Psst. Hey you. Know anyone who wants to buy a PVR?
For those of you not down with the lingo, PVR stands for personal video recorder, and I no longer need mine because I bit the proverbial bullet and cancelled my TV cable subscription.
Most of my friends think I’m crazy, but my reasons are many, the first and foremost being I’m cheap.
Well, it’s more that I don’t see the value in spending $70+ a month for mind-numbing TV programming. There are a few gems out there (I am a huge fan of AMC’s Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, which I will talk more about later), but for the most part, I’m just not interested.
I have to admit, when I was using my PVR, that little gray box brought so much joy into my life. It instantly freed me from having to follow the TV stations’ scheduling timetables. With it, I can record programs live and come back and watch them at my leisure.
That is huge. Just think back to the days when you had to physically stand up and drag yourself across the living room to change the channel. And of course, being the youngest in the family, I was always the gopher who had to go and twist that analog dial… ka-chunk.
I found the PVR especially handy when I wanted to watch a hockey game. If the Canucks were on at 7 p.m., I could start watching it more than an hour later, fast forward through all the TV timeouts and intermission analysis, and pretty much get caught up to real time before the game ended. It cuts a three-hour hockey marathon in half.
If you do plan on doing that, just make sure you put a leash on any text-happy friends who insist on sending you updates every time a Sedin scores.
Now, before you go thinking I am some kind of new age luddite, it’s not like I have taken a complete vow of TV silence (far from it). It’s just that I have found a more cost-efficient way to get my digital entertainment fix.
It’s called Netflix, and by now you have probably heard about it, or know someone who subscribes.
Established in 1997, it started as subscription-based digital distribution service, mailing DVD titles to millions of users. The company has since branched heavily into the online streaming video sector, with more than 20 million users accessing movies, documentaries and TV shows via the Internet.
Despite a consumer backlash over a poorly handled price increase in its U.S. market last year (they reportedly lost 800,000 customers in a three-month span), Netflix seems to be going strong.
There are other providers offering similar services out there (Hulu and Amazon, for instance, but I haven’t looked into whether they distribute in Canada), but for now, Netflix and it’s $7.99 a month user fee suits me fine. I’ve been on it for about half a year and have yet to see television boredom on the horizon.
Netflix Canada’s selection of new releases is quite dismal (the U.S. service is way more comprehensive apparently), but again, for the price, I will happily plod through TV series like Breaking Bad, The Tudors, Arrested Development and, when it becomes available, season 2 of Walking Dead.
If you troll through the movie selection long enough, there is usually something worth watching, especially with an eclectic array of documentaries to choose from.
If there is a new release I am itching to see, I can always rent it through my Playstation 3, which also happens to be the device I use to stream Netflix from my computer to my TV (XBox, Wii and Apple TV will also do the trick).
I do miss being able to watch live sports, I now have to access the news from my computer, and I have no idea what Charlie Sheen or Kim Kardashian are up to these days… so what exactly am I missing?
—Graeme Corbett is a sports reporter/business editor for The Morning Star
