Posted on 12/07/2013 4:41:14 AM PST by Kaslin
Interesting you'd mention that. I learned how to repair my Washer and Dryer using YouTube video's. Saved myself a ton of cash vs. calling a repair guy.
Dryer was under $100 in parts, Dryer was $42 in parts. Cost of a service call was in the neighborhood of $89 to show up + hourly labor rates. Guessing I saved myself about $250 on each repair bill. Not bad.
Somewhere there is a smart business person who will figure a way to let us buy what we want to watch a la carte. It galls us to have to pay DirecTV for networks we wouldn’t watch is they paid us to do it. We enjoy college football, the History Channel and HGTV. We shouldn’t have to pay $110/mo. for hundreds of awful commercial and Leftist networks that we never watch.
The Nielsen ratings indicate that most regular TV programs struggle. The networks claim ‘hit’ status when a program manages to garner as few as 8 million regular viewers. Few programs break the 10-million viewer threshold.
Ironically, decades ago, when there were only 3 commercial broadcast networks (pre-Fox channel), many shows got 20-50 million viewers.
MASH Special - 50 million
Dallas episode - 41 milion
Beverly Hillbillies several episodes - 21-22 million
Bonanza several episodes - 21 million
There seems to be a renewed interest in many of those old ‘classic’ TV programs that can now be accessed via the Internet.
Last year, some 29 programs on the four regular broadcast networks were cancelled. Several of those got pulled after as few as two episodes were broadcast. This season, several programs have already faced a similar short-run fate.
Correction: Washer was under $100 in parts ....
My late wife and I watched the first season of Homeland and finally gave it up because it seemed every other word in the script began with the letter "F." I work in a fighter squadron and I don't hear that word as often as the actors on Homeland used it.
We liked NCIS, but it is getting to be the same thing over and over. She liked the LA version but I thought it sucked. I thought Blue Bloods was the best show on network TV, but then they had to have a homosexual theme two weeks in a row.
I have a 50 inch Sony and will try to figure out what to watch with it.
‘Arrow’ is considered a HUGE hit on the CW network, even though it only breaks 3 million viewers once in a blue moon.
For me lately it has been:
Growing Veggies from Seed
Container Gardening
Access 2010 Tips,Tricks
Similar here. Teevee is on TCM, baseball or footall; and it’s not unusual for TCM to take priority over football.
That was about the same time grocery stores were dumping the paper bags and offering the plastic ones.....
Me too. Great Company. And I bought my first Directv receiver on about Day 1 after they launched it. I'm still a customer.
Gave up TV for Lent a few years back. It was really difficult to avoid (in restaurants, etc.)
After a while, when I would catch glimpses of it, it looked really bizarre. Like a three-year-old jumping up and down saying “look at me! look at me!”
Unfortunately, I’ve gone back to watching it (mostly the Retro channels). But it would probably be cheaper just to buy DVD sets.
I keep telling myself I’m going to drop my cable “right after (football, baseball, etc.) season”. I mostly listen to sports on the radio anyway - can’t stand the TV palaverers.
There’s more good programming on tv then ever before. If you have Netfix or an Apple TV you can watch great history programs, wonderful science documentaries, and good dramas or comedies.
We’ve had our fill of cable/satellite TV and are very pleased with ROKU and Netflix. We select and pay only for what we watch.
Only thing we miss is TCM.
Does anyone know if TCM can streamed?
Just traded a basic cable bundle with internet at $103.00 for a 10.00 tethering charge. Get 4.5 GB per month. Enough to surf the web for a month without video.
Last weekend I built two gaming PC's ($600/ea.) for both sons. Got the high-end gaming video card on sale during black friday from Tiger Direct, CPU's were 50% off, Motherboards were under $60 each (also Black Friday deals) and now both of them get online to play Battlefield 4 at over 90 frames per second with their video cards set to HIGH. (Set to "Ultra" they get about 70 FPS.)
Now, I barely know what this means -- all I know is they tell me their friends are jealous because their PC's that cost MORE don't get anywhere near the FPS they get.
Gave 'em to them as their early Christmas presents.
TCM, AMC, The Military Channel, and Occasionally FOX NEWS.
I used to love the History channel, but then they decided to clog the schedule with “Ancient Aliens” and “Lost Secrets of The Bible”.
Anything to debunk the Faith that I cherish.
The point about all these “reality” shows it that they are incredibly unreal.
Replaced it with a Roku, Netflix and Hulu. Have to say we watch alot more QUALITY video now than we ever did with DirecTV.
I probably watch about 5 hours worth of "TV" that way a week. Wife watches about ZERO. My teenage sons may watch about an hour of "TV" a day. They're more interested in online gaming (Battlefield 4) with their friends.
My HDTV antenna's primary use is picking up FM Radio at this point.
The biggest declines in TV and movies came with the networks and studios being purchased by non-entertainment corporations. They are so naive that instead of actually trying to sell novel entertainment, they try to sell “entertainment formula”.
While this sounds like an unlearned criticism, the truth is that it is quite literal.
The nonfiction book ‘Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need’ was the number one selling book among screenwriting manuals on Amazon. In the United States it was reprinted fourteen times, and has become the near universal textbook for Hollywood scripts, which must rigidly follow it or be rejected.
“The book describes, in detail, the structure of the ‘monomyth’ or ‘hero’s journey’, providing a by-the-minute pattern for screenwriting.”
The trouble is that the formula is so overused that movies and television have become just parodies of other productions.
But wait! There’s more!
The non-entertainment companies decided that it was more profitable to make just a few, very big budget TV shows and movies; which on TV got so bad that critics were referring to “The Law & Order” and “CSI” channels.
And the same with movies. But they forgot the word that used to be tattooed on all Hollywood producers: “Margin”.
In the 1980s, two individuals name Golan and Globus purchased a small, failing movie studio called Cannon Films. They produced a large number of very low budget productions, often direct-to-video. But they calculated if just 1 out of 10 was a hit, it would pay for itself and the other 9, plus make a small profit. If there was one hit, and a few others broke even, Cannon would make a lot of money.
Say they made 10 movies for $1m each. Total $10m. If just one of them was a hit, it might make $50m, so $40m profit.
If a major studio produced a big film for $200m, but only made $230m, it actually had a smaller margin than Cannon Films. Only $30m profit. And $200m is a much riskier gamble than is $1m.
And this was why the major studios were in such precarious financial shape they could be bought out by non-entertainment companies.
My score was 11: Baby Boomer.
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