Ask Lemmy

I pretty much exclusively watch the local and sometimes national news. YouTube is where I go for most of my mindless content consumption.

I haven’t watched regular tv in 15-20 years, with the occasional exception if I’m in a hotel. Mostly just stuck to streaming platforms in the last ten years, however my attention span for those has dwindled and I also just don’t really have the time or mental energy to watch much. I probably watch 1 movie per month, with one or two shows here and there. As a result, I’ve just cancelled almost all of my streaming packages.

I love TV but the content is so terrible,

I have a media PC running MythTV that I use as a DVR for over the air broadcast TV. Over the years I have been using it less and less. Today I use it for sports almost exclusively. It is good for things like the oscars too. Most of the time I am just trying watching Youtube on my media pc.

Zoomer here, I grew up without cable/tv access. The only thing plugged to the black rectangle was my Wii and the other consoles I got. When it (tv) was available, I didn't see the appeal at all, I had internet access already.

TV is hot garbage riddled with ads. So yeah, I no longer watch, ca. since 20 years.

I only use it to watch live sports, everything else is watched online.

I stopped watching almost entirely back in 02 when I got sick of watching planes flying into the WTC over and over. And over. And over. I also hate ads. I've never paid for cable or streaming, aside from YT premium.

If I want to watch a show I buy a disc, watch at a friend's place, or I don't bother. Is it that important, really?

I watch The Chase with my mum when I go to see my her. TV is so thoroughly removed from my life that it makes that special occasion all the more enjoyable.

Not watched it in 20 years.

Any time I'm somewhere else and a TV is on, it seems worse. Adverts seem to be mostly "waste money on scams" and "borrow money in scams". The content has gone beyond even the cheapest reality TV nonsense.

I can't believe they even film some of that crap, let alone broadcast it.

It's hundreds of channels of adverts, with gaps between them filled as cheaply as possible. Doesn't seem to be any more actual good content than we had when there was only 4 channels.

Television as a medium, defined by scheduled programming became obsolete as soon as internet-based streaming became viable. The viewer being able to choose what to watch and when is vastly superior.

Piracy was viable a bit earlier, and I quit watching traditional TV then.

During the past couple of years my media consumption gradually decreased to none. I don’t remember when was the last time I turned on my TV, and haven’t watched a single thing on Plex. My only source of news currently is whatever is on Lemmy. As for youtube, the occasional tech video or a guide for something I’m trying to do.

I started watching again after moving in with my now wife. Fortunately our TV has a recording function, which has the benefit of being able to fast forward through commercials.

That way I can mitigate the horror that are ads. Otherwise I'd refuse to watch tbh

I stopped in 2006 because I did not feel like paying the public service fee.

When we moved into our new house 5 years ago, it was technically complicated (or expensive) to install our TV. Now, it's just a screen to stream Twitch and VOD platforms.

Occasionally I go to senior citizens homes and watch their broadcast TV. It's like going back in time, and I don't like it.

The TV is used as the device it is: A giant monitor for YouTube. Nothing else.

I have a torrent client in a country where nobody cares so I can get all the shows but I don't.

However, I recently found an old sat box in the trash. The house still has a dish pointed at the Astra 3B (most of Europe) satellite for my grandparents' TV so I plugged it in and it can still tune in to some FTA channels that use the old MPEG-2 SD standard. They're all German, haha. I use it to browse teletext for nostalgia, I bought a hopefully compatible capture card and I'll try to archive some of it with vhs-teletext before most SD channels' broadcast shuts down for good in 2025. I found lots of auto-updated or non-updated headlines, hundreds of phone sex ads, SMS chat rooms (kind of shitty IRC where receiving is 100% anonymous but sending is $0.50 per message), use guides to analog satellite broadcast and ShowView VCR codes (how is that still running?) and found out that Germans still import like ¼ of their TV fairytales from the Czech Republic for some reason (never the other way around though).

On ProSieben, my good old method for "skipping" ads still works. I'll be making a video about it and editing it in Movie Maker style like I'm 12 and it's 2007. My TV is that old and I can use a badly inserted RF connection to pretend analog is still running.

Yep, stopped probably 7 years ago when we moved into our place and cut the antenna cable. We pretty much watch political commentators on YouTube and the odd movie on stream, as well as whatever's in our DVD collection.

OTA, no. Cable, no. $$ for streaming, no. Ads, no. I watch a lot of shows from many countries (AKA I read a lot of shows), but rarely from the US. I hate US tv, it's so formulaic and boring. I don't even watch very many movies anymore. Mostly documentaries.

