Ask Lemmy

You can still read news, no need to be uninformed.

This is the majority of young people. I've never paid for cable TV.

Definitely, TV is useless.

Yep that's me!

I have YouTube TV and only use it for sports.

I'll go one step further and say I haven't watched a new, regular network television show in at least a decade. Who has time to watch 20-something episodes each season - with much of that time spent on fluff story lines that only exist so the show can fill a time slot for 22/23 weeks a year?

Here's a great example: Lost.

At the time it was amazing. But there was also a lot of unnecessary BS in there because, frankly, they needed to fill time. If you go and look, almost all of the top rated episodes for the series were the last handful of episodes at the end of the season.

Now imagine if they took that show and made 10/13 episode seasons out of it.

I think you could make the same case for most network TV shows. Even if they were amazing at 23 episodes, they'd be even better at 10 or 13.

A great example IMO is Friday Night Lights. Amazing show overall, but that first season was just too long. Then because of a variety of reasons, they moved to 13-15 episodes a season (instead of 23 in season one), and the show excelled.

I use Jellyfin and watch DVD rips. I can get box sets cheap at goodwill. Haven't paid for TV in 15+ years. Sometimes I'll watch streaming on FreeTube.

Haven't watched TV in 15 years. I've wanted my media on a TV though.

I don't even have access, it would cost me extra. And the content is cancerous and riddled with ads, I see it every time when visiting my dad. For news there are news websites and the big news corps have their program online anyway.

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

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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 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...

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 don't watch TV, not even streaming.

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 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.