Chris Dragan's Corner

I don’t have broadcast TV reception at home. In fact I only listen to the radio in my car and only on the way to or back from work. That’s like maybe 20 minutes a day tops, on a good day.

It goes like this: I’m stopped at the red light and getting bored or I’m coming back from work and my head is almost exploding from thoughts banging around inside. To ease my mind I turn on the radio. These are the things I hear:

The most common are commercials. When I hear a commercial I just switch to another station. The next station often also has a commercial, so I keep going until I find one which doesn’t, or I turn the radio off.

The next common thing is music I hate. Typically these are the so-called “hits”, i.e. music which someone in a record label decided to promote. I have no idea how people can listen to most of this kind of stuff, it’s usually loud BOOM, BOOM and a woman screaming out her lungs or some tune which is so annoying that I switch the station before I hear the chorus.

There are specialty stations which only play one kind of music. They are a nice change on the first few listens, they usually play more music than commercials and they don’t play the usual kind of trash than most stations do. However these stations get annoying after a few weeks, because they are playing the same things over and over again. How many times in a row can you listen to the same old song? Even though I listen to any kind of station at most 20 minutes a day, so that’s even much less per station, I can tell that they are repeating their stuff, so their selection of music must be really low! Take the music collection on your favorite pocket device, how often will you hear songs repeat if you listen only to 5 songs a day?

Sometimes its fun to listen to foreign language stations, for example it’s easy to tune to some Mexican station in the US. The Mexican songs are fun from time to time but they are also all written to the same kind of melody and they are also all about a broken corazon – I challenge you to find a song in Spanish which does not have the word corazon in it.

Back to TV. I do watch broadcast TV a few hours a year, for example when I’m in a hotel. Every time I watch TV it reminds me why I don’t have it at home – there is nothing on it. You can have hundreds of channels, and none of them has anything interesting. Sure you can laugh at some sitcom once in a while, but that’s it. OK, maybe you can find some interesting series from time to time – but then it’s interrupted every 5 minutes with very long commercials. So out of a 40 minute show they can easily make a one hour show. If you really like some show, then you need to remember to be at home ready at exactly the time they have it, otherwise you will not be able to watch the whole thing. If you have extra money to throw away, you can get a DVR, but the commercials remain.

The Internet to the rescue! Fortunately there are streaming services now, so you can watch whatever you want, whenever you want/can and without commercials. And it’s inexpensive. I don’t know why people still watch broadcast TV at home.

Internet radio is nice, but it’s not available in my car, plus it’s also been crippled with commercials in the recent years. There are paid options, but I don’t spend enough time in my car to want to pay for that.

How long before broadcast TV and radio share the fate of dinosaurs?