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Topic: No TV 4 Me

yardie
Member

Registered: Feb 2000
Location:
Posts: 1571

I was just thinking. It has been about 3 months since I watch any television at all. I wonder If i am the only one that is watching ;ess and less Tv since the advent of the highspeed internet. Is the TV getting extinct? I think I read a few weeks back that more and more people are spending more and mro time on the net and less and less time in front of the tube. If this is the case, then why are they be forging ahead with the so called 500 channel universe? It would be interesting to hear what y'all gotto say.

04-17-2001 12:03 AM

foo fighter
Member

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: I'm not sure, but I see lots of lights everywhere.
Posts: 1287

Even w/o high speed broadband I'm watching less and less TV. The only networksI watch are CNBC, TechTV (occasionally), and Sci-Fi. But ever since Sci-Fi dumped Mystery Science Theatre 3000, I have less interest in the network. I miss crow.

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Last edited by foo fighter on 04-17-2001 at 12:37 AM

04-17-2001 12:11 AM

akur
Member

Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Seattle, Washington
Posts: 293

"Even w/o high speed broadband I'm watching less and less TV"

same here!

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04-17-2001 12:30 AM

suphi
Member

Registered: Apr 2001
Location:
Posts: 6

Little TV for me

Little TV for me, makes for a happy person. Did you know that a decade ago, it was a mark of beauty for women to be obese in Fiji? A diet was unheard of. Cuz it meant that they were wealthy and blessed by the gods to have food. But in 1995, they introduced mainstream US TV, and within 5 years, 90% of the female population was on a diet. Is that crazy or what? I don't remember the EXACT numbers, but you get the idea.
Did you also know that the more time you spend watching TV, browsing through magazines, and shopping at the mall, the more discontent you are with what you have?
Just a little tidbit from me.
suphi

04-17-2001 12:37 AM

mensachicken
Member

Registered: Oct 2000
Location:
Posts: 443

i shut my tv and radio off in 1987 and haven't turned them on since.

mc.

04-17-2001 12:39 AM

Matthew Nichols
Member

Registered: Nov 2000
Location:
Posts: 714

Quality programming has been on the decrease for the last couple years, or perhaps I'm not as easily entertained as I was when I was younger

One of the best things to happen TV are Personal Video Recorders: TiVo, ReplayTV, UltimateTV. Since I've bought a TiVo I only record the programs I feel are good & I can watch them when I like, without the hassle of tapes (which I never bothered with anyways). A plus is that TiVo has thumbs up & thumbs down that you can give television shows and from that it will automatically record other shows as suggestions.

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04-17-2001 01:04 AM

MarkEagle
VisorCentral Staff

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: Connecticut USA
Posts: 2682

Hmmm... I feel out of place here reading this thread while DateLine is playing on my ATI All-In-Wonder video card!

Ok, so I'm still using a 56k dial-up and haven't been spoiled by high-speed access, but ever since getting this new marvel of a video card, my TV watching is on the rise again! (for the record, I mainly watch news and sports, and not necessarily in that order)

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04-17-2001 02:14 AM

Vinny
Member

Registered: Mar 2000
Location: NC, Indiana
Posts: 465

I don't watch television much anymore either. I don't have broadband yet (is scheduled to be installed next month), but I do spend more time on the computer than on the television. I only watch Star Trek Voyager (7of9 es mui bueno!), American High, and Earth: Final Conflict (when I can catch it, it switches time slots every week making it a pain to keep track of). Normally I only make the one hour Voyager and half hour AH tho. I do enjoy a DVD movie a week now that we put in a quality home theater in our basement.

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04-17-2001 02:50 AM

narnia_77
Member

Registered: Apr 2000
Location: Inglewood, CA, USA
Posts: 390

TV, TV, TV...

I'm a TV junkie.
(typing this as I watch a "The Pretender" rerun.)

---------------------
Will work for gadgets....

04-17-2001 03:10 AM

na2rboy
VisorCentral Writer

Registered: Mar 2000
Location: Richmond, VA, USA
Posts: 151

hee

http://www.theonion.com/onion3604/d...television.html

04-17-2001 02:02 PM

Hoser_back_home
VisorCentral Staff

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: bright side of the moon.
Posts: 996

it's playoff hockey time!!!

this is when i get my TV fix!

Go Leafs Go!

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04-17-2001 02:18 PM

Soul Raven
Member

Registered: Dec 1999
Location:
Posts: 239

quote:
One of the best things to happen TV are Personal Video Recorders: TiVo, ReplayTV, UltimateTV.

I recently saw some TV magazine program (DateLine, I think) that interviewed several families with these devices. They said that they were watching more TV now, since they could watch their programs whenever they wanted, and could easily skip the commercials.

I logical evolution of this technology is, of course, on-demand programming (which I believe is being tested in some markets). I tend to think of this as not a 500 channel universe, but 1 channel, the "me" channel. Turn the box on, go to the menu and select "CNN", and the latest CNN broadcast starts playing. Select "Cubs vs. Sox" and Pat Somerall (or whoever) glows to life with the pre-game show. You watch what you want, when you want, and you don't have to worry about when it's on, or what channel.

