We moved back to the city some 6 weeks ago. Since then we have done entirely without traditional television. So admittedly that’s less than two months, but the initial results are encouraging. The only show that I watch with any kind of consistency is Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, for which full episodes are available at the Daily Show site. Other than that we now have streaming accounts with Netflix, Vudu and Hulu Plus. Between those three there is no shortage of things to watch. Of course it helps a lot that none of us are trying to watch any US sports.
Yesterday evening there was a brief moment though when we would have liked to watch some of the Oscars just for the heck of it. The Red Carpet show had been officially streamed but the Oscars themselves were not. The rationale here apparently was that the ABC broadcast is available for free over the air and on basic cable. That leads me to an important question: how high is the cost of supporting a stream? Even though we only wanted to watch for maybe 30 minutes I would have probably spent a few dollars for a high quality stream instead of digging through reams of spammy adverts, phony sites and shaky third party streams.
