TV On-Line?

TV on the Internet

I am watching TV on a Sunday night and I see that NBC is running a rerun of The Voice from last week. WHY? I've got a 50" HDTV and I'm paying Dish Network $100 a month so I can see the same ol' crap repeated in less than a week's time?

If it were up to me, I'd give Dish the boot, hook my 50" HDTV to my laptop and watch TV on-line. Problem is ... not everything is available on-line. It could be. It should be ... but it's not.

Local TV stations, cable and satellite systems don't want to go out of business. If we could watch all network shows and sporting events, on line, local TV stations and local cable companies and satellite distributors would go belly-up!  There are two ways that they can stay in business...even with everything being streamed...

1. Stream live and be truly LOCAL. Local people enjoy watching local TV - especially when it is fresh and updated. It's not cheap for the stations...it requires extra work. It's easier to run 30 minutes of The Andy Griffith Show than it is to produce a local program. (Can't I watch Andy Griffith on the Internet?)

2. The second way for local TV and cable systems to remain in business is to make sure that the FCC and politicians don't make it legal for TV stations and Networks to stream all of their stuff on-line. (This is what we have now.)

I say why not stream EVERYTHING? Remember when competition was legal? Remember when the best of the best was number one? The way things are now, you can air the same stuff in a small town as they air anywhere else. People in the small town are forced to watch the small town TV station...which has maybe three hours a day of local programming.  Much of those three hours contains the same news story repeated four, five, six or more times!  That's almost useless.  - but it could be put on-line!

Then, there's PAY TV.  You know, that's where you pay a subscription fee to watch TV and commercials which are supposed to pay for the program....is this right?