I stopped watching linear tv 13 years ago, but my Plex library is not what I'd call small lol.

You mean broadcast TV? Yes.

But TV is just another part of the internet now.

I still watch scripted, episodic, video content and get my news, local; national; and world, from the internet.

I got my own place a decade ago, I don't have a TV, never had.

I just don't see the point, it just feels restrictive.

I am considering getting a projector though...

I had hated the commercials on local TV (and their insipid local newscasters), and the way Cable networks chopped up films to the point where a 90-minute film took 2-1/2 hours to watch. NOT to mention their 200+ channels with 7 worth watching (for many $$$).

When they shut down analog TV in 2009, that was it for me. I didn't even grab a ~~free HDTV converter for local stuff. Nothing but Internet ever since. Music? HUNDREDS of online stations.

The TV is for the wife, but even she gets annoyed with the amount of ads and reruns to increasingly turn to streaming.

I don't watch TV, not even streaming.

Actual TV? Hell fucking no.

TV Shows? Sure, I'll #yaRrr it from the 🏴‍☠️'Bay and watch it. No Netflixes or crazy subscriptions, I'm broke, lmfao.

Although, I haven't found any thing new in the past few months, so I just watch youtube videos and sometimes download old TV shows / Movies I watched for nostalgia, and maybe catch some minor details I missed.

I haven't been able to watch broadcast TV in decades. The commercials were making me physically ill. Too much flash flash between them with sudden volume changes.

As for news, it's easier and faster to read, plus I can deep dive on anything interesting. For everything else, there's streaming or piracy.

I did that 20 years ago. It's great!

Don’t even have one anymore. The number of books I’ve read in the past few years exceeds that of the rest of my life, or at least comes close.

Yeah I haven't owned a television in years

I stopped watching TV a few years ago. It wasn't a conscious choice. I just didn't find it interesting.

I do still follow current events. There are much better sources of information than TV news.

At least in my country, yes since 2016 after our election.

It's almost just kiddie shows and news back then, but now after our next election in 2022 it I stopped watching news, since its almost all yapping about the dictator's son

When our TV broke along with the storm in December that year I stopped watching it altogether

Of course it's over-the-air TV. My higher-ups refuse to install cable/sattelite TV that time before

I will rent movies and television shows from the library. I don't watch broadcast TV unless I'm forced to at the gym. Speaking of, I don't understand why gyms subject people to watching the shitty news while on cardio machines. I wish they would turn them off or just show random inspirational stuff instead.

Yeah 25 years ago.

I haven’t had access to cable since like 2003 when I lived with my parents. I, like many others here, pirate a bunch of stuff (plus some physical media for independent media and stuff I want to support)

That said I recently got an iptv subscription bc my partner got into sports and the available options are either stupid, prohibitively expensive, or both. NBA streaming package is not crazy at $10/mo but it has a blackout for your local team, so you can’t watch games of your team, forcing you to a cable provider if you follow them. Anything for local sports is minimum like $60 a month and often double that. absurd. Iptv is super piracy but it’s like $70/yr for all the games of all the teams of all the sports plus all the channels of all the countries plus a huge library of content.

I watched tv for like a day with it and it was insane how terrible it was. Most networks just marathon random episodes of mid shows with obnoxious ad breaks. So it’s like comedy central- 6 hours of family guy, 3 hours of american dad, 4 hours of south park, 3 bad movies, 6 more hours of family guy, 4 hours of infomercials, repeat. Maybe there’s like one episode of new content every few days, and it’s something low effort like the daily show. Or another network like hln that literally just shows forensic files and informercials 24/7.

The news is toxic bullshit. Hyper focus on rage bait and propping up anything that gets ratings (which is basically trump and elon nonsense).

It’s insane. It’s just streaming networks where you can’t pick what you watch. They realized people like binge watching and leaned into that, hard. The advantage they had is creating new content but there’s none of that the overwhelming majority of the time. They’ve given up and are propped up solely by sports

I will say some of the other countries have decent programming at least. Tbs from Japan has some good shit (although you have to speak Japanese of course). They tend to have better news too

Cable, about 30 years ago. I bought a TV a few years ago to watch my digital movie collection. A bigger screen is nice.

Your public library has a ton of content for free. Music, tv, film, print… honestly, what more do you need? Just throwing that out there.