AMEN–the X1 remote from Comcast has thoroughly spoiled us as well. The voice commands can turn captions on and off, and go right to things like English soccer!
Same with the DVR service, which we didn’t realized had been added to our service package w/o adding a charge for it.
There are certain British programs that may just appear without much fanfare (Shetland, for example, or the Canadian show Murdoch Mysteries). So we have the DVR “on the lookout” for those shows, should new episodes appear.
At our age and stage in life, we deserve to be spoiled a bit!
My DVR programming came in useful over the last couple of years. I don’t watch a lot of “as it airs” shows anymore but have a few set as series record. That’s how I identified several series resuming after long gaps and how I discovered Doctor Who had a new special Doctor 13 episode - saw it in my scheduled DVR list.
I only watch a scarce handful of shows “as they air” - mainly I do streaming on my desktop now. We have an older dumb smart tv so don’t use it much for streaming. And I can watch my computer in the study with the door closed. I always seem to have something on tap there so haven’t been looking for anything new to just watch on tv. It wasn’t so very long ago that I had at least nine or more “must watch tv” series each week!
Husband watches a lot of live sports and news, mainly from the easy chair in the sitting area of our bedroom. He will leave it on as he comes and goes doing chores and such.
Our cable company is phasing out DVR’s so the only choice soon will be cable streaming services through them. If my DVR box goes out (and it did recently) we can only get refurbished ones at this point.
I watch all my TV on my iPad. I just like the intimacy of it. I don’t like watching t.v with other people. Never have. My kids didn’t have TVs in their rooms but were given free reign over tv watching in terms of how much. If they weren’t having problem getting their work at school or home done I had no interest in setting limits. They were both very self motivating. I remember once when my daughter was in 5 th grade my friend was over and daughter got home and asked if we could record a 30 min show that was on then so that she could watch when her homework was done. My friend said “ it’s great your kids really follow your rules about tv watching only after homework is done. I’m always fighting with my kids about that.”
And I told her “That’s HER rule, not mine. I don’t care if she watches tv first.” My friend was flabbergasted.
We have only 1 TV in our house, but had up to 3 as the kids were growing up. I hardly watch TV, maybe an hour a week, other than sometimes paying attention when my husband watches the news (pretty much every weekday - we call it the old man news).
We literally paid 10 years for cable boxes for 2 TVs that we didn’t use. (One we may have used VERY occasionally).
Interesting. We don’t get cable where we live, so are with Dish Network. They keep sending me emails to upgrade to their “Hopper,” but TBH, I never even looked to see what a Hopper was. I know upgrades are often accompanied by price increases, so…
We don’t get Wifi here either. All of our internet comes from hotspotting our phones. It works fine, but with limited high speed data, we don’t livestream things often.
Upgrades often also come with extending your contract another 1-2 years. If you have a contract in any event (which I know our cable company did when we left).
We stuck with our old outdated Dish network equipment for way too long also…when it finally started to get flaky we called Dish, talked about the Hopper equipment, and it actually ended up being a tiny bit cheaper after the upgrade (which was installed for free). The hopper equipment is actually pretty sweet.
I should make an on-topic comment. H and I watch a lot of tv. We stream some…but honestly we do more flipping than anything. It’s just not our style to decide what to watch before actually watching, if that makes sense. Occasionally we get sucked into a streaming series but that’s not the norm for us.
Wow. I haven’t flipped channels in probably 6 or 7 years. I guess it’s because I only watch TV….including cable…on my iPad. And I much prefer binge watching to anything else. Also I almost never watch TV with anyone else. I really like to watch alone. One of my best friends and I both binged a few shows “together” meaning we were both binging and would text things like “call me to discuss Episode 5 when you’re done” and the other person might text the next day. “Watching now. OMG!”
My H totally is a flipper. Which is why we don’t watch tv together! It’s like he just flips, watches a little of this, flips, watches a little of that, oh! check the weather, oh! Check the score…flip, flip, flip!
I think my tv is more purposeful. I’m sitting down to watch this episode of this show. Then I’m done. No mindless watching.
With Netflix and Hulu, I find myself searching and searching for just the right thing to watch. There are so many choices, I often find myself too indecisive, and I give up and read a book instead.
