TV is broken

Beatrix isn't the customer. She's the product being sold. TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things.

Hopefully young Beatrix is an outlier like her parents and she'll never get hooked. But it could be that, like most adults, she'll get used to sitting there through the commercials, wasting 8 minutes of her life to get 22 minutes of entertainment. Plus, of course, whatever she wastes on buying things that she doesn't need.

I used to watch TV, like most people. Then, in the 1990's, the number of channels started increasing. More options, great. Twice as many channels did allow for more specialization, so maybe there were twice as many things I wanted to watch. When it reached four times as many channels, though, there were still only twice as many things I wanted to watch. Ten times as many channels, and now I wasn't sure if there were even twice as many as in the old days, because the budgets for the good shows were being spread among more shows to provide vehicles for more ads in all those new broadcast channel-hours.

Then, along came TiVo. Ah, TV was fun again. I could skim the cream. Couldn't imagine life without it. But as the years passed, the things I grabbed with TiVo were losing quality, too, seemingly bleeding budget to the shows "out there" that my TiVo and I ignored.

Then, my TV set broke. I assumed I'd have to get a new one quickly because, of course, everyone had to have a TV, right? I was sure I'd go crazy without it.

But I didn't. As time passed, I found I grew less motivated to get a new one, not more.

Well, after years of no TV, we finally got one a few weeks ago, so we wouldn't have to gather 'round the laptop for Netflix and slide shows of family vacations. The image is spectacular. But I can't believe what I'm so clearly seeing. They may call themselves The Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, History Channel, Food Network, Science Channel, or whatever, but they're all "Paid Programming", reality for rednecks, and pseudoscience for suckers, punctuated by screaming ads.

Even the islands of quality have clearly suffered extreme beach erosion.

But at least DVR technology has improved. Sorry, JUST KIDDING. You'd think that after years of Moore's Law, Comcast could make a cable box that didn't act as though I was waking it from a nap with each key press. You'd think that a product called an "HD DVR" would have an HD interface (wouldn't you?), instead of one with the display resolution of the lower half of a Nintendo DS. You'd think with so few needles hidden in the haystack of broadcasting, their interface would help you navigate the guide and find shows to watch, but apparently nobody at Comcast HQ has ever used Amazon to find a book.

Either that or they never watch TV.

Also check out Sym-Bionic Titan, it's the Firefly of animated TV shows.

If you have internet through your cable provider they already have to make sure the signal gets to your house and you're already in the computer, so adding you as a TV subscriber costs them nothing at all.

I never watch broadcast TV, but when my internet connection goes down it's a handy troubleshooting tool - when I flip the TV on and see car commercials it means there's no cable break.