When I was growing up, there were always 1-2 kids that I knew that grew up in a house that didn't have TV. This amazed the shit out of me, because what else was there to do in the 1980s? These kids, consequently, had no idea who He-Man was or why Optimus Prime kicked ass. I imagine some of them have recovered, with therapy and DVDs, but the rest of them are hopelessly stunted. Given our trend this week of threads about avoiding the trends of the masses... FOCUS: Did you, or someone you know, grow up in a house without television? How did they turn out? ALT FOCUS: Now that you are old enough to post on the Internet, do you do without television now? Whyso?
I grew up without cable and with one television in my house which was controlled 100% by my parents. Usually the news was on. I've got problems, but it isn't because of my childhood TV habits.
My house was called the land before time by my friends while I was in high school. My parents refused to buy a TV other than the 20'' RCA from 1985, I didn't have cable, no microwave, and no DVD player. This was 2008. Now my parents have outfitted the house since I moved out with a 42 inch HD TV with cable, two more TV's for both of my sisters rooms, and a sick sound system with bluray. Still no microwave because my mom believes the radiowaves zap the nutrition out of the food. I'm gonna go research this and type up an email for her right now.
I have a shit-ton of televisions, but no cable or satellite. I get the vast majority of my TV from torrents on the intarwebs. Why? Because the fucking cable companies won't give me a product that suits my lifestyle, and are trying to force their business model on the masses. Their stupid cable channel packaging combined with the fact that most of what they show is crap has pissed me off enough to say "fuck you". Give me the ability to choose individual stations I want, or better yet, individual shows I want, and give it to me on demand, and I'll gladly pay. It used to be that the only reason you paid for cable was so that there wouldn't be any commercials in it. It's changed a bit since then. I know people who pay over $100 a month and sit there and watch commercials for half a night. Every night. I have about 6TB of shows, all commercial free, which I have sitting on a media server in my office. (It's a little Mac Mini, without a monitor, with 5 external drives hung off it). Every room in my house has high-speed wired network capabilities, and each TV has a simple little media player that I got from Costco for about $100 a pop. It's simple, but it works. Full 1080 via HDMI into the TV. Combine that with a little app that I tweaked called TED that automagically goes out and finds the torrents I want, and an easily-navigated file structure, and I'm good to go. Just this afternoon I flipped through and started re-watching The Good Guys from the first episode while I was working. It was awesome. I really hope that more direct-purchase series take off... For something high quality like Dexter, or Breaking Bad, or Mad Med, etc., I'd be more than happy to buy them directly for download as they came out. Fuck the big cable companies.
A girl in my class who was from a family of 8 didn't have a fucking telephone at home. Not even a rotary. This always baffled me. All the kids that lived in town had cable, and a few out in the country had parents who had those giant fucking satellite dishes. We had the UHF that picked up 3 channels. CBS, ABC, and PBS. When I was 7, decoders were finally available that would pick up 15 channels, and we were able to rent a VCR from the local video rental place. That's about the time we bought a TV with digital channel selection and a fucking REMOTE! High class, bitches.
There was a kid and his brother in high school whose parents refused to have a TV and forced them to participate in sports as activities. Consequently they were the stars of the basketball team but still were social idiots. My grandpa owned his own TV repair business so we always had large screen TVs (rear projectors), Super-VHS, and my dad knew a guy that hooked us up with a cable descrambler. Consequently, I was a social idiot. Lately I have been going Nettdatas route. My brother got our family into Popcorn Hours. A digital media device that plays all the stolen torrents you download on your TV. Im watching Deadwood for the third time as we speak. God bless America.
Growing up I never had cable, just the fuzzy local stations picked up by an ancient antenna on the roof. Eventually my parents got a Dish (cable wasn't available where our house was, yet), and my TV watching went up, though still only a few specific channels. Now that I'm on my own I don't get anything. I've got an old school TV with a DVD player AND VHS built in. Pretty bad ass, actually. I really don't see the necessity or logic in spending that much when there are only so many shows i'm actually interested in, especially since they can all be found on-line or through NetFlix. Aside from the few actually well made shows out there, TV and commercials are a giant waste of time. I'd much rather go do something myself than watch someone else do it. . . . Except murder criminals or cook meth to support my family. For now.
A bit off focus, but does anyone else remember when television used to be viewed via an antenna? One of the large suckers that went on your roof and, if you were fancy like we were, was controlled by a large dial inside the house and would rotate? Nothing says 'childhood' like being downstairs while your father yells, "Clockwise! A bit more!" so that after the show on Channel 3 was over you could watch one on Channel 12.
I find one of the benefits to the torrent thing is that you get content you normally wouldn't have access to. I find I watch a lot of BBC comedies and dramas, as well as their coverage of F1, for instance. Hell, the UK version of Top Gear is worth the hassle all by itself. I also get rugby matches and highlights via torrents.
