If you genuinely want a LOT of the crap on television to just go away, tell your congresscritters that you support "A la carte" cable instead of being required by the cable companies to sell you tons of crap in a bundle just to get one or two channels that you really care about. If that happens, you can vote with your dollars. Now, if you want the history channel, you still have to pay for Oprah and the Lawn and Garden channel. I have a friend that really only watches NASCAR but to get the NASCAR channels, he has to buy the ultra-super-duper-premium-platinum-edition cable bundle and pays some insane monthly fee (over $150 per month, I think) just to watch two or three channels that he likes. All that money pays to support crap that he doesn't want, doesn't like, and never watches. The cable company really doesn't care if he doesn't like Nancy Grace or Oprah Winfrey or anything else since his checks come in the mail every month.
Only paying for the channels that you want might also influence channels like the History Channel to actually put some history stuff back on since people who specifically choose to watch history might not be thrilled to pay for "Finding Bigfoot" all day.
/end rant
Exactly! My brother was the same way... all he wanted was "Speed Channel" and some car hop-up, hotrod, and racing channel stuff... and he was having to shell out big bucks for it, so he dropped the satellite entirely. Not worth the money.
I'm just about there myself. I only got satellite because in the old days, Sci-Fi actually showed good "classic" science-fiction shows (LONG before they became "Sy-Fy" and became the dumping ground for embarrassing wastes of money like "sharknado" and various wrestling and boxing crapola (still don't get that one-- who the h3ll turns on a supposedly science fiction channel to watch FRIGGIN' WRESTLING and BOXING?? :confused2: Makes no sense whatsoever). I liked History Channel back in the day (despite the programming leading to the nickname "the Hitler Channel") and it USED to have genuine historical programming and various documentaries on it... now it's bigfoot crap, alien crap with dudes who seriously need a haircut and a mental evaluation, and other such crap. The "science channels" (Discovery, etc) are all just as bad...
Then of course they take a 90 minute movie and stretch it out to three hours because they have five minute commercial breaks (or LONGER!) every five minutes of the movie... I've seen them do about a MINUTE of the movie in the middle of TWO five minute long commercial breaks! And all this on TV that we PAY FOR, which obviates the need for commercials in the first place...
It's ridiculous...
More and more I find myself simply buying old TV shows from the 70's on DVD and watching them when we have time to watch TV... The only thing I find interesting on satellite TV anymore is the historical dramas like "Vikings" and "Turn"... If I could get them any other way, I think I'd drop DirecTV like a hot potato...
I agree... It'd be REALLY nice to be able to pay for JUST the channels you want... maybe return the focus to where it should be on those channels, and wouldn't have to support utter GARBAGE like anything Oprah is involved with (her own channel... really?? I removed it from my guide-- never COULD stand Oprah and never watched her... sure don't support ANYTHING she's involved in and don't want to watch anything she's supporting).
Just too much garbage out there now...
Of course that's precisely why it'll never happen...
Later! OL JR