I just want to put in my .2¢ worth about Cable TV and in particular the
"On-Demand" feature. I'm not talking about using Tivo or recording/viewing with a DVR. Nor am I talking about any Pay-Per-View stuff. Just the basic cable services and the On-Demand. I'm tempted to make this rant just a list of my complaints about the whole thing. So:
- First you are paying a heck of a lot of money, for the privilege of getting specialized programing from satellite TV stations/Networks. You even have to pay for the regular broadcast stations that were at one time FREE, but now with everything being broadcast digitally and mostly in High-Definition or from satellites anyway there is no such thing FREE broadcast TV anymore.
- Even though there are hundreds or thousands of movies and television shows available with the On-Demand feature, there isn't much in the way of "on demand". Sure you can view them anytime you want (but within a 24 hour period before you have to look for that program again if you didn't watch it within that small window of time), HOWEVER, the selection isn't always great, and many programs are only available for a couple of months before they are removed from the listings. Then you have to wait who knows how many months before they bring them back. Some programs never make it to the On-Demand lists sometimes even very popular shows. Sometimes shows that used to be available On-Demand are no longer available. I'm talking shows that are still currently running not shows that were cancelled by their network. There does seem to be a limited amount of movies available for selection.
- Many of the networks now are disabling some of the playback features in order to force you to watch the commercials, you are already paying for the programing and now they are forcing the commercials on you. More and more of these networks have the fast-forward feature disabled. It is very annoying and one of the things that annoys me the most about cable. Plus most of the time the programing is just a straight copy of whatever was originally broadcast commercials and all including those "coming up next" promos. I could get the same thing with my old VHS recorder, but at least with that I can fast forward through the promos and commercials. It used to be the On-Demand programing was just the program itself with no commercials in between. If that isn't bad enough sometimes the commercials they do have are from just one or two sponsors and every break they show the same two commercials (like Hulu and some of those TV online services do every FIVE minutes) which since they disabled the fast-forward you have to sit through again, at least the mute button usually works.
- Oh and sometimes the playback for movies on demand and some of the broadcast shows for some reason block the closed captioning. So you have to rewind sometimes to catch dialogue you might not have heard or heard weird.
OK I think that is all for now. Just wanted to get some of that out.
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