What I hate about cable and satalite television: A rant.

Hey! You may be thinking! What's to hate? Plenty if you ask me. The top problem is that if you use cable or satellite to get your TV programs then you are paying to watch them twice!

How'd I come up with that you may wonder. Well, I'll tell ya!

I figure I pay plenty to watch the programs I pull in with my antenna. I pay by watching, suffering through and putting up with all the freaking commercials they stuff into the shows. Y'all do realize that for an hour drama show, for example, you are getting; I'm guessing here so don't get out the stop watch! maybe forty minuets of drama! The rest is commercials trying to convince you to eat more fast food, go to a gym, use deodorant, soap, and go into debt for that really fine car so you can be either a chic or a guy magnet. I know because, writer wanna be that I am, I once read a book about writing for television and that's what they said. The story plot had to have space built in for the commercials and for an hour show could only cover about forty to forty five minuets. Now that was an old book and I read it some time ago so it may be down to thirty minuets by now for all I know. Sure seems like it sometimes.

Then here comes the cable or satellite folks wanting me to buy into their service. Do they take out the commercials and just show the bare shows. Not on your life they don't. Not only do I think it may be impossible to do, but they probably wouldn't if they could. There's likely some contract thingy about having to show the programing as delivered. So. There you have it. You pay for satellite or cable and you essentially are buying not only the shows you want to watch but the commercials that try to get you to buy stuff as well. The commercials that pay for the programs. The programs you pay for by watching the dratted things. You pay for the show twice!

Yes, I have other gripes against the cable and satellite folks. Especially these bundles of shows they want you to sign up for. What's with that? What I want is to say, "I'll take the fifty channels for 29.95, please. And these are the channels I want: . . ." But I can't DO THAT!

No. If I sign up for the basic package I get the channels I could get off my antenna plus maybe one or two programs I'd really like and a whole raft of channels I have NO INTEREST what so freaking ever in! They are usually sports channels. GHAAAA!

I have no interest in baseball, football, soccer, golf, hockey, or racing of any kind. I might, occasionally watch figure skating on a hot summer day when nothing else is on, or gymnastics. If I don't have something interesting to read or an idea to write about. Get the picture.

All those stupid sports dedicated channels will be ignored or quickly flipped through so why would I pay to have them available!? National Geographic, the History Channel, Animal Planet, Oprah's channel, the Sci Fi channel and such, I would gladly pay to have available. There just might be fifty channels out there I'd really be interested in. Probably more like thirty or forty. So can I get that kind of deal? Say only pay 19.95 for the few channels I really want? NO. Why? Cause they got all these channels they want me to see even if I don't want to see them. Surely if I click on one of the shopping channels I will see something I just can not live without and buy it! Or find I can't live with out some obscure little channel I wouldn't normally choose.

Fine.

So what's wrong with letting me pick say twenty five or thirty of the fifty channels and then rotating through all the others twenty to twenty five a month so I can check them out and see if I'd like them? I'm still paying for the fifty channels and they still get to tempt me with all these other goodies, some of which I might actually decide I like and choose to keep, right? Nope. That don't fly either. They probably have some dumb contract with somebody, like the sports channels, so that they have to push them on folks who don't really want them just so the folks who are addicted to sports can get their fix if they happen to show up at my house during a game.

My other gripe against the cable and satellite folks? Glad you asked.

It seems to me that we are being forced to get these darn services like it or not. I live out in the country, several miles from the broadcast stations that send out the TV channels. If I don't have my antenna lined up exactly right, now that we've gone digital, I either can't get diddly or all I get is a massively broken and pixalated screen and audio so mangled I can't piece together what is being said. Oh, I do get a nice picture when I get it lined up right. Big deal. I got at least as decent a picture with the old analog tech. So it'd get a little fuzzy or snowy if the antenna was a little off! Big deal, I could still see the show without having to tramp out to my antenna to use a pipe wrench to realign it! Every time the wind blows hard enough to move the antenna around I have to fiddle with it!

Besides all the problems I had with the old analogue antenna I would still have with cable or satellite. Storms can interfere with both just as easily as they did with the old fashioned antenna. Ice or wind might have broken off some of the old antenna's and wind may have moved them around but they'd still work! With satellite you have to brush off the snow or accumulated rain from the dish, providing you can reach the thing and I swear rain wet cable just plain messes up. At least it did the one time I did have cable.

All in all I'm quite put out with the whole deal. If I weren't addicted to watching the darn TV I'd just turn it off and leave it off. Maybe get Net Flix and just use it to watch movies. Unfortunately I do so like to watch the weather reports.

I know, I know. I can get my weather fix off of the Internet, but all I have at the moment is dial up and that is so freaking slow! I definitely can't get Net Flix over it either, or that internet TV thing a friend has told me about. That may be my biggest gripe. If I want half way viewable TV, just half way! I'll likely have to get either satellite or cable. Like it or not. Grrr.