The Evolution of Television

It looks like analog TV broadcasts got a stay of execution, not that it matters to me. I am ready for the transition, but that's not why I don't care. Honestly, even if I hadn't gotten my coupons and digital converter boxes (I only have cable for internet access and my TV is old and has rabbit ears), I probably wouldn't notice. As far as I'm concerned, my television set is for games and (occasionally) movies (my son loves Cars).

I actually watch a handful of TV shows currently: Dexter, BattleStar Galactica, Heroes, Smallville, Tudors, House, Lost, Fringe, and various PBS programs. By the way, not to change the subject, but Dexter is an awesome show. If you have the means, I highly suggest picking it up. But back to my point: I follow a fair number of different TV shows (too many, really) and basically never watch any of them on my television. In fact, several of the series I've enjoyed the most (like Firefly and Babylon 5) were ones that I watched after they were already off the air. Then there's House and Smallville, which I started watching from the beginning after they had been on the air for several seasons already. Through a combination of Netflix, Hulu, and the sites of the various stations that carry these shows (some of which annoyingly use software that only works on Windows/Mac), I watch basically all of them on my computer.

Which incidentally is also why I still have an old CRT television set. Why would I want to spend money on a big, expensive TV when I have a beautiful high resolution screen that I can take into any room in the house? In fact, if I do the math based on viewing distances, I'd need something like a 100 inch screen to cover the same amount of my visual field as my laptop. I can pause, rewind, quit anytime and pick up where I left off later, too. Sure, I could do that with a PVR, but I don't have one. I skipped that stage of television evolution and waited for on demand access to arrive.

As far as I'm concerned, the FCC might just as well free up all of the spectrum used for broadcast television (analog and digital) and use it for something else. Yeah, yeah, I know -- not everybody has broadband, but with all the work that's gone into this switch, maybe we could have fixed that instead of limping the dinosaur that is television along for another generation. The mammals are here and the age of dinosaurs is over. Or maybe I should shut up and be thankful lots of people still use televisions; there's more bandwidth for me that way anyway.