I'm Baaaaack!

No new posts recently due to taking a little mini-vacation. Picture to follow soon.

In the meantime... I've been thinking lately. My dad would have said "Better watch it, that's dangerous" but nonetheless I've been thinking. About TV. About the future of TV.

You see, I dumped cable over five years ago. The first year without it, I'll admit, I missed it. After that though... haven't really missed it at all. I dropped it because at the time I was moving and I had come to realize that I paid (then) over $50 a month and I watched a sum total of about four shows spread between three channels. It just wasn't worth it!

There was some talk, a while back, of cable services offering "A La Carte" deals -- in which people could pick out which channels they wanted and only pay for those. Nothing has come of that discussion to this day.

The thing was, I didn't want CHANNELS, I wanted cable at a SHOW level! Years ago I was talking to a friend and I said that my dream was to be able to program MY version of a primetime line-up. To sit down and program my TV to play the latest episode of some new series and then play an old episode of The Equalizer or The Man from U.N.C.L.E., etc.

And then along came the internet....

Contrary to a certain song from the musical Avenue Q the internet is for a lot of stuff and one of those things has now become TV. Thanks to free, legal sites like Hulu and AOLin2TV I can just about live my dream of MY primetime line-up. I can watch an old episode of I Spy on Hulu and then bop over to USA Network's website and watch Burn Notice. I can watch new episodes of NCIS on CBS's network site the very next morning after they air! Sure, I might have to wait overnight or in some cases a week but to be able to watch what I want to watch on MY schedule, when I have time to watch it is priceless.

I'm not paying a ton of money out of my pocket every month just to watch a sum total of FIVE TV shows I enjoy. Maybe, if the day ever comes that production companies start producing a lot of TV shows that are worth watching then I might get dish but all my vacation has done is remind me that I made the right choice. During the two nights I spent in hotels I had 50-some-odd TV stations to choose from... and there wasn't a darn thing good on ANY of them. Spent most of the time reading a book.

Even more so -- there is now a new wave of people out there who are creating and producing their own TV shows on the web and what they are doing is a heck of a lot funnier and more entertaining than many so-called "sitcoms" today.

The future is here folks... and it's the internet.