There are so many ways to watch television these days without even having an antenna. Recently one of the 'add-on' units for your home theater, Boxee, introduced a new feature that brings HD-quality channels in your area to your television for less than subscribing to cable.
Great, right? No more paying out the nose to watch all those reality shows or sports on the weekends. And in HD. So - why am I not that excited?
Well, let's face it. There's a good reason most tech-minded people don't like paying for TV and/or movies. For one, it can get expensive and cut into our budget for new console games that run as much as a month of cable per game. We also have to budget for those convention trips and the costumes we'll wear, we have to make the costumes in many cases and there are those marathon viewing sessions with friends re-living the days gone by of our favorite sci-fi/fantasy show(s).
You know, the good ones. The ones that barely lasted a season or they killed just to use the budget on the next remake of "The Cosby Show". (Bitter? Us? Pfft.)
After all that, we might have some time to surf the web for the latest tech gadgets or something kitchzy and geeky to put on our desks. We need to show the entire world that we're geeks after all.
If you haven't figured out the real reason already, it's pretty simple. TV is a time-sucking black hole that we use for background noise more often than not.
Before I cut the cable-cord I did the math based on what we were paying a month for basic cable with no premium channels and figured out that I was essentially paying $10/channel for what I actually watched. In most cases, that actually equaled $10/show! These days I've taken a liking to several BBC shows available via my $9 Netflix subscription which would make my dollar value even higher - their seasons are about half that of ours. (12-13 episodes)
$10 per channel/show to sit on my butt and either have background noise I could achieve with a radio or by popping in a DVD I already own, or to just sit on my butt and decompress.
Don't get me wrong, decompressing is good. But is it worth even the $55 Boxee is charging?
No. Not in my book.
I used to think differently of course. I took a sales and networking course once for work and some of the folks were talking about how in order to succeed you needed to make better use of 'wasted time'. The time you spend doing activities that don't move you forward in life or elevate you.
Granted, I am glad I don't particularly like multi-level marketing and I never invested in real estate like most of the other folks I was hanging around - they had a point, though. If you are sitting idly by, staring at a screen that probably isn't interracting with you in any meaningful way - what good is that doing for your life? We all need down-time, that's for sure. I'm just not sure we need to spend the same kind of money monthly to watch the tube that you would spend to go to a major theme park for one day.
Call me old-fashioned. I'm an elitist and I can live with that. If it means that I don't have any clue about who the next American Idol is or if any of the Bachelor's ever actually end-up married so be it. I'm not losing any sleep over here.
Well, my husband has taken to watching WWII in HD on Netflix of late. So actually, I am losing a bit. But at least it's something historical and interesting.
Photo courtesy of Gilgongo via Flickr
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