Do you have a TV?
- Thread starter Rusty Blade
- Start date
I threw my TV out in 2003 - one of my best decisions ever. Music for the ears and books for the eyes. These days I'm so far removed from TV culture that I don't even think about it anymore. I watch sports occasionally ... mostly finals and championships ... I'll borrow one so I can watch World Cup Soccer at the weird hours the games are broadcast.
This is the way. This is what we did a long time ago. I knew the day was coming when things might turn unfortunate, and things we once enjoyed and treasured would disappear, be censored or edited into something distasteful. Sadly, it came.
I can't recommend this enough. Build your own home library, for yourself and those to follow. Preserve it. Because someday, those things may be gone. Generations ago, it was with books. It is still books. But it has expanded to the electronic forms in later times.
We spent 45 years building up ours, starting with late 70s Betamax tapes, and ending with some 4K movies on BD. All manner of television shows that are no longer seen. Hundreds and hundreds of movies. All the home movies, too. It's all on a computer drive now. Digitizing particularly the early stuff was not easy, but I've had some IT help over the years.
We need TVs because my eyes are long gone, and that's how we've watched these things for decades. Mrs C. is able to watch on a pad sometimes, though.
Put STBs on the TVs, and run your own closed circuit entertainment oasis. Plex, Jellyfin, there are now many ways to do it.
I stopped watching network TV in the early 90s. About 15-18 years ago, we completely cut all the cables. I couldn't tell you what's on current TV, and we don't miss it one iota. It's saved us untold thousands in cable fees, and we spend a lot more time doing other things.
If the entire world's media industry collapsed tomorrow, we wouldn't notice. But if there is something current that must be seen, there are ways of finding it on the Internet. Same with the news. I'm normally up to date on current events.
We did the same thing with our music library. Over 80,000 music tracks are now on a computer drive. Music going back to the 30s, it's all there. We listen to it through audio streaming boxes connected to the stereos. The vinyl we kept, as it is special.
My goal was to have our entire lifetime media collection on one drive, and hand it over to my son when our time is up, so that he can carry it forward. I think we accomplished that.
I’ll get back to you later. My show is on.
That's what I've done with a RAID 5 Network Attached Storage Unit with four 20TB drives and UPS running Jellyfin.
I've got nearly 1500 movies, 650 TV series, and 13,000 songs.
As part of the setup in the movie "The Duke", the protagonist (Kempton Bunton) was shown to modify his TV to be unable to receive the BBC signal. Of course no details of how that was done were shown, but it seemed plausible to modify the tuning circuit to otherwise filter out that broadcast signal. But he was still forced to pay the BBC fee, thereby establishing the injustice on which he justified his actions. All that as a long way to ask was the license based on the physical TV set back during his time (1960s)? And then some point later transition to a per household basis? Was the change in any way influenced by what Bunton had done in real life?
