On television

I haven't watched much television in the last five years or so. When I moved to this apartment, it had cable TV and so could get about 30 channels (primarily German, but also French, Italian and CNN). The package included the usual assortment of trash and my favourite station, ARTE, one of the most intelligent stations worldwide. (Example: tonight at 22:00 ARTE is broadcasting a three-hour version of Peter Brook's production of the Mahabharata.)

Then the cable company raised the price, I said "no thanks" (not quite in those words) and so the service was disconnected.

After that, my set could receive one single local station, and that only on rainy days. Since that station seldom broadcast anything worth watching, and since these few broadcasts seldom coincided with bad weather, I lost the habit of watching TV. It sat unregarded in the corner of my bedroom, and I didn't think about it from one month to the next.

The world cup changed that. Not that I watched any of the games, but for another reason: Europe is switching over to digital broadcasting and the world cup was chosen as a transition point, to encourage as many people as possible to convert as soon as possible. The digital broadcast service offers (presently) eleven free stations, one of which is ARTE - and at once the subject became interesting to me.

So I bought a digital TV receiver this afternoon, a Thomson DTI1003 (no link to the manufacturers, because they have an egregiously shitty website: too big, too slow, too many photos of pretty-people-with-dogs, no hard facts at all, only displays properly with Internet Explorer; the Web is ten years old, damn it, in 2006 one must consider such a website to be an act of deliberate malice) and plugged it in. I remembered the difficulty I had had programming my video recorder many years ago, and was expecting much the same from this machine. And indeed the Thomson's first actions seemed to be heading in that direction: it asked me to choose a language, then went into "hourglass" mode. At this point, the phone rang. When I returned to the bedroom some five minutes later, the TV was playing a news station. Clever little Thomson had found all eleven available stations and programmed them into itself; it even figured out the date and time. That made a nice first impression. The remote control is overwhelming at first glance (forty-two buttons!) but in use it's well laid out and very intuitive: I could surf stations and adjust the volume without needing to look down.

So I looked through all eleven stations, about a minute of each, and decided that there was nothing worth watching. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

By the way in case anyone has been wondering, the links to books and CDs that I throw in from time to time are not "advertising" in the usual sense: I'm not getting paid for posting them (nor do I receive any other incentive or reward). When something pleases me, I like to pass it on.