3 ms·

Except 20 or so channels on my dish network setup are nothing but direct sales garbage. I think we're suffering because its economically more appealing to trea

Except 20 or so channels on my dish network setup are nothing but direct sales garbage. I think we're suffering because its economically more appealing to treat the TV as a sales machine instead of an entertainment machine. No wonder there's no bandwidth left over on satellite or over those fat DOCSIS connections. Carriers are too busy selling us "lose weight now" bullshit over providing the service we're actually buying. Toss in its "Public Interest" channels which hold useless junk like religious programming and public access, we have about 50 channels of non-entertainment nonsense. Everything looks like shit because the bean counters and MBAs think Billy Grahame and "Look good in that dress for $19.99" should be in contention over the actual shows and movies I watch.

seanp2k2 15y ago
…and it's because of all the "useless junk" that they cover on those public gov't access channels that you don't have a single good choice of ISP or infomercial service. Drop cable and lobby to end the Comcast/AT&T/Time Warner oligopoly.
maxerickson 15y ago
On satellite there are also the dozens or hundreds of local market broadcast channels. They lobbied hard against a de facto national ABC, CBS, etc. One of the channels in my area is now encouraging people to pester Dish to pay them per-subscriber money. Meanwhile, Dish has audio dropouts and video artifacts aplenty. (My impression is that many of the channels you label "Public Interest" are getting a free ride because they don't charge the carrier anything but allow the carrier to increase their advertised channel count.)