The Butt Ugly Weblog

And I was so smug...

...about not watching a lot of TV. You know, what all self-righteous intellectuals should do: go about dissing TV and being proud of doing something meaningful as opposed to approaching a vegetative state on the couch.

Then three things happened:

1. I installed the UK Auto Scheduler to my Topfield. And suddenly I could tape whatever I wanted without worrying about it changing air times.
2. I ordered MTV3 Scifi, and realized that it's airing all episodes of Dr Who, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, the first one I had never seen and the rest I had mostly missed when they were first aired (Yes, the sad truth that I missed the last three seasons of DS9 completely. And people thought I was a Star Trek geek...)
3. I got hooked to TVKaista, an online PVR system which records everything. Then you just go back and watch whatever you missed. A simply brilliant service, which unfortunately wastes quite a lot of resources (According to the copyright law, these guys must buy a separate box for every subscriber. Which is just dumb waste, environmentally and otherwise, especially since the money goes to hard drive vendors; not the authors of the content. I hope they get this one resolved soon so that they can use less resources and pay some of the saved money to the content authors.)

So now you know why I haven't been blogging. I'm totally immersed in passive media consumption - just simply because it is content that I want, whenever I want it. The freedom of not being tied to air schedules has completely changed my habits, and while I don't know how long this will last, it's just... pretty overwhelming.

Frankly, I don't even feel the urge to go and download anything off the internets anymore either. There's only so much time I can dedicate to watching television, and for my "yo box, entertain me for I am too tired to think!" -needs this all is more than enough.

There's a lot of power in traditional broadcasting still. They just need to adapt to the Internet distribution and content consuming models, and they'll be just fine.