The Internet Should be Platformless

It’s not hard to notice that the local news media outlets and their outdated websites has become one of my pet peeves. I suppose I should be a bit more honest about why this is a pet peeve of mine though. You see, it really boils down to the fact that I have a satellite dish and they charge extra for access to local TV stations, and signal for the local TV stations where I live is laughable. I suppose that’s the way of things when you live on the side of a mountain, but you would think that these things would improve with time as technology advanced. Here, they don’t. I’ve lived in this town for over a decade and I have never lived in a part of town where you could get good local television signal. When I first moved here, cable didn’t offer the local stations as part of any of their packages and then, when they did add them, you had to pay extra for them. So we just sort of gave up on network television and moved on to other things because we were broke then.

Now that we’re not, we honestly don’t see the point in paying our provider an extra 15$ a month to have something that we should be able to easily get over the airwaves for free, if the signal were decent enough for us to view it up here without special signal boosting equipment on our house, I’d watch, but since it’s not… we don’t. I’ve learned to deal with it, but I compensate for not being able to watch the news, by visiting the local news sites from the web.

I don’t know how many homes are like mine, but I do suspect that the number isn’t small.

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