'TV is Broken'

Another great story by Patrick Rhone, this time about how Cable TV is utterly broken, especially in the mind of a young child:

When the commercials are over, it is some live action teen show. She is not impressed.

“Can I choose?”, Beatrix asks. She’s still confused. She thinks this is like home where one can choose from a selection of things to watch. A well organized list of suggestions and options with clear box cover shots of all of her favorites. I have to explain again that it does not work that way on television. That we have to watch whatever is on and, if there is nothing you want to watch that is on then you just have to turn it off. Which we do.

I then do what I should have simply done in the first place. I hook up the iPad to the free hotel wifi and hand it to her. She fires up the Netflix app, chooses a show, and she is happy.

This, she gets. This makes sense.

Read the whole thing. There’s a part about his daughter’s first exposure to ads and how frustrating it is for her (and as far as volume goes, frustrating for Patrick). This experience is part of why I ditched Cable TV nearly two years ago. My three year old has no idea what traditional television is like. His idea of television is the on-demand experience of using our Apple TV to stream from Netflix or iCloud.