Goodbye, TV
Today, I went down to the local Comcast office. A perfect storm of events led me to say goodbye to my cable TV service. When I got back from holiday, I simply couldn’t locate my digital box’s remote, and the damn thing doesn’t have any buttons on the front nor do any of my universal remotes support it. Also, as of Jan 1, Comcast took over the area and were going to start making changes and given the experience my family members have had in the past, yikes! But really, it was the missing remote. I went for almost 2 weeks without using it, and I didn’t mind. Before that, I hadn’t really used it either.
There are only a handful of shows that I watched anyways. With the current writer’s strike, they are all off the air anyways. And for that matter, I had been downloading them all anyways. Besides letting me watch them whenever I wanted, I get HD shows widescreen format and higher quality than the on-air broadcast I normally would get. Downloading them is a non-event because I can subscribe my torrent client of choice to a feed from an aggregator, and it will automatically download them for me. In other words, TV is mostly worthless to me.
The one caveat is perhaps watching an occasional random show that I hadn’t planned on watching. However, I think I have this one figured out too; I never really did that before ever since I downloaded the entire run of Arrested Development, Boston Legal, and Top Gear.. I just keep my own “shows in syndication” to watch to fill those voids. This leaves me with only the discovery of new shows (should the writer’s strike ever end), and well, I have other news sources to inform about shows to download (i.e., my friends). Once I learn of a show, I just throw into into my downloader.. no costs involved really, so I don’t feel bad for downloading absolutely rubbish shows. And, if nothing else, I can spend those random moments playing Xbox 360 instead.
So I guess what I am saying is: cable TV is worthless! Join the future!
January 11th, 2008 at 1:42 am
Now you have even less reasons not to watch Battlestar.