I don't have television.
Yes, I have a TV. It is a beautiful large-screen HDTV courtesy of my overseas adventures that my wife refers to as my girlfriend, but there is no cable or satellite screwed into it.
Yet, I am currently and legally (amazing for someone of the Napster generation) up to date with every television series I would have watched otherwise. The only exceptions are a couple of shows on HBO and Showtime, but none are at a high enough quality right now that waiting for their DVDs is not an option.
I am also perfectly up to date on everything in current affairs. My news sources have tripled and become more accurate and reliable than the entertainment-driven programming that is cable news. I still knew all about the Balloon Boy when they were embarrassing themselves by frantically following the empty bag of helium across Colorado.
In sports, I know more about the NFL and MLB than I have in a decade even though I have yet to watch a full game from either league. Instead, radio, podcasts, and catching up on columnists and journalists have done more for me than watching talking heads and retired athletes try to be TV stars on SportsCenter.
Cable is for the Flintstones
Cable is becoming obsolete, and it is for the best.
Every week I get a flyer in my mailbox advertising 200-plus channels for "new low prices." I should get excited. My inner dialogue is supposed to go something like this: That many channels for how much? That's more than ever! Look how far we've come from when we only had 20 stations when I was growing up. Very impressive.
But it's not. It is an unnecessary waste of money to pay for anything that isn't going to be used. So I refused to pay, and one year ago, the wife and I began our great experiment of life with no cable, not even the alphabet broadcast channels I could probably get for free.
It has been great.
The Internet makes the perfect alternative. We've had Netflix for years, and when used to its full potential, it can fill in those times when we are tired of reading and want to watch something. I have either started watching shows or caught back up on old ones by using my fairly cheap subscription to have DVDs mailed to me or stream them on my computer. "The Office" and "30 Rock" can thank our Netflix account, not the networks that broadcast them, for our continued viewership.
However, the cheapest substitute is Hulu.com, which is a essentially a free library of television shows. Commercials are usually filled in where a typical break would be, but are much shorter. A traditionally 30-minute episode of "The Office," for example, can be watched on Hulu with only three or four 30-second commercials, one per break, and I am done. There are no long commercial blocks that force me to change the channel and then forget to turn it back in time to catch the beginning. There is a timer ticking away to tell me when the show will be back on, so I actually watch the commercial while waiting.
Advertisers should be loving this. With DVR, nobody really watches their commercials anymore. A year ago, I would record programs and then purposely start them 10 minutes late just so I could fast-forward through the commercials. Online, however, I will sit and watch a 30-second commercial. It adds up to about the same amount of time it takes to skip through if I was watching it on DVR anyway.
Metallica Should Have Went Away
Companies complain that viewers are not watching commercials anymore, yet they have started to abandon the one format where we actually do. Hulu is not getting the advertising money they need, and the Web site will become subscription-based next year.
It reminds me of a similar situation about nine years ago when Lars Ulrich of Metallica was attacking his own fan base of lower class "rebels" for downloading his music for free on Napster, forcing them to buy his crap albums in hard-copy format even though the exchange of media was obviously trying to evolve: Networks and advertisers need to let go and avoid doing the same thing. It would improve the quality of media that is released or at least weed out some of the garbage.
Only the Best Get Paid
What he did not understand is that we understand everything is not free, and we are willing to pay for quality. "Mad Men," currently running on AMC, is not available on Hulu, but Sony, through their Playstation 3, offers a pay-per-view service in which you can buy or rent movies instantly, or buy television episodes a day or so after they are released. "Mad Men" is one of those shows I might have hooked my cable back up for.
However, using my Playstation, I can pay $3 an episode and buy and permanently store high-definition copies onto my hard drive. It sounds like it adds up, but it's still cheaper than the DVD set would be after being released months from now, and I get to watch them commercial-free at a quality somewhere between DVD and BluRay. The 12 or 15 bucks I spend on that show, and a couple of others are still cheaper than the cable subscription I would have had to buy to see them otherwise.
It is this format that the future needs to embrace. Instead of recording a show with DVR, we should be able to download it for a small price. The costs of online storage would have to come down, and the technology is not yet here. But every channel in the world could be available at our disposal, and we just pay small fees for the programming we want to watch. Networks may offer some shows for free for periods of time for promotion, and we still get our channel surfing fix. Short, focused advertisements could replace long blocks of commercials nobody watches anyway. Advertisers could be assured their ads are actually being seen by who they want, and television networks can be paid directly by their customers.
Closing With the Utopia Channel
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