I thought I was the only one... We had this fancy antenna rigged up on the roof of our house. Our house is perched on a tall hill and we had a 25ft antenna on the roof so we received signals from quite some distance. My dad wired up a control box inside, complete with cardinal directions, to aid in receiving the clearest signal possible. If the wind is just right, at midnight, you can watch a very fuzzy version of Mexican bullfighting...
Fuck... we hit the big time when dad brought home one of these: Was a time when the remote control for your TV was your kid.
I didn't have television up until I started college. Even so, I never turn it on. Instead, I watch a lot of Netflix and play a LOT of Call of Duty and Halo. Every so often I will miss out on a TV show reference, but that's about it. I keep up with the news online, and I've seen some shows (Dexter, Party Down, Weeds, etc.) through Netflix. However, I try to watch Archer every thursday.
I only had one friend who didn't have TV. She's pretty normal, but it was always so frustrating when she'd be at one of our houses, and we'd be watching TV for a little bit and then try and move on to do something else or just have it on in the background, and she would be so mesmerized and absorbed by it that she might as well have not been there. I love TV, but I don't have one or cable because of the expense. (God, I am coming off as so broke in these past two posts I've written, but that's okay.) I watch all my shows online because I'm in my early twenties and part of my DNA is being able to find anything I want for free on the interwebs. Sometimes I miss having TV because every now and then I want to be a couch potato and intentionally spend a day watching bad shows. But then I'll go home and try and do just that and turn it on to see someone eating a cockroach (true story) and then I remember why I don't actually miss having TV. I do find the people who purposely avoid TV annoying. I think that's something worth getting passionately angry about.
Torrents similarly changed my life. I honestly don't see the point of watching any show on tv anymore unless you absolutely have to watch it on first broadcast. I set up RSS feeds through utorrent so as soon as a new episode of a show I like is released I get it maybe 2-3 hours after it airs. The only thing I'll watch on tv now is sports, which are kind of lame if it isn't live. The best part is I don't have to worry about when a season starts, when a show airs, checking tv guides, etc. If a new episode airs, it appears on my hard drive and I can watch it whenever is convenient for ME, not when network executives have decided it will be most profitable. I honestly think the big companies are slowly bleeding themselves trying to keep their business model going. The people are slowly revolting against it, they have to adjust or they'll lose increasing amount of profits to people like us. I did have a tv growing up, but as broadband and torrents increased in prevalence, so lowered my use of the tv. I'm also really poor so my personal tv is only 19", which may as well be a computer monitor. I only got it to play ps3 now and then since everyhting else that a tv can do, a laptop can as well. One of my cousins had only the basic channels w/o cable through the vast majority of their lives growing. The kids are now the biggest tv addicts I know who watch every reality tv possible and even.......soap operas....
For those of you who torrent everything, what would you do if you got a pre-settlement letter from some law firm demanding $5000 or they'll sue you? Just ignore it? I understand that our Canadian members probably don't care because only 'mercans and Brits get hassled for that sort of thing, but I'm curious whether this crosses your mind or not?
I'd laugh and say "go ahead, take me to court". We already get hit for a "pirate tax" on everything that is empty digital media; iPods, blank CD's DVD's, etc. This is the big media corps automatically assuming we're going to pirate shit and store it on here, so we're paying for that. Fuck them. If they're going to fine me like I'm a pirate, then Argggg Matey, prepare to be boarded. Can't have it both ways. Details HERE
I try to minimize my exposure as much as possible. I severely cap my upload speeds as that's what you get in trouble for, not downloading illegally. As soon as a torrent finishes downloading, I remove it from utorrent so I don't upload anymore. I also use private trackers as much as I can, since, from what I understand, these can't be (easily)tracked by authorities. I feel like as long as I'm not one of the low-hanging fruit in terms of piraters, I'm safe.....right?
As long as you stay off downloading big budget things (new blockbuster movie, big new game) off of the big public trackers, you'll more than likely be fine. Yeah, you can run Peerguardian and the like to feel better as well if you want, but it's not a huge deal. Just be smart about it. You know, for all the Netflixes and Hulus and Gameflys and everything that's supposed to make watching things easy AND legal, it's still so much easier to just torrent everything. There's no downtime, no commercials, and the only limit is your own internet connection. My roommate has Netflix and watches things on it all the time, but whenever we want to watch something NOW I just torrent it.
I have always been enamoured with television. However, for four years between the ages of 8 and 12 we lived in a house that barely got any signal (being the days before satellite, cable or the interwebs). We did manage to get two channels: ABC and SBS. Don't think of ABC like you get in the States (or maybe, I don't know). These two channels were the government broadcast stations and didn't have new content past the 1970s, basically. To worsen matters, SBS is the mish-mash ethnic station and I'm about as white boy as they come. We also did not have a VCR until I'd finished two years of pleading with my parents. There were some upsides: 1. Plenty of The Goodies; 2. Tons of Doctor Who; and 3. Some nice foreign films where you could catch full frontal nudity with some luck.
225GB seedbox, $25 a month, 100/100mb connection and unlimmited bandwith. Just ftp from there and only use private trackers.