Posted on 07/12/2025 8:12:43 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
I say that within 5 years, DishTV and DirectTV will be gone. There are so many available channels on air that they are almost obsolete, considering the costs of them. I was forced to use them because I wasn’t able to stream well enough. But the local Electric Company brought fiber Optic to the area and now I have unlimited streaming. I am in the process of winding down my cable, but considering the amount of Fiber Optic that is being installed around the country, The Cable companies have priced themselves out of the market.
Basic Plex is.
Peacock is about $6/mo.
The point is traditional CABLE is a dinosaur.
I've not had cable for at least 25 years, in part because the price kept going up (even though I paid a year in advance to save money -- they'd just say, "your new due date is..."), in part because of being short on cash, but mostly because I wasn't watching more than two or three of the cable channels.
Having too many channels with too little content has been cable's biggest problem (at least for consumers, and imho) for decades.
Had they used their vaunted bandwidth to diversify into a single-package deal (cable TV, www, landline phone) and made the channels a la carte, the whole freakin' country would be on broadband by now.
My only paid channel per se is Amazon Prime, and that started as a home shopping thing. My favorite of the rerun channels is Tubi and Roku Channel, but I also spend a chunk of time on the YouTube app on the Roku.
YouTube's "Let's interrupt the content in the middle of a sentence" policy is benighted, and while it's not the worst thing Google does, it is the one for which the mgmt should have the ever-loving **** kicked out of them.
I’ve got one of those flat antennas on each TV around here, but I receive a different set of channels on each one. :^) Also, I rarely put on broadcast TV. I’ll throw on a live NFL game and listen to it from in here — until there’s just one too many ads with a *****y soundtrack, and/or the game isn’t close.
You can’t do history anymore because you can’t tell the truth and nobody wants to hear the truth anyway. People make up history and their own truth.
Awful, but true? 🤔
I just ripped “Black Sheep Squadron” and put it onmy home video server. Great show! I read about it on FR a few months back.
We are only four miles from “Pappy Boyington Field” in Coeur d’Alene, ID. The native of Coeur d’Alene is a Medal of Honor recipient. Lt. Col. Pappy Boyington shot down 26 enemy planes in World War II air battles in the Pacific Theater, while commanding VMF Fighter Squadron 214 in the Central Solomon Islands between Sept. 12, 1943, and Jan. 3, 1944.
A couple summers ago, VMFA-214, the original Black Sheep Squadron, visited us with six F-35B Lightnings.
Speaking of westerns, I ran across two I really like:
* The Westerner
* The Californians
I get that. But there are lots of free streaming channels and with a Mohi Leaf antenna, lots of free over the air channels. Paid streaming eliminates cable entirely.
Good to know. There’s an old episode of Black Sheep Squadron that involves a couple of P-38 Lightnings. It’s a great episode.
EchoStar Corporation owns Dish Network, but bought Boost Mobile, which uses larger networks, the same thing Visible and Mint do. The acquisition of Boost happened as a condition of approving T-Mobile’s takeover of Sprint. Sprint had to shed Boost.
Fraid so.
Nonetheless, the Cable Companies are charging so much for a dwindling market, so something has to give.
Somehow or other, in the past couple of weeks, in an FR thread, or as a result of one, I learned that John LaRoquette was in Bah Bah Black Sheep and/or Black Sheep Squadron. Rather than stream it, I’ve been thinking about hunting down a full-series disk set.
Check your local library for it.
Yep, he was in the series. John LaRoquette also played an evil Klingon in Star Trek: The Search for Spock.
Do you have different brands of tvs or how do you get different channels. I’ve been thinking of getting a new tv or getting a ROKU for the old not smart one that is hardly used.
I'd imagine that the cable channels will get their pants consolidated off by the streaming studio networks, because they have the same problem.
People join them based on some Emmy-winning piece of crap show, discover that literally no other content is of interest, and decide they don't want to give up eating out once or twice a month to pay the subscription.
SiriusXM has managed to survive, despite the fact that it's generally both grossly overpriced (after the trial period, which for me was when I first owned the car) and ironicially always having to 'discount' the service to hold subscribers.
It is available on streaming platforms, via phone apps for example, as far as I know. Dunno if it's also subscription-only there as well.
Having the hardware built into most cars should make the whole thing a slam-dunk, but without partnering with an actual content provider I've have my doubts that it can survive. They bought Pandora, how did that go? :^) It seems to me they need to consolidate the brands, starting with a new screen and improved interface, something like "SiriusXM -- Powered by Pandora" (or the other way around, but with the Pandora name in bigger print), and for their in-car streaming make the subscription cost much more modest, maybe $2 a month, and claim it's honoring Thomas Jefferson. :^)
SiriusXM (formerly Sirius and XM, which were allowed to merge) will probably be sold, and it's not unlikely that the buyer will be either Elon's Starlink, or Jeff Bezos, or someone or something else trying to expand orbiting network services.
>Having too many channels with too little content has been cable’s biggest problem (at least for consumers, and imho) for decades.
As much as I don’t like his politics, Bruce Springsteen nailed it around 40 years ago.
“57 Channels and Nothing’s On”
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