Last week, I cancelled my DirecTV service. The three months of “Vacation” from DirecTV that I arranged over the summer proved to me that I can successfully live without cable and satellite television. The WGA strike’s affect on the more random, transient programming I watch didn’t hurt either.
Don’t get me wrong, I still watch television shows — and, lucky for me my favorite “Must Watch” network shows are programmed and provided by NBC, FOX and ABC and not CBS.
I say lucky for me, because the video quality on CBS’s “Innertube” service has left me feeling that CBS hates the Internet, hates their viewers or both.
Today, I decided to check out that much-hyped CBS reality show where the show producers abandon 40 or so kids in some ghost town with a hope that they go all Lord of the Flies on one another.
I notice a change almost immediately in CBS’s feed. Maybe they dumped the Real Networks-based streaming service and its constant “buffering…” messages that annoyed me the last time I wrote about Internet televsion?
CBS replaced the “buffering… buffering… buffering… ” with — well… — I’ve recorded a 30-second audio sample (yes, the video was just as poor as the audio). Various press releases state that move networks (the service that really impressed me with their ABC and FOX stream delivery) now includes CBS as one of their clients, so this quality problem would appear to be CBS-originated rather than a move networks problem. Which is good, because I really like the other stuff move networks delivers to my house.
Anatomy of an Internet Television Show
NBC (Ignore the downloadable shows, they’re only for Microsoft owners using the Windows-only version of the Internet), FOX and ABC place complete episodes of most of their interesting shows on the web.
Most of the network streaming services make you watch the same commercial five or six times in the place of the twenty minutes of commercials you’d normally see during a one hour show, with ABC being the only network mixing in their own show promotions with the commercials.
I actually prefer this approach to traditional advertiser-supported television. If an advertiser wants to pay a network some money in exchange for me to view an episode’s worth of tv, even if there’s no chance in hell of me ever buying or using that product, then good for them and great for me. I’ll take six 15 second commercials in exchange for twenty minutes of random interruptions any day.
So, what do I watch?
NBC
FOX
- The Simpsons
- Bones
- House
- Kitchen Nightmares
- Hell’s Kitchen (Hell’s Kitchen link currently plays American Dad)
ABC
CBC
(the trick is to click pause and let the show download first)
- The National
- Toronto 6pm News (when it works)
Shows I can live without, but wish were available online:
Bravo
- Project Runway
- Top Chef
FX
- The Riches
Local News
I live next to the foothills in Boulder within an apparent RF deadzone (ask any cab driver trying to bill my credit card at my house). I wish there was one local Denver TV station that streamed or allowed the download of local news rather than splitting their stories into tiny clips as added “multimedia rich media extras” linked from Web pages.