Sometime I think I think about how ironic it is; I watch 3 one
hour episodes of The Walking Dead in
a row and I realize that minus the flesh eating tendencies, I’m not too
different from those zombies.
I love this show, but like the hypocritical chain smoker, I am
going to suggest that you do not take it up because it is almost as addicting
as those cigarettes. Fortunately, there
is an end to my problem. I am currently
half-way through the second season of The
Walking Dead and pretty soon, like wildfire burning out, I will be forced
to stop because there won’t be any more episodes for me to watch. As empty as it will feel to not get my daily
dose of Rick, Karl and Lori, I look forward to this moment because I know that
I will have a lot more free time.
A true Walking Dead fan
at this point would probably say, ‘no worries, Chris, the next season starts in
just a couple weeks.’ But I can say with
confidence that I will not watch those new episodes; I don’t watch cable TV. ‘But Chris, you just said you watched 3 hours
of TV in a row’ I hear you say. No, I
watched 3 hours and (approximately 18 minutes) of TV shows. I stream all of my
TV from Netflix and I haven’t watched regular TV for anything besides sports or
news in a very long time.
This switched to streamed television is not only happening to me.
A study done by Nielson Company showed that younger generations are watching
less traditional television and more time shifted or Internet streamed
television than in the past. The study does not specify
the devices being used but I know from experience that many are streaming these
episodes from there computers from websites like hulu.com. I at least have standards; I will only watch
episodes that I can stream through Netflix on my actual TV.
Currently, people still watch much more traditional Television
than streamed television, but there clearly is a change coming. I am curious, how the world would be
different if all TV were streamed instead of broadcasted. Would there still be commercials? If not
would it cost more from the people to keep shows of the same quality?
Currently, TV viewers pay for shows by sitting and watching commercials. If we
stop doing that, advertisers stop paying and what then? Obviously broadcasted TV will never go away
completely but I can imagine a TV network that integrates broadcasted TV and
streamable content with more emphasis put on the latter.
I am not going to say that TV is bad; a lot of people before me
have already proven that, and I am not particularly concerned for the effects
of traditional television watching. I am
more interested in this change from traditional linear TV to streamed, hand-picked
TV watching.
In some ways I think this trend in streaming TV is better than
traditional TV watching. I am in more
control of what I watch than I ever was with regular TV and I don’t have to
watch nay commercials. This is kind of
huge. Instead of just sitting on the
couch and settling for anything that I can find, I watch only what I want to
watch. And although it is bad that I
watch episode after episode, I get to know characters over a long distance of
time and instead of just looking for the short humor of a youtube video, I am
watching the stories of deeply seeded characters as they go about their
adventures over a long distance of time. These are not just one hour episodes, and they aren't even a three hour movie. This is
one 20 hour (currently) story. Within this
long period of time we see characters change and develop in complex ways.
I however am only talking about the show that I am currently
hooked on and that last paragraph doesn’t apply to other shows like How I Met Your Mother and Seinfeld where characters don’t change
much and every episode is just a new stream of funny events. These shows are also frequently streamed and
these shows to me seem no better than the short momentary bit of pleasure
derived from surfing the internet which has been shown to have a negative effect on our brains.
We will not switch to totally streamed TV but if me closer to that
point, I don’t see any big problems with it.
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