Canadians Turning Off TV…
August 10, 2007 · By Shane Edwards
This is big news, though not surprising news.
TV is simply not worth the money anymore. It doesn’t matter if you can get 29 channels with basic cable. It doesn’t matter that for 2 bucks more you can have 120 channels. There simply is not enough good programming to justify the cost.
In my 32 years, I have lived through massive growth of television. From the time I was born up to my late teens, houses went from 1 TV set per house, up to 1 per room. Cable TV launched, pay TV launched, sattelite TV launched. Since about age 25 though, I have seen the trend reverse. People I know are pulling TVs out of rooms. I don’t know anyone with a TV set in the kitchen anymore. There was a race on to get lots of channels, but now more and more people I know are dropping cable, satellite, everything. It’s a waste of money. You simply don’t get $100 a month worth of value out of 110 channels. People are discovering there are better things to do with their time.
Exactly. You sit down one evening, you want to find something to watch…there’s nothing there. It’s crap. If you can’t just sit down and find something after flipping through 30 channels, what’s the point? I keep basic for the channel reception. And to try to upgrade? I have to go through Rogers’ Customer Service and they won’t give me a price ahead of time for how much everything I want will cost. Some customer service.
We haven’t had cable for about 5 years now for the exact reasons that have been stated. Instead, we have a reasonably-sized LCD widescreen and an above average DVD player and my wife and I buy DVD movies and/or TV series that have interest for us. This is in lieu of cable and we budget so we spend about the same per month as a typical cable subscriber except we literally have something to show for it.
We can watch what we want when we want and not be beholden to the broadcasters who can’t seem to get past reality shows these days.
Two words that encapsulate everything that is wrong with TV at present: Chris. Hansen.
The Conservatives are pushing for the CRTC to allow a “pay per channel” model instead of the current “bundle package” one.
If I were able to pay per channel, I’d probably only have 12 channels and they’d mostly be stuff like TLC, History and Discovery.
We dropped our cable firm (Shaw) at the start of the year and put up an antenna. Since we only get two channels, channel surfing doesn’t take much time. Usually we just watch Global National with Kevin Newman and a few British mysteries on CBC. As for CBC National– where I used to work — they should just call it Jihad Central; what a bunch of losers.
Like them specialty channels – take showcase action for example – how many times shall they repeat the six shows they have? Like Nash Bridges – season one has been played over and over for moren than a year now! TV show box sets of DVD’s are getting cheaper and cheaper – like we just got season one of the waltons – for 18 bucks – nearly 21 hours of programs for less than 20 bucks – better to buy box set DVD’s as far as possible – then we are also spared all the olay hamburger and tampon adverts…broadcast TV sucks!!