Fake Bill Gates

I’m looking around at LCD TVs for when I move in August. I already have a vga-rca converter that I use to connect my computer to my 36 inch SDTV, but I want to get something with a higher resolution. I’m tempted to just get a projector, although replacing bulbs for $200-300 every 2 years isn’t fun.

Then I got to thinking about why I was buying a better TV. When I move in August, I don’t intend to buy any satellite or cable as I have realized that they’re obsolete. I generally watch:

• The Daily Show (on hulu and comedycentral.com)
• Colbert Report (on hulu and comedycentral.com)
• Chuck (on hulu and nbc.com)
• Heroes (on hulu and nbc.com)
• South Park (on southpartstudios.com)
• Assorted stand-up specials (on comedycentral.com)
• Stargate Atlantis
• Mythbusters
• Scrubs
• Good eats

The Daily Show and Colbert Report have four new episodes every week and they’re off a full week every 4 weeks or so. The writer’s strike started in November of 2007, and most of these other shows won’t have a new episode (since the strike) at least until the middle of July. In that 8 month span, I’ve seen all the reruns of every one of these shows except a few episodes of Penn & Teller. Most will come back with roughly 4 episodes per month while in season, and most of these are available for free, some in HD, through legal online venues. Of the last few shows, we’re talking 4 shows x 4 episodes = 16 episodes per month, in season. With a cable/satellite bill at roughly $50 just for the TV service, we’re talking $3.13 per episode, and I have to suffer through all the ridiculous and grossly irrelevant advertising. Here’s a look at what advertisers apparently think is acceptable:

Family Guy is playing, and Bill Engvall comes, pauses the show, and gives a short advertisement, and then unpauses the show. There’s plenty of other ridiculousness as promotions often take up the bottom third of the screen during the regular content.

I won’t even address how ridiculous television news is (that’s for another rant). Between TapTheHive, the Daily Show, and Colbert Report, I get way more and way better quality news that’s highly tailored to my interests.

The part that I don’t get is that advertising time is just under 1/3 of all the television we watch (8-9 min of a 30 min show and 16-19 min of a 60 min show). If you make $6/hr, your 20 minutes are worth $2 in the aggregate (and I’m Fake Bill Gates… my time is worth astronomically more than that). Now, I despise Apple with the burning hot intensity of ten thousand suns, and I wish even more vile things upon DRM, but iTMS is the only decent commercial web-video service around. If there were more stores like it, dumping cable/satellite entirely would be feasible for many more people. Seeing as I’m already paying $3.13 per episode of commercial laden video, if I paid $5 for an episode without advertising, and I make minimum wage, I’d still come out ahead.

And if you’re worried about re-runs, catch them on DVD through netflix or ebay. Hell, the SG-1 box set was $100 at Costco for all 10 seasons. With most seasons having roughly 20 episodes, that’s around 50 cents per episode, all with no commercials.

The problem is that we’re in a rut right now. People use DVRs to skip commercials, and as things shift over to web-based systems, ad-block further decimates revenue for “broadcasters”. Meanwhile, cable reverts to compression to deal with bandwidth overcrowding instead of dumping analog signals for IPTV. Even then, most people are too deluded to do the math on how much of their all-you-can-eat TV plan they actually use. They’re apparently more willing to pay extensively for the opportunity to watch things they don’t actually watch, than actually to just pay for what they watch.

And all of this completely ignores the elephant standing in the room: torrent networks which spew commercial free video for $0 per month via RSS feeds.

Vote with your dollars, and disconnect your cable/satellite. I know I will.