I know I am overgeneralizing with that title, but I hope to make the point that TV these days has a lot of nothing worth watching.
Do you remember as a kid opening up the fridge and standing there for several minutes before your mom or dad yelled at asked you to close the door? Your reply was “but there’s nothing to eat!” Of course, there were plenty of things to eat in there, but none of it sounded all that interesting to you. You wanted something good.
That is the way I feel about TV these days. There is always plenty of channels with something on, but none of it sounds all that interesting to me. Fortunately, some smart people invented the DVR, which lets me digitally record shows, even automatically recording all new shows of certain series I indicate. This lets me watch what I think is interesting when I want to watch it.
Lately though, even having a DVR is not enough. I have come to the end of my most recent Dish Network contract feeling unsatisfied with what I am paying nearly $50 a month to have just the basic options of their service. What irks me, even more, is that they are still advertising the $29.95 rate that I signed up for, and not as a promotional price. About halfway through the service, they raised the rates due to “increasing costs of delivering high-quality content.” Hogwash.
So, at the end of the month, we are turning the service off. Prior to this most recent stint back on the Dish service, we chose as a family to not have any TV service for a little over a year. We found that we did more as a family, had more time to do other things, and we ended up watching many DVD based TV shows sans-commercials. For the most part, we really didn’t miss having live TV. We ended up subscribing for Dish to get a few channels and shows we wanted to catch since we are in a pocket that really doesn’t get any decent local reception. Now we again don’t feel it is worth it.
With $50/mo in savings, I am planning to research some better antennae options mounted in my attic (so I don’t have a huge device on my roof) to see if I can pull down a better signal for local channels. I will miss TLC and Discovery, ESPN and TBS/TNT, but really that is about it. Otherwise, I plan to catch some shows online and perhaps just do more with the time I have wasted periodically watching TV. What a novel concept.
Maybe I’ll read a few more books or spend more time with my photography. Whatever I do, I know it will be more productive than watching TV.
