18 Replies to “Not Watching For The Asteroid”

  4. Can’t happen too soon. Their greed has made TV unwatchable. Good (rare, I know) content ruined by excessive advertizing breaks of MUCH too long duration, and as if that isn’t enough, the creeping, jumping garbage covering the lower third of the screen when you actually get back to whatever it was you wanted to watch.
    Personally, I am happy to pay ~$2.50 to watch an episode of something I want to see completely free of ads via Amazon.

  6. I to think that I thought that CBC and CTV were going to call it quits…
    Cheers
    Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
    1st Saint Nicolaas Army
    Army Group “True North”

  8. Why would anyone even want to watch TV? I admit I probably spend too much time in front of the computer, but it’s an active intellectual activity in comparison to the complete passivity of watching garbage.
    Considering that there still seem to be large areas of various stores dedicated to selling large screen TV’s, people must be buying them but at what cost in neurodegeneration as a result? If TV stations went off the air, I wouldn’t notice for years. My only interest in TV at this time is to use my TV as a second computer monitor and as a display device for photos I’ve taken.

  10. Synchro at comment one, reading my mind.
    Still, the other two can’t be very happy either, which is also good.
    Confusion to the enemy!!!

  12. “Having a television antenna is every American’s right”
    But no one is stopping them from owning a TV antenna,the broadcasting companies are simply going to quit sending their signals over the airwaves.
    We haven’t had OTA signals here for over a year, it doesn’t seem to have affected us badly. I get about fifty channels, forty of which I don’t want but have to take,and watch maybe two or three hours a week, mostly news, to keep up with what the enemy’s thinking,
    or special events such as the love story of Saint Jack.
    The rest of the time,the TV is a handy dust collector in the corner.

  13. This would be the world unfolding as it should. I see network TV mostly as a wasteland of low-budget reality show crap. Most of what I watch is delivered by specialty channels.
    Now if we could just force Canada’s cable and satellite providers to let us tailor our TV channel selection to what we actually want instead of having to buy packages heavily weighted with stuff we don’t want (for me that includes all French-language channels, the Aboriginal channel, a whole slew of ethnic junk and channels that rerun old shows I never liked when they were fresh three decades ago).

  14. Well TV is a wasteland of low-budget TV crap so you’re spot on. I had to make a quick 3 day trip down to the US, and was stuck with cable and satellite TV at two different stops, if I could have gouged out my eyes and let them grow back a day later it would have saved me from the inane, insane and stupidity of what they were showing on TV. Even the specialty channels are getting on the low-budget crap, you may not have seen it up here in Canada yet but down in the US it’s running rampant.

  15. Between Netflix and Apple TV who needs the networks? There is so little worth watching on TV these days, I doubt if anyone but retards would miss it.
    We would all do better to spend less time in front of yet another screen.

  16. Don Morris is spot on. https://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/not-watching-fo-79.html#comment-812073
    Using the expression (in the comment title) “going off the air” is misleading. It’s usually taken as meaning shutting down the broadcast. TV used to do that every night, replacing the content with a test pattern (remember them?).
    In this context, the networks are simply ‘threatening’ to restrict reception of their signal. Does anyone still use an antenna?! Well much to my surprise apparently they do; hence the dustup.
    Question really is, how will that affect satellite re-broadcasters? Not at all I’m guessing.

  17. In the US … the broadcast licenses purchased by the networks contain conditions.
    The brodcasters agreed to keep open air bandwidth up and running with content. These provisions were explicitly to maintain PUBLIC access to the public airwaves.
    The sole intention was that individuals who wished to would receive these open air broadcasts for their own personal use. What the third party rebroadcasters are doing is taking the public free air signal and redistributing the content for commercial purpose.
    Aereo is practicing piracy of telecommunications and should be held civily and criminally liable. It is up to the regulators to assert their authority over Aereo (and presumably others too small to be noticed) and force the courts to enforce the law.
    This is exactly what the Community Access TV carriers did in the 6os and thereafter.
    At one time it was popular for appartment building owners to put an antenna on the roof and do the same thing. Of course they charged the tennants for the priviledge of using the antenna jack on the wall.
    All this led to regulatory statutes being enacted to prevent anyone other than a licensed carrier to capture and rebroadcast signals. It also led to some dirty business and legal actions by just about everybody involved.
    Over the years, the CATV industry settled down to the business of consolidating their markets and growning the business. This business evolution has now gone through all of the growth that the industry can sustain without a large injection of either new content sources or growth in demand. Neither of these things are happening or are going to happen.
    As we see right now, there is only marginal increase in available content. At the same time the carriers and broadcasters are trying to stretch what content they have by repackaging, rebundling, rehashing and repeating every minute of material that has been available for the entire history of recorded television.
    So … along comes operators like Aereo …. who are basically doing what the original CATV operators did 4 and 5 decades ago. These activities were made illegal everywhere in North America by the 1970s and remain illegal. Any court or judge that does not understand these facts is either ignorant of the facts or of the law or both.
    Say whatever you want about the value of TV content or the business practices of networks and carriers. The facts are that they pay for the priviledge of producing or packaging and delivering that content and are bound by the regulations and terms of their licenses.
    What the broadcast license holders (networks) are doing is telling the regulators and the parasites that they will not continue to supply their product for nothing.
    This is more a “John Galt” moment than something to gloat over.

  18. OMMAG, what if the material they’re redistributing is worth nothing? Given that we all have a limited amount of time on this world, the last thing I want to do with my time is waste it on inanities like 99.9% of what is broadcast via TV signals. The information content of TV broadcasts is close to zero — far less than the bandwidth consumed would indicate.
    Interacting with the people who frequent SDA is worth doing. Watching TV shows is not worth doing. I’d far rather have real interactions among physical people than sit in a room alone with a TV serving up utter garbage. Interestingly, when I practiced in Vancouver and had actors as patients, none of them watched TV.

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