I don’t see the point of television these days, especially if you have easy access to internet. I have almost no clue of what’s happening in the world except the big global stuff, nevermind my country. We’re getting poorer, less jobs, yadayada… I bet that’s what’s going on in the news.
And I don’t watch media, I rather watch clips of movies I grew up with on YouTube.
OP, please reword to be an open-ended question.
At least 7 years ago. Cable company tried giving me a free setup with Internet and I refused
Your public library has a ton of content for free. Music, tv, film, print… honestly, what more do you need? Just throwing that out there.
I haven’t had access to cable since like 2003 when I lived with my parents. I, like many others here, pirate a bunch of stuff (plus some physical media for independent media and stuff I want to support)
That said I recently got an iptv subscription bc my partner got into sports and the available options are either stupid, prohibitively expensive, or both. NBA streaming package is not crazy at $10/mo but it has a blackout for your local team, so you can’t watch games of your team, forcing you to a cable provider if you follow them. Anything for local sports is minimum like $60 a month and often double that. absurd. Iptv is super piracy but it’s like $70/yr for all the games of all the teams of all the sports plus all the channels of all the countries plus a huge library of content.
I watched tv for like a day with it and it was insane how terrible it was. Most networks just marathon random episodes of mid shows with obnoxious ad breaks. So it’s like comedy central- 6 hours of family guy, 3 hours of american dad, 4 hours of south park, 3 bad movies, 6 more hours of family guy, 4 hours of infomercials, repeat. Maybe there’s like one episode of new content every few days, and it’s something low effort like the daily show. Or another network like hln that literally just shows forensic files and informercials 24/7.
The news is toxic bullshit. Hyper focus on rage bait and propping up anything that gets ratings (which is basically trump and elon nonsense).
It’s insane. It’s just streaming networks where you can’t pick what you watch. They realized people like binge watching and leaned into that, hard. The advantage they had is creating new content but there’s none of that the overwhelming majority of the time. They’ve given up and are propped up solely by sports
I will say some of the other countries have decent programming at least. Tbs from Japan has some good shit (although you have to speak Japanese of course). They tend to have better news too
Here’s what I don’t get, who are these marathons for? People who don’t understand what streaming is? Do the only people left with cable use it as the world’s most expensive white noise machine?
It’s to fill dead air. I would bet the overwhelming majority of cable subscriptions are people who just watch sports. That’s why it’s such a nightmare to pay to watch sports online, it’s the last draw to actually purchase a cable package and for a lot of people it actually is worth the insane $120 a month or whatever bullshit they charge.
An ever shrinking minority are extremely tech illiterate people who actually watch that content and refuse to adapt from the system they learned in 1996 but those people are literally dying out.
But the channels realize the majority of cable subscribers don’t actually give a shit about watching cable. So they don’t bother with the expense of churning out content, instead going with endlessly regurgitating syndicated shit.
Haven’t had an aggregate antenna connected to my TV for… 17 years.
Haven’t missed a single thing of worth. Can pick and choose from the net
I haven’t been able to watch broadcast TV in decades. The commercials were making me physically ill. Too much flash flash between them with sudden volume changes.
As for news, it’s easier and faster to read, plus I can deep dive on anything interesting. For everything else, there’s streaming or piracy.
I’m trying to watch Earth Abides for free and I’m getting gutfucked with popup ads. How do you do it?
Not my kinda show, but I’d just take a sub to mgm for a month if I really liked the show. Otherwise it’s a trip to the torrent farm. Honestly I really have to want to see a show for it to be worth dealing with the bay. There’s just way too much for free, or already on a cheap stream, to keep me distracted.
How are you still browsing the internet without an adblocker?
My phone is the usual culprit… on desktop I use uBlock Origin
If you’re on Android, then Firefox can indeed have uBlock Origin there too
The dynamic range wars totally rat fucked music but for some reason Television never even attempted to catch the Ads. The volume swings are fucking nauseating. But any show worth watching will still have a DVD release.
TV ad volume is an intentional problem. They went all out to stop auto volume controls from being put into TV’s.
it’s like they don’t want an audience at all. or you know they want an audience that will put up with the most egregious shit possible … probably why they pump out reality TV ad nauseam. Shit was good for a single season at best, once everyone knew what was up it stopped being reality and thus interesting.
You can just tailor what you want to see. That’s the point of having internet on your TV.
Yeah 25 years ago.
Me too. I have no idea what’s on TV now.
You mean broadcast TV? Yes.
But TV is just another part of the internet now.
I still watch scripted, episodic, video content and get my news, local; national; and world, from the internet.
Same here. I’ve never watched broadcast or cable TV since I moved out of the college apartments. But I’ve gone in and out of watching shows, whether they were normal tv shows on dvd, YT series, streaming, or shows from 🏴☠️. And I’ve always got my news from the internet or local papers when they still existed.
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yup. cable got too damn expensive to have just to be able to get the local channels (only way to get them where i am). really should’ve dumped them years before i finally did. haven’t had a streaming sub in a couple years either. i mainly watch old recordings (some on tape, even), discs, and other things i have here. and maybe once or twice a month, i’ll look for something different or ‘new to me’ on a free service. i get enough news and current events from public radio when i’m in the car or when the radio is on at the office.
I did that 20 years ago. It’s great!
I watch the morning news with my hubs, then pretty much play video games. RPGs to be precise.
I’d much rather be part of my entertainment than merely a spectator.
Yes! Agency!
Haven’t had a television set in my life ever. Don’t understand why they’re still sold either.
I’ll have YT on in the background on my desktop PC for noise while I work or do chores and occasional purposeful viewing for some select few channels mostly for me and my gf to watch and discuss while we lounge, (I turned the algo off with no search history, no home page, only subscriptions, ublock, dearrow, sponsorblock etc.)
For news I tend to prefer reading to stay on top of current events in politics but I’ll also overhear the general headline gist in the morning from political YT channels. I think people should generally try to stay informed and have a fully-formed worldview which necessitates a political ideology once they’re at least a few years into adulthood, lack of curiousity and worldliness isn’t anything to be proud of imho.
For shows I just download what I want and stream it off my Jellyfin server. I find out about them mostly through word of mouth.
Dunno/don’t care about sports or anything like that personally.
You don’t understand why someone would want a giant screen to watch films on?
I’m not exactly scratching my head here
Haven’t had TV in years. Cable news is pointless and biased. I already spend allmy time doing other things.
