Television Viewership is Way Down...

OK here's what will happen. The NetZero of Television age will be starting in a few years. A constant advertising bar at the bottom of the screen that you can pay to take off. I kid you not. That is my theory!

I preferwatching TV on DVD.

You have a small, round screen?

They were crap in the 80's, too.

That's the beauty of a DVR, though: No tapes, just a hard drive that records and stores the shows you want. No expense of buying tapes as they wear out.

Plus, you can pause live television to go take a piss or get a snack.

Also, you can record two shows at once while watching a prerecorded show or a third show live (if you have unscrambled cable).

It's not a new idea. Do you know they show movies that are in theatres in some other countries on TV at the same time, the only difference being that the TV version of the movie has a constant advertising bar across the bottom. So you can watch the movie in the theatre or at home with some annoyance.

I think I read somewhere that Comcast or some other cable/satellite company is gonna try doing this. Except they're gonna charge like $20-$30 per movie instead of running an advertisement across the bottom of the screen.

No one is gonna pay $30 when they could just pay $10 and see the movie 1,000 times bigger in theaters.

Or buy it outright.

DEVO DISAGREES!

Rock vids in the 80s were entertaining...plus had great music.

Today?

No.

I hate NBC. Why don't they end a show at the minute mark? Why do they think it's a good idea to end it 30 seconds after the minute mark? For that matter, why do they end a show 3 minutes after it's scheduled to end? Are their clocks behind or something? Fucking idiots. Made me miss the end of The Office. Stuff like this forces people to pirate TV shows. No wonder NBC is last in ratings.

Toyota Tundra.

It's an exceptionally lame as trick to:

1) Fuck with DVRs to make you watch live.

But Mainly

2) Make you miss the beginning of shows on other channels so you are less likely to change channels.

DISH network's DVRs default setting is to start recording 1 minute before a program and end 3 minutes past a program. These can be adjusted, of course.

Also, theres nothing like seeing a cool show you've never noticed, and setting your DVR to record every new episode that comes after it. Then I can let them all sit watch it whenever I feel like it.

Espcially if it aired on FOX.

But I think I can understand why TPTB do that today. There's a LOT of competition in TV. Back in the 70's when MASH premiered, you only had three networks to choose from (Hense, why MASH still hold the record for the largets amount of viewers for its finale). Today, you got six network stations, countless cable networks, and with high-speed Internet being affordable to most people, most people can download what they missed or go to that network's site and stream it (IE, Jericho on CBS, Everybody Hates Chris on the CW, and so forth).

Personally, I'll be glad to have cable back in my house this Monday.

For the last sixteen years I've been living in the Sacramento area, NBC has without exception had the worst reception of every goddamn station. It didn't matter where I moved, it's alwaysed sucked. Which is just as well, since they trash the shows that are actually good and keep on riding out the same old tired dinosaurs (Namely, the T-rex known as ER ).

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That's only NBC's fault if they own the station (which they don't--it's a Hearst-Argyle property).