<soapbox>
This falls right in line with the three predictions I made to a good friend of mine in the Three Amigos restaurant in Holladay, Utah in 1993. He worked (works) in broadcasting for a local TV station and I worked for a CLEC/Internet backbone provider. We were talking about the lightning fast 90MHZ Pentium I had just bought and comparing it to the Atari 800XLs we had in 1983, and how technology had progressed in 10 years. This is what I predicted for the next 10 years:

HDTV would be simul-cast over the airwaves
You would have one wire coming into your house that would provide your dial-tone, Internet access, and Cable TV
The Internet and telephone infrastructure would merge, and voicemail and e-mail would become the same thing. You could call a person by using either their phone number or e-mail address

CBS now simul-casts several programs. I have seen the little symbol most recently on "Becker" and "Everybody Loves Raymond".

There is a little burg in Georgia (Hartford, Hartfield, something like that, my apologies if you live in said burg) that couldn't get the Cable TV company to provide service. Last fall a CLEC ran DSL to everyone's house and/or business, and they provide dial-tone, Internet access, AND Cable TV programming, all over the DSL connection.

IPv6 is (still) going to be implemented. Frankly, I thought it would have happened by now. With all those additional IP address, you could have an IP address for each one of your shoes. Your current telephone number will be part of your telephone's IP address.

Well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad, but I still have a year or two left.
</soapbox>

Whoa, sorry, don't know what got into me there. Hey, they don't call it "Off Topic" for nuthin', ya know!

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04-17-2001 03:02 PM

BertBert
Member

Registered: Nov 1999
Location: Greenwood, IN
Posts: 125

When I was in graduate school, the screen on my TV went out -- fixable, but expensive (as is everything on a grad student salary) so I let it sit. For two years. I remember my mother being so put out that I didn't have a working TV that she paid to have it fixed, and the first thing I saw when I turned it on after two years was a commercial featuring a bunch of people doing the Macarena to sell athletic shoes. I remember thinking that Mom could have saved that money for something better!

<Soapbox>

I am watching less and less TV these days, not because I am on the internet instead (no high-speed access at home yet) but rather because I am just more and more fed up with the ridiculous crap that passes for programming. It seems to get worse and worse each year. TV programming is so obviously constructed to make money, rather than providing entertainment, that it just gets to be sickening after a while.

This is not even to mention the massive mixed signals that TV programming sends concerning love, family relations, morality, and other things of meaning. My wife and I have digital cable with umpteen-hundred channels and we still have a hard time finding things to watch that we can even like just a bit, and of those, the portion of those things that are edifying and worth watching is no greater than 75%. My time is just better spent doing stuff around the house, reading a book (now THERE's an idea!) or talking with my wife or on the phone with family.

To be fair, there are some things on TV worth watching -- football for instance (although -- the XFL is a perfect example of how a TV-consumerist mentality has worked its way into sports), and lots of things on the History channel (although this channel is more accurately titled "The WWII Channel") and HGTV (we're DIY type people). "Whose Line is it Anyway" is a weekly ritual for us. And nobody ever said that TV is where we are supposed to search for meaning in the universe (other than TV itself?) so I should not blame TV for being morally ambiguous (or just plain amoral). But overall TV seems like just a wasteland of consumerist nonsense to me and I would rather being doing other things.

</Soapbox>

My $0.02 worth,
BertBert

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Mark 12:28-31

04-17-2001 03:48 PM

Toby
Member

Registered: Jul 2000
Location:
Posts: 3034

quote:
Originally posted by yardie
I was just thinking. It has been about 3 months since I watch any television at all. I wonder If i am the only one that is watching ;ess and less Tv since the advent of the highspeed internet. Is the TV getting extinct? I think I read a few weeks back that more and more people are spending more and mro time on the net and less and less time in front of the tube. If this is the case, then why are they be forging ahead with the so called 500 channel universe? It would be interesting to hear what y'all gotto say.

Quite honestly, I consider the internet (at least the Web, anyway) and TV to be almost the same thing. I try to limit my consumption of both of them. Outside of a few channels (Discovery, TLC, The Hitler^H^H^H^H^History Channel, VH1 for Behind the Music, and TNT for Pretender reruns), I'd probably never watch TV. OTOH, my internet consumption is very similar. Outside of this board and a few Usenet groups, I'd probably never fool with the internet. Both suffer the same problem with me, it's usually too time consuming to bother separating the wheat from the chaff.

04-17-2001 03:56 PM

BobbyMike
Member

Registered: Dec 1999
Location: "Children are a gift from God, they are a reward"
Posts: 1049

TV is too passive for me. I will occasionally watch a video, but we are blessed to have no real reception to speak of. My kids think that you can pause TV shows! We used to (5-6 years ago) watch Deep Space 9 and The X Files. Then someone told me that a person watching TV has the same Brainwaves as a person in a coma. I don't know if it's true or not, but I prefer not to be brain dead yet.
I also can't stand to watch spectator sports. If I can't be playin' I ain't interested. (I used to go to ball games, but that was when Rolly Fingers, Catfish Hunter, and Vida Blue played for the 'A's at Candlestick Park!) Books are good. I usually read about 3 a week.
Michael

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