TV Experiment
A couple of months ago my wife and I realized we’d stopped watching TV. What were we doing instead of hanging out in front of the TV? Hanging out in front of the computer. The few TV shows I was still watching (my wife doesn’t watch any TV anymore), like Lost for example, weren’t being watched on the TV at all. I was watching them online on my computer, either through Hulu or directly from the show’s website.
Once we realized we weren’t watching TV we started talking about canceling it. And then we did. We’ve been TV-free ever since.
In place of TV, we signed up for a subscription to Netflix. A 2-disc subscription for $15/month turns out to be cheaper than what we were paying for TV service. My wife and I stopped going to movies when our daughter was born, about 19 years ago. We hit an occasional movie if we thought it was particularly worthy, but many movies passed us by without our getting to see them. Now we can watch all the movies we want. And not just movies. There are many TV shows that are available on DVD through Netflix. I’m currently working my way through The Sarah Conner Chronicles, for example, and there are many other TV shows I have yet to watch.
Ah, but it’s not just DVDs. Netflix has an unlimited streaming service available to any subscriber. There are a surprisingly large number of movies and TV shows that are available for streaming from Netflix. Of course, I’d really like for the entire Netfilx library to be streamable. I do believe the day is coming when it will be. But we aren’t there yet, so I still need to keep the DVDs coming through the mail.
I look forward to the day when everything I want to watch is available online. I don’t think that day is far off. My guess is that more and more people will cancel their TV service as they realize they don’t really need it, and at some point there just won’t be any watching broadcast TV left. The old networks will continue to exist as content providers, of course, but they’ll stick the content online immediately and we’ll all stream it to our computers to watch it. And then we’ll be able to tell our (grand-)children about how TV shows were only broadcast at a certain time and if you didn’t watch it then, you had to watch it in reruns. No doubt they’ll ask “what’s reruns?” It’ll be a hoot trying to explain reruns to them.
