Assignment 5 - Christian Lauritzen

     I cannot speak very well on the topic of Television and its merits because I do not watch much TV. I find that it is quite simply inferior to being subscribed to cheaper and higher-quality content available on the internet, or otherwise through it.  Regular TV today is utterly horrible to use.  You can only watch what TV stations decide will be running that day.  You can record your favorites but even those recordings require the show be aired at some point, which only ever happens when business executives identify it as a profitable running choice.  My family personally has Dish TV, using a satellite, and that is even worse because when a spout of bad weather passes through our area, signal can go out for hours.  You also have to make sure you own the subscription to the channel you want to watch shows on, and these packages can bring cable subscriptions up into hundreds of dollars a month.  And I haven't even mentioned the fact that you can't get a lot of movies or shows on regular TV packages period.
     Meanwhile, my families Netflix subscription costs less than 10 dollars a month for all 4 of the people in our family to have customized collections of hundred and thousands of media at our finger tips, compared to a 70 dollar cable subscription which gets me select shows at only a certain time on a single device.  I also have a Chrome extension that makes my computer appear like it is in different countries, so I can have access to services like Britain's iPlayer, which has a huge amount of content created by the BBC available to anyone "within the country".  There is also the factor that you don't have invasive advertisement every 10 minutes for 2 minutes when watching streaming services. Online streaming services are just superior to TV in every way. As an example, I love the show Game of Thrones.  The HBO channel package costs 15 dollars a month on TV, and that's only if your provider offers it.  The scheduling is random and mandated by a group of people sitting at computers deciding what is profitable, and you still have to watch commercials.  All the while HBO Now for the same price gives you all HBO content whenever you want without intrusive advertisement.  It's no wonder that so many people are dropping cable services in favor of the superior content-viewing experience.