TV by Mail

I won’t sugar coat it: I’m a TV addict. Perhaps it’s because of a lack of anything else to do or a general need to have some kind of noise happening in the house; but I watch a lot of television. The thing is, it is so annoying. Clutter all over the picture, promos incessantly blaring… it’s all making it so difficult to just sit down and watch something these days.

So, I’ve been dabbling in alternatives to watching live TV. First it was the TiVo, which enabled me to schedule shows when I wanted them, even letting me skip the commercials. But it couldn’t take away the constant clutter and garbage that gets in the way of the show.

Next, I set up a video server: a Mac Mini, onto which I ripped DVD sets of TV shows, putting seasons’ worth of programs at my fingertips with no clutter, no promos, no network logo bugs, no commercials.

And then yesterday, I discovered another way to divorce myself from the spectre of the cable company: Netflix. I signed up for this service yesterday morning, and amazingly I received my first discs in the mail this morning! I put all seven seasons of “The West Wing” in my Netflix queue, so I have 8 episodes to watch this week; I’ll send them back and get the next batch — I have enough TV shows in my queue to keep me occupied for 9 months, all without commercials or clutter and ready to watch when I’m ready to watch them.

I also bought “The Sarah Silverman Program” from iTunes, episodes automatically download themselves to my Mini video server every week, ready to watch, without ads.

I could do this as well with “Lost”, “Ugly Betty”, and “Battlestar Galactica” — the only shows that I follow weekly right now — but I wouldn’t be able to catch them in high definition that way. Looks like I’ll be keeping the cable for a bit longer, but I’ve already cut the service down as far as I can. The whole concept of paying an outrageous sum every month so that I can be incessantly marketed to really irks me. With all the crap, the ads, the promos, the clutter, the cable company should be paying me to have it in my house.