E-TV

Ever since I took my very old and tiny television apart last month I have been out of the loop. I like being out of the loop for the most part since I don’t care if Brittney shaves her head or if Lindsey is in rehab or who Paris showed her skivvies to. I get occasional doses of news from Washingtonpost.com or OrlandoSentinel.com and that keeps me up to date on local, national, and international events. However, one news story completely bypassed my radar.

Since I deconstructed the box of moving colors down to a box of circuitry, which I fried with the hair dryer just for fun, I have been catching my favorite shows on the internet. I am too lazy to install and deal with bittorrent programs so I have stuck to legal viewing avenues like the Weeds blog on blogspot and the shows made available on network sites.

Last week, after watching the latest Family Guy on Tuesday instead of Sunday on the Fox website, I found myself chatting on the phone with my younger brother. He is an aspiring writer and he was jazzed up about the writers’ strike. Uh-oh, sounds like I might have missed something important. If you haven’t read/heard/seen anything about the writers’ strike then click here for the Washington Post’s take on the story.

I’m not going to lie. I am used to being part of the problem when it comes to regulating e-commerce and the flow of intellectual information. I used Napster back in 2000 when the RIAA was working towards alienating music consumers everywhere. I used Kazaa before I realized that most of the files available were corrupt and virus infected and I have settled for just not buying music over subscribing to pay services. But if you but the CD, oh won’t you please burn me a copy? The only time I buy CDs now is when I’ve paid good money (at least Pearl Jam tried to stop TicketMaster from ripping us off at the gates) to go to a show and the band/group is selling their merchandise directly to the crowd. It makes me happy to cut out the middle person. I really don’t have an ethical problem with any of this. If you can’t figure out how to use the internet to make money then you are a dinosaur and we all know what happened to them. Artists are now using forums like MySpace to disseminate their music and band/group information.

But my take on this situation with the television writers and the evil corporations that are exploiting them should be pretty apparent from the way I worded this sentence. However, that didn’t stop me from watching the Simpsons before writing this (it’s research!). Watching the Simps (we are tight like that) on the internet has only two drawbacks to watching on television. One, they don’t load the program on the site until one to two days after the first airing of the show, and two, the screen is small. Very small, like 5 by 5 inches small. There was a three, the buffering wasn’t very good last week, but they have since addressed that. But, on the upside, I only had to watch about fifteen seconds of commercials throughout the entire episode. This in and of itself is indicative of how “new media” is rapidly evolving. The week that I talked to my brother I endured about two minutes of commercials, which was actually the same stupid thirty second Papa Johns commercial played four times. This week, the Toyota Yaris sponsored the program with four commercials that were four seconds long. Once again it was the same commercial every time, but it wasn’t nearly as annoying as the long drawn out Papa Johns commercials or even the stupid yet well funded commercials I used to be assailed with as a television watcher.

Fox isn’t the only network making their programming available online. I caught up with 30Rock on NBC.com and Grey’s Anatomy on ABC.com and…well I don’t really watch anything else but there is certainly more out there.

So am I part of the problem or am I a consumer that is creating a demand which is allowing the broadcasting companies to exploit their staff because of a very old labor issue, contract negotiation? I suppose that I’m just happy that for once my digital consumption is in alignment with what is legal (if you want to give me guff about my former career as a MP3 pirate I will be happy to send you a quasi-legal brief I wrote with a dissenting opinion concerning how copy write law has been interpreted by the courts).

Anyways, I am not above blatantly soliciting reader opinions, so PLEASE comment and let me/us know what you think about this writers’ strike and the state of E-TV.