Television

I’ve always hated the idea of paying to watch television. Why would I want to pay a fair amount of money every month for mediocre programming that rarely interests me; what about the dozen channels that I must subscribe too that are rarely watched, most likely to subsidize the cost of the one good channel. On top of that, I am expected to pay for the right to watch the many commercials that are broadcast? The whole idea just doesn’t sound like a very good bargain, especially now that there are alternatives, perhaps not the most viable, but what can we do until the content producers agree to play ball?

Needless to say I do not pay for cable television. I subscribed to Netflix and Hulu, ended up dropping Hulu after several months and have been happy with Netflix and purchasing cheap Blu-ray discs. Comparing Netflix and Hulu, I felt like Netflix was a much better value. Hulu has all of these annoying clips and previews which would get mixed in with the videos. At the time, it felt as if both options had a lot of the same content. When it came down to comparing the two, Netflix did not require that I watch commercials, making the choice easy.

Not to say that Netflix does not have its share of flaws. Everything can improve; the following annoyances come to mind:

• When streaming content on a computer, surround sound is not available
• There are no options for per device settings, in particular quality control per device.
• Netflix has lots of B movies, heck, some of these movies are about as amateur as  you  can get.
• Netflix really needs some better/more ways to sort and search through their titles.

I’m sure not all of this is Netflix’s fault. I've heard from a fair amount of people that Netflix really has to fight with the content producers to get the shows it currently has. Sadly, it seems that these content producers are slow to adapt their business models to modern times. Without much competition, we can expect it to be a slow process.