{"id":40757,"date":"2017-10-01T06:00:35","date_gmt":"2017-10-01T10:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40757"},"modified":"2017-10-01T10:55:41","modified_gmt":"2017-10-01T14:55:41","slug":"tv-im-not-watching-star-trek-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=40757","title":{"rendered":"TV I’m Not Watching: Star Trek Discovery"},"content":{"rendered":"

So the new Star Trek series is out. I’d like to watch it. Reportedly, the first few episodes aren’t bad<\/a>. But it’s produced by CBS and only available using their own streaming service CBS All Access<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Now, this sucks because it means creating a new account and maybe downloading new apps or whatever. Will it play on my Phone? On my Roku? In my web browser of choice? Do they have enough streaming servers to handle the load, or will this be like watching YouTube in 2008? For the sake of argument, let’s just assume CBS has spent the money to build solid apps and infrastructure. <\/p>\n

They’re asking for $6 a month. That’s shockingly high in today’s market. Basic cable – which includes CBS – is only about $40 and includes many channels, so asking $6 for just one channel is a lot. Netflix streaming costs double what CBS is asking and they have a comparatively massive library that includes many blockbusters. <\/p>\n

This is particularly odd since you’d expect them to come in low with an introductory price and then jack the price up later once you’re hooked on the content. (And for some people, simply too lazy or distracted to cancel.) <\/p>\n

And then you realize that the CBS deal includes commercials<\/strong>. If you want commercial-free streaming the price goes up to $10. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Commercials<\/h3>\n

ACTUAL DEMONSTRATION<\/div>
ACTUAL DEMONSTRATION<\/div><\/p>\n

It’s tough for me to articulate just how much I hate commercials. Sometimes they’re jarringly loud to the point of discomfort. Sometimes they’re cloying, obnoxious, or flagrantly dishonest. Sometimes they’re offensive on a moral or intellectual level. Sometimes they’re repeated several times in the course of a show, which I find maddening. And of course, they waste the precious moments of your life that you have available for entertainment. <\/p>\n

On top of that, commercial television is often designed to be emotionally dissonant with the commercials. They want you to hang around through the advertisements, so they deliberately design the story to place the break right in the middle of moments of maximum emotional intensity. The camera will do a close up of a tense face as someone makes a profound revelation, suspenseful music plays, and then we fade out to a woman singing about fabric softener. When you come back to the show, the emotional energy is gone<\/em>. Creating emotional investment is so monumentally difficult, it’s madness to destroy it the moment it appears. This isn’t an “interruption” to the show. It actively undermines the central thing a drama is trying to accomplish. It’s like a rollercoaster with all the downhill bits edited out. <\/p>\n

I get that my reaction to commercials is not common. Some people are able to take them in stride and continue to enjoy their show. I could tolerate it when I was younger. But it’s been a decade and a half since I watched commercial television and I’ve been spoiled by the future. Back in the 70s we watched fuzzy black and white television at 480i that required you to stand up and mess with the antennae every couple of minutes. It wasn’t a big deal at the time, but it only takes a few days of having crisp color images and good reception before the old way is ruined forever. I’ve seen how good it can be. I can’t go back.<\/em><\/p>\n

I understand that shows cost money to make and commercials are part of the way they raise that money, but I’m just comparing services. Hulu has a similar pricing scheme, and they have several channels worth of content plus a handful of movies, plus a bit of original content. Netflix is about the same price as the commercial-free version of CBS, and they have TV, movies, and a bunch of originals. It’s like CBS doesn’t know what the competition is doing.<\/p>\n

I’d like to watch Star Trek Discovery, but this deal is not enticing at all. I’m not going to pay ten dollars a month for a single broadcast channel, and I’m not going to pay to watch commercials. I’m opposed to the latter on some sort of primal level. <\/p>\n

I guess the optimal thing to do is wait until all the episodes are out and then subscribe for a single month so I can binge through the whole thing? (Assuming I remember and the show is still relevant.) <\/p>\n

CBS All Access is the UPlay of streaming. They’ve shown up very late to the market, against entrenched rivals, with an inferior product, and they don’t have anything to entice consumers aside from exclusives. (And not even a lot of those.)<\/p>\n

Ah well. At least Netflix still has TOS<\/acronym>, TAS<\/acronym>, TNG<\/acronym>, DS9<\/acronym>, VOY<\/acronym>, and even ENT<\/acronym> for some reason.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So the new Star Trek series is out. I’d like to watch it. Reportedly, the first few episodes aren’t bad. But it’s produced by CBS and only available using their own streaming service CBS All Access. Now, this sucks because it means creating a new account and maybe downloading new apps or whatever. Will it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[608],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40757\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}