End of year reflections - Part 2 in a series of a few. Maybe.
If 2005 was the year of DVD Boxset TV binging (come on, catch up Mark) 2006 has been the year of the TV download for me. Paul would be proud.
Just over a year ago I plumbed in a neat little Elgato EyeTV and EyeHome setup at home, converting an iMac into a PVR and media hub allowing everything to be streamed over Wi-Fi to the TV or laptops. Setting aside the fretting about the RF poisoning from the 3 base stations required to penetrate the walls of my house (it is the veritable brick shithouse, once being a ladies toilet after all) it’s totally changed the way I watch TV now. I haven’t read a TV schedule in months, and rarely sit down to watch scheduled TV, save perhaps a bit of Jools or the Saturday morning cookery wars. Instead, it’s pretty much all on demand.
The main draw has been the primetime US shows like West Wing, Sopranos and my beloved Six Feet Under. Earlier this year I knew the US TV schedules better than I knew the UK ones. Mondays for West Wing torrents, Tuesdays for SFU etc. After these essentials came the back catalogue stuff. All the cookery series, then the cosy retro-telly of a few years back like M*A*S*H, Yes Minister, Twin Peaks, every travel programme Palin has ever made, James Burke’s Connections (you HAVE to see the first episode to feel mighty small and useless in this world and really wish you’d paid attention in farming class).
Update: By the power of Greyskull and Google you can. See you in 50 mins.
It gets addictive, and once you’ve exhausted the quality UK and BBC back catalogues, you move onto the foreign stuff. Low rent US stuff like the gloriously unchallenging Roseanne and early Frasier (before it got super-annoying), down to some of their terrible, terrible cookery shows. Canadian TV was a recent goldmine, uncovering 25 episodes of the worlds greatest train journeys (yay!) but pretty soon that got exhausted too.
So, you buy a 250Gig hard drive. And another. And Another. Pretty soon you’re staring at a terabyte of TV humming away in the office, and a thought pops into your head as you surf through all your personalised, tailored media channels.
There’s nothing I want to watch.
How did that happen?
Better read my Christmas Book instead I guess.
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