Classic Hifi Care

And not necessarily at 3 am from drinking too much soda pop. I feel so modern.......

Okay, maybe I'm not 100% ready to stream, but I'm well on my way. We have a dumb TV, made in 2012 before TV's got smart. I wanted a new 75" Vizio so we could stream, but cooler heads prevailed and so I'll put a little cockroach in a USB port on our old TV until we find out if we are actually smart enough to make this work. I get Paramount+ free from work, since Walmart sponsors several shows on Paramount network. There are some new shows on Paramount+ we want to see, such as the Sly Stalone Tulsa gangster show starting in about a week. My understanding is there are no commercials on streaming sites. We'll see. Wish me luck.

All the kids at work think it is their right to get things for free. They know where to get all the free stuff. They "watch TV" on their phone, and several of them go together and buy a 75" flat panel so they can play video games. Those in our generation wear glasses with lenses thick as stove lids because we watched a 10" black and white, but mostly snowy gray, TV when we were kids. Kids of the current generation will wear free glasses thick as stove lids from "watching TV" on that little bitty phone screen. "You gotta stream, dude" is their advice. Okay, but what IS streaming? How do you stream? Fortunately, we had a vendor come thru one day offering to coach store employees on the various streaming devices. Okay, but my TV is "old" a 2012, which is ancient in the streaming world. I have to buy a little cockroach of some kind, a Roku "streaming player". Once I get it connected to the TV, it's a matter of selecting the program we want, kind of like On Demand on Cox cable. I sure hope all this trouble will be worth it.

In the same boat. 2014 Sansui small-ish 42" dumb TV. We only watch over-the-air shows for free, no cable. But visiting in Denver now we're getting spoiled being able to watch PBS series we like and have missed by using the "kids" (45? is a kid?) Roku and are sort-of learning to use it. My concern if we get one, with so many choices, is watching too much TV instead of reading... yet another slippery slope?

My wife follows the Phoenix Suns basketball team, and their stuff is only available on cable or some kind of pay-per-view source, so we can't kill the cable entirely. Plus, we got "On Demand" so we can watch the shows we miss when basketball is on. About all she can do is something that doesn't require a lot of physicality, so TV is about her only entertainment. More and more of the good content is going on to streaming services. Network TV, with a few exceptions is pretty much garbage. Not much entertainment value, not funny, not interesting. I am tinkering with over-the-air content in the shop, but that is a project on the back burner at present. Paramount+ seems to have all the stuff we want to watch. "Dark dramas" is what I call them. We are addicted to "Yellowstone". IT is on the Paramount channel and on cable. Paramount starts their series on cable, then transfers them to Paramount+, where we couldn't get them. I'm not excited about learning about more "tech" but we don't have a lot of choice.

I use a ROKU device and subscribe to Sling Blue, Acorn TV and Britbox. I own my own wifi router so there is no rent charge from the cable provider. My TV was a smart TV, but most of the providers it was made for have went belly up. When it comes time for me to get another, it will have RF and AV inputs. Period.