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SHEARON: TV or the Internet? |
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Thursday, 01 November 2007 |
 I have seen TV evolve a lot in the last half century. My dad bought a Magnavox console TV when we were little. It had a state-of-the-art push-button on/off switch that I thought was way swank.
What seemed like an eternity later (but was actually probably about five years), my brother, mother and I pressured Dad into getting a color TV.
I had always enjoyed TV, but I thought I had died and gone to Heaven when we got the color set.
I got to watch Batman and the Green Hornet and Saturday morning cartoons in color. Wow.
As I got older I enjoyed British TV shows, including “The Avengers” and “The Prisoner.”
I lamented that there wasn’t a way to record the shows, and vowed one day to be rich enough to be able to buy the original film of the shows from the networks.
Imagine my delight when I turned 30 and we bought our first VCR. It cost more than $400. (My current one cost about $30).
Now I could save my favorite shows for posterity.
Then we got cable, and lo and behold, “The Avengers” and “The Prisoner” were frequent fare, and I recorded all the episodes. It was great. TV just kept getting better.
But, I think TV may be finally approaching its zenith, courtesy the Internet.
A few months ago my son, Sam, who lives in Memphis, called to tell me I had to watch a show called “Heroes.”
“It’s great, you’ll really like it,” he told me again and again.
“But the season is almost over,” I protested.
That’s when my son told me about the wonders of streaming video.
“You can watch it on the computer. That what’s I do,” he said.
Huh?
He explained that I could watch the episodes on the Web, from a site set up by NBC. I found this hard to believe, but at 5 the next morning (which is the time of day I reserve to do things I want to do on my own), I got up and called up the site.
I was in utter amazement when the show came on, played clearly, had a razor-sharp picture and very, very short commercials.
He was right, by the way. I’m hooked on “Heroes.”
I watched all the previously aired shows in the next two weeks, then had to wait anxiously as the network played the last few episodes. I don’t get NBC too good at my house, so it’s actually better for me to watch “Heroes” and now “Bionic Woman” on the Internet. Sometimes I’ll watch “Dancing with the Stars” on the Internet, which is on ABC. Their Internet player isn’t quite as good as NBC’s, but it does OK.
If they’d put “All My Children” on the Internet, I could retire my VCR.
The only thing that would be better than this current setup is for me to be able to sit at my TV and watch these shows whenever I please. I figure someone’s going to come up with an affordable way to do that before long. If they don’t, they should.
I had a friend named David Brown who claimed to be a futurist. He predicted that within a few years one of the TV channels would, in fact, be the Internet.
It’s looking like he was right.
Robert Shearon is news editor of the Courier.
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