Since last spring, I've gone without cable at home. Initially I had been using the Windows Media Server in Windows 7 and my Xbox360. Not a great solution, but it was cost effective, as it would have cost me more to build my own media centre PC, which I really didn't in the first place. In August, I picked up a Sony Internet Player, which is their latest Google TV set top box. That lead to me selling the Xbox, since I only owned 2 games for it, and simply wanted it for media streaming. I might never have gotten rid of it, and moved to a Google TV based system if Microsoft wasn't idiotic in putting a paid system like Netflix behind it's own Xbox Live Gold paywall. Bad design, bad decisions lead to a lost customer.
However, this isn't about my media streaming solution. This is about life without cable. Netflix, and some direct media streaming from Plex Media server were the early main sources of media streaming, and more recently in the last couple of months, Youtube subscriptions have been becoming my main sources of media and entertainment.
So, now that I've moved to Toronto and am in temporary housing with free digital HD cable until we move into our new home, surely I must be realizing how much I miss cable...right?
Well, not exactly, and maybe not for the reasons I thought. I've probably got about 150 channels of television to pick from every night. I'm finding I'm really only watching sports in the background, while I tap away at my laptop through the night, or maybe playing a solo game of Forbidden Island. Now, you might think that of course I'm just watching sports. I'm Canadian, and the NHL playoffs are on, including a Toronto/Boston series that went to game 7. I do enjoy playoff hockey, but there is more to my decision to watch sports than just that.
The honest truth is, there just isn't enough on the TV channels that I want to watch, and sports simply fills bigger blocks of time. It takes me several minutes to make my way through the aforementioned 150 channels which simply serves to annoy me. Now, a couple of weeks ago, if I wanted to watch something on my GoogleTV box, it took me as long to look through Netflix and Google Play Movies for something to watch. However, the scrolling through the TV listings is so... force fed. I can't simply gloss over the shows and channels i have no interest in. Shows I am interested in aren't grouped together. The fact that I have to scroll through channels is only compounded by the fact that I need to then scroll through timeblocks. I don't care how behind the selection on Netflix is, I don't think I can bring myself to pay for cable when it's distribution method is still so impersonal. Sure, I can search for shows by name. What if I don't know what shows are available? What if I want to try a new show based on my previous viewings that I enjoyed?
Now that Netflix is getting into it's own shows, and they're releasing entire seasons at once, the concept of weekly episodes seems archaic to me. American based television series are seeming to be too slow moving, with too many filler episodes that carry on for seasons that are too long. Give me 10 or 12 episodes a year where the storyline moves. Stop drawing out seasons for 23, maybe even 26 episodes simply to score ratings and ergo advertising revenue. Case in point are previous favourites of Bones and Castle. Both of which have good antagonists in the major storyline, that get forgotten for 8+ episodes in a row in the middle of the season. Don't even get me started on the weeks of repeats between sweeps weeks.
At this point, I can honestly say that the only thing that could possibly bring me back to a cable provider (whether actual cable, or pseudo cable/fibre provider) is going to be a la carte channel selection, and even then, I can't see me going with broadcast channels. Maybe a couple of speciality channels, but even then, unless the model of television show production changes, I'm not sure that will even be enough for me to come back. For now, I'll sit here with my Chromebook laptop, watching youtube videos that are entertaining and recommended for me based on what I watch and like, while in the background plays the sounds of a hockey game.
The truth of the matter is that I have missed my simple GoogleTV box more over the last week, than I have missed cable over the last 12 months.
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