Television in this house is a bone of contention.
Eva *has* to have it on. As far as I can tell, she doesn't *watch* it more than about thirty percent of the time, but it's utterly impossible to know when she's paying attention and when she isn't. She could be sleeping on the couch, and if you turn off the television she'll snap awake and yell "I was watching that!"
"You were snoring."
Whereupon she'll tell you every last thing that happened in the last fifteen minutes. And this could be one of the few times the show wasn't a rerun.
Of course, it usually is a rerun, an that's one of the things that infuriates me about television. The same episode of the same show plays three, sometimes four times a day. Did you know that? And Eva can watch all four of them. This drives me absolutely nuts. After the second time I have the script memorized. That's when the earphones go on. Well, then and whenever there's anything humiliating on TV--which is often, since our entire notion of comedy seems to revolve around somebody's pain.
And it's always the same shows.
For the most part we watch (she watches) all of three channels in this house: the Comedy Network, Comedy Gold, and Déjà View. We can access Christ knows how many other channels--we've downsized our cable package, but it's still a ridiculous number--but we pretty much watch three. And those three channels seem to have exactly three shows on them, 24 hours a day. Comedy Network's got The Big Bang Theory. I like that show, don't get me wrong: there's a little of Sheldon Cooper and quite a bit of Raj in me. But why does it always have to be the first couple of seasons, cycling over and over?
The other channels have--I don't even pay attention to what they have, to be honest. I keep hearing the same theme music, over and over again. And don't even get me started on the commercials.
None of this bothers Eva, though. Not one bit. I think TV is some kind of comforting thing for her, an adult security blanket or something. Security against what, I don't know. But I think she had a TV on in the womb. Every marriage has these things you just have to accept because you're never going to change them, and this is the big one in ours. Doesn't stop me from fuming to myself every time I ask her to please change the channel since the same episode of The Big Bang Theory is on here for the third time today and she'll snap "there's nothing else on".
There's like two hundred other channels and she doesn't even bother to look at any of--*sigh* grab your earphones, Ken.
It's not as if I watch much myself, when I deign to watch TV at all. Occasionally I will get sucked into whatever Eva's watching, but generally for me it's hockey, it's baseball, or it's 680 News.
Hockey and baseball need no explanation. Eva doesn't like either of them (particularly baseball, which I'm not normally allowed to watch with her in the house). And 680 News is not even television: it's radio on TV, no picture at all. Tell you this, though: I never can watch the same game of hockey or baseball twice and 680 News is my idea of background noise: in half an hour of listening (I don't even have to be looking at the TV!) I can be up to date on everything that is anything.
Let's see, what else? I used to watch Discovery, the Learning Channel, and several others of that ilk. I haven't so much as looked at them in several years, ever since they were infected by the reality TV fungus. Now, ten times a year there's Game of Thrones. Sigh. We have to pay for a whole channel for ten hours a year.
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We have Netflix.
Just the Canadian Netflix. I know the U.S. one has worlds more content, but the Canadian Netflix has worlds enough for us. Particularly since (ha-ha) Eva watches two shows on it. She goes to sleep every night to Futurama and the only other series I've seen her watch is Weeds. To be fair, she has plans to watch more, and we have prowled over the stand-up comedy routines.
I love Netflix because (a) no commercials and (b) she watches it on her iPad, which casts much less light than the TV in the bedroom used to, meaning I can go to sleep at night now.
Over thirty percent of Canadian households have Netflix subscriptions now. I wonder how many still bother to pay for a satellite system on top of that. People tell me I can pirate Game of Thrones and stream my sports, and that's great except I hate watching anything longer than a short YouTube video on my computer. Actually, for reasons I have trouble articulating, I don't like watching anything on my computer. The whole point of a computer is that it has a keyboard and a mouse. Just sit there and watch? That's too passive for me.
We have one friend who has her computer hooked up to her TV, and that'd be great except Eva wants to watch things on TV while I'm on my computer. That's actually how we spend most of our evenings. Basically, what I'm saying is that our habits are going to have to change. It's happening in slow motion: already Eva's down to three channels, having discarded the Food Network when it stopped being about food, and watching Netflix more and more, particularly at bedtime.
We're working towards cutting the cord...and the Canadian TV industry is working hard to strangle us with that cord.
Forgive my cynicism. The Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has never once in its history put Canadian consumers first and I don't believe for a second that they have any intention of starting to now. They've been in the pocket of our distribution and
Per the linked article, here are the issues supposedly facing Canadian TV:
The overarching concern for everybody is a loss of profit. TV stations that rely on advertising for revenue have seen their profits plummet as Canadians seek ways to avoid ads entirely. Rogers and Bell, meanwhile, own both the distribution network and most of the content. To me that's a clear conflict of interest, but the CRTC feels otherwise. Personally, I've never quite understood why I pay Bell a hundred and some-odd bucks a month for TV and still have to watch ads on top of that, when Netflix can get me more content, ad-free, for $7.99 a month. Something doesn't quite make sense there.
PICK AND PAY: As things stand, if I want the Toenail Channel, I must also subscribe to the Nipple Channel, the Drying Paint Network, and Bowlerama!, among others. The CRTC says they want to force Bell and Rogers to offer a la carte channel selection, and maybe that might even come to pass, but I'm quite certain the providers will have their profits protected to the last penny. If you want one "premium" channel, it'll cost you a hundred bucks a month. Two will be fifty bucks each; three will be $33.33 each...you get the idea.
Rogers and Bell--I'm convinced they're actually the same company, the same way I'm convinced that there's only one set of gas stations in this country that just happens to operate under a plethora of names--say they're opposed to letting people pick their own channels, "especially if it's paired with a skinny basic option" where the mandatory tier of perhaps a dozen channels costs $20-30 a month, maximum. Their research shows this would not be a popular option. Well, duh. People don't care overmuch about the networks any more. People want the channels up the dial. And not all of them: I'm convinced quite a few of them would die out if they weren't subsidized. That's the free market for you, and in this case I think it should be let to work.
LOCAL TV is dying as well. Good riddance, says I. Because of the oddities of satellite, I've long been able to see my dad's local content, my mother-in-law's local content, but not my own. The only reason for local television is local news, and what little happens in this city worth knowing about can easily be learned from the web or local radio. Many people I know don't even bother watching the news on TV anyway.
CANADIAN CONTENT. Being something of a nationalist, I've always harboured a soft spot in my heart for "CanCon". Since the early seventies, 30% of what's broadcast over Canadian radio and television -- by law -- has had to be Canadian. This has had some positive effects, of course--bands that would have never made it without radio airplay got famous on the back of CanCon--but nowadays even I have to admit there's just no point any more.
Canadians have shown over and over and over again that they don't care about Canadian television, in particular. Don't get me wrong, there are some good shows out there, and always have been--but I can't think of a single instance where a Canadian show that wasn't sports-related led its time slot in the history of Canadian television. They say the quickest way to tell a Canadian from an American is that the Canadian will be insulted if you call her American. Well, when it comes to TV viewing habits, Canadians and Americans are awfully hard to tell apart.
I believe, incidentally, that CBC television should either be scrapped or, more palatably, turned into something more akin to PBS.
We are slowly migrating online. I'm surprised it's taken this long to even start the process--I remember predicting sometime around 1985 that by the year 2000 there wouldn't be such a thing as televisions or networks. The cable companies are running scared, and for good reason. It's iTunes all over again, or Blockbuster Video. Once again I find myself quoting Robert Heinlein from 1939:
There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
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