Summer Most Heat Moon
Kate and I finished the final three episodes of 2014’s run of “Orange is the New Black.” We’ve been saving the last several episodes of “House of Cards” like hoarding candy against a day we can’t make it to the store. We did that by finishing up “New Tricks” and “Single-Handed.”
Now for those of you who still watch TV with the cable tuner and channels into the 400’s this may not be familiar ground for you. “Orange is the New Black” is, like “House of Cards”, a made for Netflix tv series. Both are really more like a novel with 13 chapters available all at once, and right now anyway, once a year. When ready, Netflix puts up all 13 episodes at once, available for streaming. If you wanted, and I imagine some do, you can watch all of them in one session.
Kate and I tend to do it a couple of episodes or one episode at a time. The second decade of the third millennium experience, watching video shows with no advertisements, feels like a luxury, like we’re getting away with something. Yet, I imagine there is a whole audience of kids for whom advertisements would be the odd experience, not their absence.
“New Tricks” and “Single-Handed”, on the other hand, we watch on Huluplus. It collects current tv shows (and all the episodes of older ones) and streams them, albeit with brief advertising, more like the old broadcast experience. There are though the important exceptions of being able to choose when and what to watch and to stop/pause it whenever desired. Huluplus also has movies, including 800 movies from the wonderful Criterion Collection.
We also watch certain other programs on Amazon Prime. Having a Prime membership in Amazon comes not only with “free” two-day shipping, but over a million downloadable songs and many movies and tv series available for “free.” Free in this case means no additional charge.
So that’s our new millennium television experience. No Comcast. No Timeswarner. Only our Roku box and three subscription services whose net cost is $30 a month. It may sound like we watch a lot of TV, but we only watch when we want, what we want. It is, as always, an excellent way to decelerate the mind in the evening.
And best of all, we’re shelling out much less to Comcast. All of this comes in over our broadband link for which, unfortunately, we still have only one choice. Comcast.
