Growing up with cable
Being a kid in the mid-2000s meant coming home from school and plopping down on the couch to watch TV. Not all of my friends had TV, so occasionally they would come to my house and we would watch some of our favorite shows. It was either TV or playing Wii games. I was also one of the first kids in my neighborhood to have a Wii as well, but that’s beside the point.
Cable TV was part of my daily life for nearly 2 decades. My parents were avid TV watchers, to the point where they had different DVRs. The most successful and practical one was the Tivo, which there were two of. The biggest downside to cable TV is the constant commercial breaks, and I was able to simply ignore them.
The Tivo I had played a huge part in my enjoyment of TV. You wouldn’t typically be able to watch each episode of a new show each time it aired, especially as a kid, but with the way a Tivo automaticlly scheduled recordings for new episodes, you could have new episodes of a show waiting for you anytime after they aired. Back in 2014, FXX aired a 12-day long maraton of Every Simpsons Ever and I recorded all of those episodes. That is how I watched every episode of The Simpsons. Same with Steven Universe, My Little Pony, Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, and so many other cartoons. If you know anything about me, you would know that I’m a huge fan of animated shows.
But the Tivo was always an option. When I’d gone through the catalog I had recorded, I could always turn on live TV. Looking back at it, this was kind of magical. Myself, alongside thousands of other children, were watching the same show at the same time, all across the country. Going back to Steven Universe, I watched a majority of those episodes when they premiered, and I frequently got on forums or Discord servers to discuss the episode right after it aired. That was one of my favorite pastimes, and part of the reason Crystal Sins ever got started.
Streaming, and what’s missing
At some point, as internet speeds became faster and cable subscriptions became more expensive, Americans started cutting the cable and jumping ship to streaming, specifically Netflix. Netflix, at the time, was a leviathan database of millions of episodes of TV. For the longest time, believe it or not, all of the shows that were on Netflix were originally on cable. There was no such thing as a Netflix Original show. Netflix would license them from dozens of different media companies.
Seeing the success of Netflix, these media companies decided they could profit more from running their own streaming services instead of only profiting on licensing fees coming from Netflix and Hulu. That means they pulled their shows from those platforms as well. Almost overnight, streaming shows became segmented across 6 or 7 major services with significantly less actual value versus what Netflix and Hulu used to have.
You’d think that I’m here to complain about the price of maintaining subscriptions to all of these services, but I’m not. That’s been done to death already, and cable is not a good alternative when it comes to cost. Subscriptions in general are something I try to avoid. I deal with enough with mortgage payments, student loan payments, car insurance payments, and buying food for my animals every month. When it comes to cost, there is no winner between streaming and cable. They both suck in that regard.
The actual gripe that I have is a weird and pretty personal one. I don’t like not being able to watch a live broadcast. Streaming services tend to release several episodes all at the same time, with no premiere event or anythign. I think that’s ridiculous. Back when I watched Steven Universe, watching one episode premiere live and then having a week to discuss it before the next one came out was something I looked forward to all the time. When Cartoon Network started releasing 10 episodes at a time in “Steven Bombs”, suddenly I wasn’t able to look forward that new episode every week.
All of streaming is a Steven Bomb. Not only do they release all of the episodes at once, seasons are only about 10 episodes long anymore. I have no idea if that has anything to do with streaming, but it feels like it does. Shows that still run primarilly on cable like The Simpsons and Miraculous Ladybug for example, still do 26 episodes per season. It’s baffling to me that with all the improvements in technology when it comes to TV productions, showrunners are essentially lying through their teeth, saying shows are more difficult or slower to produce these days.
It’s not as if demand for episodic releases and live premieres has gone away. Twitch, a site built around live streaming, is a behemoth of a platform. And YouTube introduced the concept of Premiering a video, with a live chat and everything, a few years ago. For some reason, TV producers (or rather the tech companies that publish their shows) just decided those extra touches don’t matter anymore.
What will become of my favorite hobby?
Watching TV is not my favorite hobby. I don’t think consuming media in any form can be considered a hobby. A hobby is something that requires involvement, something you can develop a skill around. My favorite hobby was making YouTube videos. I don’t know if that’s still the case anymore, since it’s been so long since I’ve done it consistently.
Every show that I watched had a question that followed: “Is this show worth reviewing?” A lot of the time, the answer was no, but other times, I could write a video in a day, edit it in a week, and upload a whole review of that show. I never did it for money or fame. I made those videos because I enjoy making videos.
Reviewing TV shows becomes difficult when simply watching shows is difficult. Back when I had cable, I could turn on the TV and watch something live, something that I had never seen before, and see if it piqued my interest. That’s what happened with Miraculous Ladybug. I didn’t start at the beginning of that show, I started somewhere in season 2, and I was interested enough to watch the rest of the show in order.
What would solve this for me, is for streaming services to emulate that live TV feeling. Let me log into the website and press a button to start a random episode of a random show, and I could just leave it to continue playing. Oddly enough, I could easily do this myself.
Piracy, as usual, is probably the solution
If you are ever in a conversation with me and bring up Jellyfin, unless you’re actually interested in the topic you’ve probably made a bad decision, because I will not stop singing its praises. Jellyfin is one of my favorite pieces of software ever created. It’s a server software that lets you host your own streaming service, for free, with the media that you own. That’s any media. Jellyfin supports movies, shows, books, audiobooks, music, and comics.
Jellyfin has the exact feature that I wanted. You can pick a show, or a collection of shows, and just press shuffle. The caveat of running a Jellyfin server is that you have to have raw files for the media that you want to host. Assuming you own the media and aren’t sharing access to the server publicly, this is completely legal. Ripping DVDs and Blu-Rays and putting the files onto the server is the most reasonable, legally black-and-white way to run a Jellyfin server (so long as you own those discs as long as you’re hosting the files).
On the other hand, an illegal and more convenient way of obtaining media is piracy. You’d be hard pressed to not find something you’re looking for (assuming someone is seeding it). The hardest part is looking for it. That’s the other downside to piracy: you have to know what you’re looking for before you start watching. The main downside being the fact that it’s illegal, and you run the risk of getting your internet shut off. I know this from experience, as do plenty of others.
Nothing can replace cable for me. When I release Pilot Light and inevitably become rich, the first thing I’m going to buy is a full-package cable subscription and a Tivo. At that point, I can live off of my old hobby of reviewing cartoons, and my new hobby of making video games. And maybe I’ll start live streaming again, who knows?
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