DIGITAL TV, HULU.COM, AND THE SPACE/TIME CONTINUUM

My best friend and so-called adopted brother, Otis (Otis is not really his name, although now that I’ve called him that, he’s probably more known now for that name than his own – anyway, I digress,) is fighting the whole digital TV conversion like an XP user struggling over going Vista; an old Coke drinker boycotting New Coke; or a baseball fan struggling over the use of the designated hitter. He hates it and doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. He’s not going to get cable and he’s definitely not going to get some silly converter box either, he growls. Yet, for some odd reason, he’s shopping for a big flat screen TV for his apartment as if the Food Network is simply going to magically appear on it because he wills it so.

His new apartment has free-wifi so he’s in heaven about not having to directly pay Comcast, although technically he does realize that it’s factored into his rent. So I suggested that he try hulu.com to maximize the full extent of his wifi non-payment experience. If I miss an episode of regular TV that I forgot to DVR or I’m bored with only having 782 channels available to me with absolutely nothing on any of them, I go there to watch my TV. And I am even just technically savy enough to plug an “S” cord into my computer and run it to my TV to watch the show on a bigger screen, especially when I’m on the road and in “motel only has 40 channels and nothing on” hell.

“So do the shows play in real time?” he asked me.

“What do you mean, Otis?” I retorted.

“I want to see my show exactly when it comes on, you know, in real time,” he declared.

“But Otis, hulu.com let’s you watch your favorite shows whenever the heck you want to watch them, regardless of the hour they originally aired,” I maintained.


“But I want to see the show exactly when it airs otherwise, I could care less about seeing the damn thing!” Otis demanded. (Keep in mind that Otis is not a 92 year old crotchety man but a 40 year old, eccentric genius crotchety old man – just in case you were getting a different picture here than the one I was painting above.)

I kept going on and on, however, that it truly didn’t matter that the show was available any time he wanted to watch it – day, night, eve of the apocalypse, whenever, and that he could watch it on that big old flat screen TV and not even have to pay any extra for digital cable! He could have his cake, eat it, digest it, throw it up, sell it on ebay as left over from a Britney Spear’s night of binging – it was irrelevant because it was streaming to him via the internet 24/7 non-stop!

“You just don’t get it, do you, Trace? I set aside time at certain hours of the day to watch the show that comes on at that time. If it ain’t in real time, I don’t want to see it,” he explained, exasperated that I was not getting the quantum physics equation with regard to his own particular way he went about viewing his shows or E=MC2.

E - the amount of Energy it would take him to hunt down his show on www.hulu.com.

M – the mass of all the other meaningless shows he didn’t want to sift through in order to get to the show he might or might not want to view.

C – the crap he’d have to put up with just to watch the one or two shows he actually liked, squared!

I give up. It’s apparent in my quest to help Otis out so that he can watch Paula Dean and Gordon Ramsay, his two favorite shows, that my advice is being sucked up into the black hole of analog TV oblivion. Next time he wants to come over and plant himself in front of my DirectTV with subscriptions to every freakin’ channel known to man and the rock group Menudo, I’m so cutting him off!

Cheers!