Why I Hate Local TV Affiliates
I’m trying to watch the first installment of the big CBS mystery event, Harper’s Island. CBS has been hyping this program for what feels like months. And my local CBS affiliate just broke in so a stammering local weatherman could tell me about a tornado warning on the other side of the state. It may sound like a valuable public service, but it’s not. It’s rude and disruptive. I’m a Dish 200 subscriber, so I have a lot of viewing options. Only a few of them are local affiliates, and feel the need to break into programming for local weather events. All of the people in my community who didn’t happen to be watching a local affiliate (around 4 channels out of hundreds) are still blissfully unaware of a potential tornado a hundred miles away.
And then there are the droves of people who record their programming via DVR for later viewing. How useful is a weather alert when you’re watching a program recorded last week?
Maybe this ‘public service’ made sense back when the only channels people watched were local channels, but now you only get to have your programming interrupted for these urgent messages if you happen to be watching one of the few local channels. I should have just waited for Harper’s Island to show up online.
By the way, this is the same local affiliate that refused to let Dish Network carry it’s free to air signal last summer because Dish wasn’t willing to pay enough. Even though local stations are advertising supported, and would seem to want their ads shown in as many houses as possible, they withdrew from Dish’s programming to shake down the satellite provider for more money. And federal law protects these local monopolies, keeping consumers from getting access to other, better, CBS feeds via sattelite.
Local Network affiliates are an anachronism, and I do everything I can to avoid them. Hulu helps a lot, and I am not above resorting to torrents for programs. When more people get PCs connected to their TVs, these dinosaurs are in big trouble. </rant>
