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Posts Tagged ‘roku’

Trashing Paradigms: Dropping the Hammer

Posted in Hi Tech, Television, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 17 Jan 2017| 8 Comments »

Today, we went dark. Sort of.

Today, our cable and land-line were cut off. We still have internet and our mobile phones, but the dedicated connections for television and phone are as dead as Monty Python’s parrot.

During our fortnight-long sans cable experiment, everything about our television viewing habits came under scrutiny: what we watch, when we watch, and how we watch. We learned a great deal about our habits and thoroughly re-evaluated what we considered “worthwhile” viewing. After two weeks, we no longer think of things in terms of networks, but see them in terms of providers, apps, and individual shows.

Not everything was rosy, though, and before we dropped the hammer, we had to make some compromises. (more…)

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Trashing Paradigms: Cutting Cable

Posted in Hi Tech, Television, tagged , , , , , , , , on 05 Jan 2017| 7 Comments »

On January 1st I woke early, made a pot of coffee, and sat down to watch the Sunday morning punditry. In general, this is not a good idea as it often leads to shouting and throwing things at the television, which tends to wake my wife and scare the cat, but it’s a hard habit to break.

First up, as always, was ABC’s “This Week with” … whomever they got for that week … George … Martha … Krusty the Clown. I turned the television on, punched in Channel 4, and was presented with a black-bordered message from Frontier Communications, our cable provider. It informed me that the distributor of our local ABC affiliate was being a pooter and wouldn’t negotiate a “reasonable rate” for their programming and, since Frontier “won’t settle for less than fair pricing for our customers,” they chose instead to deprive us of the ABC channels altogether.

It was the last straw. (more…)

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