Called it, told them, and now they can see it for themselves. The parents texted me the other day saying one of their favorite channels is going to stop transmission.
It’s not all bad, I guess, it seems that the parents are not especially fond of televangelists, or indeed, any other person that comes out of the magic box asking them for money. Nor are they especially inclined on getting more than a small share of news programmes a day, a welcome change from the neverending deluge you see on public locations. However, trouble started brewing on their High-Definition paradise sometime over Christmas.
As ever with people whose parents know they are technologically minded, the problems started when the parents told me to look at something wrong with the TV on Christmas Eve. There was nothing wrong with the TV. However, there was a small banner underneath some channels saying that the channel would cease transmissions in a couple of weeks. Apparently I was to figure out a way to stop it.
“Sure, let me just go back to 1991 and beat Tim Berners-Lee with a croquet mallet,” I didn’t say. This was inevitable from the moment that companies realized that a streaming service makes money, also that it isn’t regulated quite like airwaves, and that it skirts having to go through most of the palavers of setting up regional distribution arms, or countries that demand that you boost their fledgling entertainment industry by demanding that they make local productions.
Not that any of this knowledge solved my parents’ issues. My recommendation is for them to go into their cable operator’s office to get a better deal on their now premium channel-less subscription now before they merely readjust the price under them. I expect they will procrastinate on this as befits their new skillset. Anyway. What I did tell them was that Television is a dead medium. And that they should probably broaden their hobbies into something that doesn’t need a subscription service. I did briefly consider getting them into a streaming service, but I have seen where this particular road ends, and I don’t want them suddenly realizing they have 24 streaming services without any idea how to cancel them.
As we finished a lovely Christmas dinner cooked by everyone in the family (which somehow managed to cause no-one even the smallest episode of intestinal distress despite the unholy combinations of food) I left and realized, with a bit of a chuckle, that radio is more likely to survive television as a preferred medium of content consumption, much in the same way actual theaters are probably going to outlive movie theaters. It gets very strange to see tech develop in this way, another huge middle finger to those teachers who said that computers were for the finance departments, and yet another sign that you shouldn’t get too comfortable with the world as you understand it, as large-scale changes in it now are so common, they begin with a small ticker at the bottom of your screen.
Jerry Shields 