As has been mentioned elsewhere on TVWriter™ earlier, yesterday I wrote about my experience over the last weekend at trying to cut the pay TV cord.
I wrote about it right here, actually, and will be glad to wait while you read that post if you haven’t already. (What? You haven’t already?)
The gist of what I said is that even though I didn’t get el cordo cut all the way through, I did achieve what I considered to be a pretty big victory: I got my DISH bill cut almost in half.
Yeah, that title’s a little awkward. We at TVWriter™ take all the blame and want to openly acknowledge that Marc Alan Fishman, the writer of this piece, got it way, way better:
How Gothan Got Great(ish)The past Monday, Gotham had its fall finale. While the episode itself was a bit meh to not-bad, the show thus far this season has been darn good to dare I say great. Since I last wrote about James Gordon and friends, the show has really settled into a fantastic groove. It’s been so good, I’ve privately sang its graces enough to ComicMix‘s EIC, Mike Gold, such that he mentioned it on his rockin’ good radio show. When Mr. Gold recognizes your opinion asvalued, then you know something must be going right.
With the new season dubbed “Rise of the Villains,” Gotham has added a bit more serialization to its previously procedural format. We started with the entrance of the never-been-comic-booked nemesis Theo Galavan. Introduced as a scene chewing billionaire by day/evil criminal mastermind by night, Theo’s been mostly a high point to the proceedings. Especially when he flipped the script and murdered the Joker. OK, should I have said spoiler alert? Nah.
Yesterday, our Beloved Leader Larry Brody wrote on this very site about his experience attempting to cut the, in his case satellite cord. And shortly after one of our stalwart minions saw that particular post, she found this view of the cord-cutting situation. So of course we just had to share:
When the executive in charge of your company’s traditional television services publicly admits she’s a cord cutter who no longer watches traditional TV, it might be time to reconsider the future of pay television. By and large most cable and broadcast executives have responded to the cord cutting phenomenon by either denying it exists, claiming it’s the domain of losers, or insisting it’s a fad that will magically evaporate once more Millennials procreate. But at a recent TV industry conference, Verizon’s director of FiOS TV services, admitted she’s been a cord cutter for a while:
“Maitreyi Krishnaswamy, director of FiOS TV, has a confession, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of Verizon’s fixed-line video business. “I’ve pretty much cut the cord,” Krishnaswamy admitted on a panel at the TV of Tomorrow event in New York City. Krishnaswamy is bullish on Verizon’s new Go90 mobile video service, but she readily acknowledges there are major challenges in the traditional pay-TV business.
Last week Gwen the Beautiful and I got a notice from our not so close personal friends over at DISH Network that as a thank you for using their service for 17 years in five different cities across the country, they wanted to personally thank us for our loyalty and were rewarding us the chance to watch some movie channel we’d never heard of for absolutely free for a few months.
Oh, and they also wanted us to know that they were raising our monthly fee by about five bucks because, hey, expenses, you know?
Over the past few years, we’ve been watching actual television shows on television less and less and thinking more and more about ditching everything, plugging a laptop into our flatscreen, and living out other people’s fantasy lives without leaving that strange comfort zone created by being online. The only thing that mitigated against that was the concern that it would just plain be too hard to keep track of when shows we wanted to see would be on without a DVR to record them automatically.
In case you’ve missed what’s happening at TVWriter™, the most popular blog posts during the week ending yesterday were: