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Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Cable Bill on the Rise, and Breaking Bad on the Horizon, and Netflix Makes it all OK: These are the things on my mind today.

When I was a kid I got magazines in the mail. I can remember Entertainment Weekly, and Movieline, before the internet was big you didn't know much of anything until the magazines showed up. Times changed and I grew up and now I dread the mail. Bills, that’s all, bills bills and more bills.

            Then a friend of mine told me about Netflix. It was just starting and to be honest I hated the idea. I loved going to the video store. I knew the people there and they knew me, we’d talk movies and games, and I eventually brought my daughter with me, and she loved it. I remember signing up for Netflix and STILL going to the video store at times. It was sad to see Hollywood video go away. We still have Family Video here, and they do well apparently, but they need to let go. I despise Family Video for staying around when Hollywood video couldn'tFamily Video is nothing but a reminder of days long past, days when my weekends consisted of Burger King or Fazoli’s and movie after movie after movie.

            For all the fighting I did with Netflix and their attempt to take all of that away from me, I accepted it with the change going on in my own life. Starting a family and having little time for fast food and movies, I knew that like everything else that made up a singular me had to be shed and left behind, and for better or for worse it needed to be done to make room for my family.

            We looked at our bills, and the money I was spending renting movies, we even looked at the miles to the video store and cost of gas. It was going to have to go with Netflix, and though the two overlapped, they did so for not very long, for as I said Hollywood Video closed down just a short time before Blockbuster itself went tits up.

            On the plus side – I was beginning to look forward to the mail again (with a family you find yourself enjoying the little things). The streaming was a hassle at first, with the disc that had to be in the PS3 to stream, but luckily that didn't last long, and we now stream as we were meant to.

            Another nail in the coffin of my past life was getting rid of cable (which is something we need to look into again since this morning I found out Cox will be raising their prices here in Wichita, Kansas. Talk about backwards movement). It was a tough thing to do (Have I established TV was everything to me for a large portion of my young adult life?), but again a no-brainer. It was a cost that we couldn't afford nor did we truly need, and again with the fall of cable in our house Netflix rose up as it began to carry more and more cable shows. Not a whole lot, yes, but enough to keep us satisfied to the point that now we currently have too many shows to watch that we’re beginning to fall behind on them all (a problem we didn't think possible when we first began to stream shows).

            My point is, I love Breaking Bad, and the final season will be streaming Feb. 24, and I can’t wait.

            Also, I think that the creators of the show, when they say that Breaking Bad benefited from Netflix, instantly started something that will change how we watch TV. Breaking Bad is a great show, and I think that looking back it will be seen as a powerful one as well in we the customer’s struggle with affordable, enjoyable, TV.

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