateral damage to shared values.
I have stopped watching tv about 5 years ago, have multiple blockers on my browsers and I learned to intentionally ignore physical adds(magazines/boards).
I'm glad I'm not the only one. But how do you handle situation? My family usually takes offense, and I can see that I would seem arrogant for doing so. I just don't know how to communicate how intrusive and strident the TV is to me.
Just explain that you can't concentrate on what they're saying with all of that noise, and you can see things out of the corner of your eye that distract you.
I don't have the TV on much at all to be honest. I don't understand the people that have it on all of the time, from waking to sleeping. Some people put it on as "background noise" but that doesn't make sense to me - you might as well tune a radio into FM between the stations for background noise or buy a white/pink noise generator and put that on!
The downside is that cable subscribers subsidize the handful of TV shows I actually want to watch. Individually, every person who quits makes a rational decision, but when everyone quits we don't get a lot of good shows.
Maybe Netflix or Amazon or whoever will take up the slack. Or maybe those shows will just go away.
> Maybe Netflix or Amazon or whoever will take up the slack. Or maybe those shows will just go away.
It already is. Netflix is funding a lot of new stuff (House of Cards, Orange is the new Black, lots of standup stuff). Note that this stuff is being received very well by normal consumers and critics alike. They're also funding canceled shows like Arrested Development, Lillyhammer, etc.
They're funding a lot of stuff relative to their perceived size, but they're not funding a lot of stuff relative to the gamut of content that exists. In particular, pilots are something that intuitively I feel like Netflix is going to have trouble speculating on at their size, whereas the networks and cable providers generally green-light a number of pilots per year. Netflix will need to hit on their productions (and have so far, to be sure, but they're betting on the surest of things) and I have a feeling that in the short- and medium-term that's going to result in what they've fielded so far: well-produced but not particularly innovative content with mostly established actors. That's not bad, to be sure, but it's...kind of boring.
This is an important point that everyone really misses.
Cable companies make (50M subscribers * $100 /month * 12 mo/yr)=60B dollars per year.
TV advertising is another $80B /year.
Overhead and profit might eat up 20-50% of that, but we're still left with a bill, to create the TV we want to watch, of a few hundred dollars per US man, woman, and child.
Why would people imagine that we can replace that market with a hundred million $8/month netflix subscriptions and not see a decline in the availability of quality programming?
OK so let's assume we need to pay $200 per person and a typical household is a family of 4. Currently the difference between a broadband internet connection and a typical monthly cable TV with internet bundle is in the $50/month range. This means that the current typical household is paying $600 per year to get content in a ridiculously stupid way, versus the estimate of $800 per family of four just buying their content direct from the producers.
This doesn't seem like an unbridgeable gap to me. And in fact it's in the process of being bridged slowly -- the problem is that existing contractual relationships and infrastructure won't just reform themselves overnight.
There will always be enough entertainment to meet the demand of viewers. What we have now is a deluge of crap to meet the demands of advertisers wanting to sell eyeballs.
> There will always be enough entertainment to meet the demand of viewers.
This seems likely, but the idea that it will be cheaper than cable is pretty specious. The reason you can get TV programming so cheap for just the cost of a Roku and Netflix is because hidden in that content is the millions of dollars that already came from traditional TV.
Somehow I don't have a problem with that. What annoys me about ads is how they have nothing to do with what I want to be watching, and try to get in your head. Sing-song commercials and commercials for baby diapers make my blood boil, and that's not what I want when I'm trying to relax.
Fair enough. I'd much rather have 3-4 breaks in an episode to surf around online/make popcorn/whatever instead of stuff like this in every show I watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE
Here in NYC with TWC, I threw cable in the garbage when my subscription for TV and internet (ONLY, no VOIP service) exceeded $150 a month. I didn't even have premium service. This was in 2010, I think.
One month I saw the bill and I wanted to punch a hole in the wall.
They run a wire to my house, so that the TV reception is better than an aerial antenna. That's what cable is. That's what cable does.
The internet service was rock solid, but when they bombard me with a constant deluge of ads offering introductory service at $99 dollars a month (for TV, VOIP and internet), every ten minutes, no matter what channel I'm watching, basically, I expect my bill to be $66 dollars for TV and internet only, AT ALL TIMES.
This is the same psychological process where we rationalize to ourselves that $99 is cognitively less than $100, so it must be a reasonable truth that I'm paying a better price than $100, if I'm only paying $99.
If they know who I am, because they know whether to enable my cable signal, based on whether I've paid my bill, and they show ME advertisements on MY TV, stating that I can get 3 things for a price divisible by three ($99), when we both know I'm only buying 2 things from them, then cognitively, we both know I should be paying 2/3 of what their hellish TV jingle blasts into my ears every 10 minutes.
I'm sitting at work, humming their damned jingle to myself, as I suffer through my 9 to 5 drudgery. Then I come home check the mail box. There are two bills. Cable and Gas/Electric. The cable is more. It's $150 dollars. I'm subscribed to two thirds of their products, and I'm humming their incessant jingle to myself about how all three of their products should cost two thirds of what I'm actually paying for the stinking two thirds of what they offer.
The jingle is thus:
EYE! OH! DIGITAL CABLE!
WATCH A LOTTA CHANNELS!
WHENEVER YOU'RE ABLE!
THE PRICE IS NICE!
LET ME PUT IT ON THE TABLE!
ONLY NINETY NINE DOLLARS WHEN YOU SIGN THE LABEL!!!
There are trains underground, and I can enter and exit their tunnels twice a day, every day for a month, on trips as long as I can tolerate, and I'll pay less for that than cable. Trains underground cost less than cable.
Smart phones might be a secret government program engineered to earn the complicity of the citizenry, in volunteering to carry tracking devices on our person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So what?! It's still cheaper than cable!
Cable doesn't keep me warm in the winter. They don't do anything essential to my survival. They don't deliver perishable food to my door. Cable TV can burn.
What I fear is the invasion of advertisers on the online channels. Youtube is already getting there. I just hope that it doesn't get as bad as TV though.
I've found that some sites (at least Amazon) don't allow HD streaming on PCs, while they do allow it on dedicated devices (Apple TV or PS3, for instance). I was all ready to ditch the Apple TV and use a full-fledged PC and then that happened.
I've recently purchased a Roku as well so I can use Netflix. So that combined with Plex + downloaded content means I hardly ever watch broadcast TV any more.
