How I stopped caring about cable and learned to love the internet.

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Lets face it. We live in an on-demand culture where instant gratification is not accepted, it is demanded by the consumer. Our (the average American) pastime, watching the tv, fills this need, but at an insanely high price, for poor broadcast quality and not very much content. When my cable bill started getting past the $100 a month mark (for internet, cable, and HBO), I started to freak out and began to look for alternative solutions to my viewing needs.


First off, I canceled my Comcast subscription and ordered high speed DSL from my local phone company. They tried to get me to sign up for the dish network, but mounting a dish on the side of my building violates my lease (even though there are already two dishes on the back from tenants past), so I refused that offer. The goal was to become independent and choose my own programming. Goddamn it!

After my DSL was up and running, I began looking at a way to substitute the on-demand movie functionality that I had with Comcast. I found a small company called ITVN that offered Stars and Encore, and well as the promise of providing pay per view movies in the near future. I do feel that IPTV is the future of home entertainment, but it is unfortunate that the future still is far away.

After struggling with tech support to get my box to talk with my network, I began to watch all the movies Stars and Encore offered on-demand, as well as their live streaming. The whole experience was very frustrating, the movies would pause every few minutes to re-buffer, and the picture quality was very grainy from the artifacting.  That being said, if you like your porn (and I know you do!), it offers over 100 flavors of genital grinding goodness.

The next step was a google search for streaming tv, and I found a site called TV LINKS, that had decent quality (for free) of most of the shows I like watch. I still had a buffering problem, but when something is free you have a little more patience with it. A lot of the major networks also have their flagship shows for streaming as well. The commercials are annoying, but at least you are in control of your content.

Netflix filled my HBO/Skinamax void, and there is something to be said about having the ability to watch a full season of your favorite show without having to wait until next week comes around. If you don’t mind paying a small fee for each show, direct2drive and iTunes have a lot of content these days as well.

One last way to get all your programming, is the most illegal of all, the dreaded torrent and usenet downloads. Easynews.com is a great usenet server for the novice user, and has more porn, music, and movies than you could ever dream of, just remember you are taking a risk when using this service, but if you don’t care about stealing, it is the best way to go.

So use this information as you will, and keep pushing for more choice in content selection. Eventually the media giants will fall, and will give affordable time wasting goodness back to the masses.

-m.hersted

3 thoughts on “How I stopped caring about cable and learned to love the internet.

  1. Watching TV with DSL is almost like cheating with dial up. I was at my Uncle’s house and his DSL sucked watching longer movies. Youtube was o.k., but streaming was not as tight as high speed internet like Comcast. First off, Fuck Comcast. They are monopolistic corporate piranhas that want to fuck all their customers like they’re breaking a gang bang record. Television is about to get fucked by the government’s take down of all analog signal airways by January 2009. The feds expect everyone to own a HDTV by then. As far as I know, there are no government grants to help those out that do not own a HDTV. When this happens, there will be a law that people will come to find out about in regards to streaming and getting cable through the internet. It will be like the Napster situation, only ten years later in 2009. Right now, itunes is trying to become a media monopoly. They are doing o.k. at it, but there will be more competition. I’m a big fan of Weeds, the TV show on Showtime. I can’t fathom paying money for basic cable and Showtime, so you have to get the episodes off of Limewire. Shit, they had episodes that were not even on the air yet and I got to watch them. Oh yeah, bit torrent shit is about as user friendly as Linux. I’m assuming the same folks came up with them.
    The internet as we know it will be short lived. We will be talking about how cool it was to be able to use wifi and youtube years from now, after the government steals the information and the servers from the public via martial law. Let’s hope Jesus comes back and raptures all those dumb fucks out of this planet before then.

  2. Justin. Before the internet as you know it, we used a thing called bulletin boards (or bbs’s), a person would dial directly into a persons computer and transfer files and information. I agree that the internet of tomorrow will not be what we are using today, and that for the general populous it will be limited by corporate assholes, but there will always be underground forms of communications and for the exchange of ideas, just keep year ear close to pipeline to catch the latest wave.

    I hope the internet as we know it dies before Jesus has a blog. Just what the world needs is another preachy blog.

    zooom

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