khaosx.com

I’ve got thirteen channels of sh*t  on the TV to choose from.

-‘Nobody Home’ by Pink Floyd

The above quote is so archaic at this point in time that you want to tousle its hair and tell it how adorable it is. Have you looked at how many channels you have access to recently? The descriptor is still fairly accurate, though it’s through the eyes of the beholder.

There are just way too many channels that I will never watch, and I’d love to not have to pay for them. Sports would be the first set of channels that go away. There have been two occasions where sports have been on in my house – once for HD testing, and once because a couple of friends came over to watch a World Series game last year because their cable hadn’t been hooked up yet. I’d be glad to be rid of them, on general principle. Don’t even get me started on Spanish channels. I don’t speak Spanish, so I’m paying for channels that I cannot even understand.

So, it’s not wonder that I’ve long been a fan of the idea of paying a la carte  for cable TV.  I would love to see a smaller bill from Charter.

This morning though, I found something that actually moved my irritation from passive to active. I found a chart from last year showing the costs to a cable provider per channel. Click here to see the memo. Seriously, go look at it. I’ll wait.

I know that everyone derives entertainment from different things, but I’m going to say, for me, the idea of paying about $6.45 for the top two sporting channels is outrageous. I didn’t even bother adding up the Spanish Channels, because I’d probably pop a blood vessel. And this is on top of the “Well, you can get HBO by itself, but it’s actually cheaper to bundle every channel we offer" scam. I bet that if I could go out to Charter’s web site and put a checkbox by the channels watched in my house, it would end up with under 10 selected, plus one or two premiums (assuming you give me reasonable prices for them – $5 a channel seems about right.)

There’s also a larger issue here – we’re subsidizing channels that otherwise would have no chance of ever making it. What’s the revenue plan here? Just leech off the subscriber fees forever? Seriously, there’s a Wedding Channel on my lineup. If you can show me how that channel would make it in  a world where cable subscribers aren’t forced to pay for it, I’ll eat their CEO’s business card.

Apple – Trailers – Serenity – index

This is awesome!!!!

I saw every episode of Firefly on TV, which is very unusual for me – I’m not a big fan of the telly. And yet, there was something about this show that caught my imagination form the first five minutes. I remember thinking (after I watched the first episode) that this was a show that was WAY too hip and smart to last more than about a season.

Fox, of course, failed to promote the show, aired it in the wrong order, and moved it around so much that it came as no surprise that it got cancelled after 13 episodes.

If you ever listen to anything I say, and like good television dramas with smart & funny dialog, do yourself a favor and order the DVD set.

I’ve watched the trailer twice now, and I am still grinning about it…I can’t wait.

In other news, I have my doubts about HHGttG as a movie…after reading some of the reviews and seeing how the story has been changed, I don’t think I’m going to bother going to see it in the theatre. What a dissapointment it will be.