The other was television "news" which was becoming less and less news, and more and more propaganda and "infotainment." What video news I do watch is occasionally YouTube clips posted here on DU.
I don't have cable or satellite, and I haven't re-scanned broadcast channels since our local PBS station went digital. But I don't even watch PBS anymore. They too are irritatingly influenced by commercial interests.
I have a DSL internet connection that's just fast enough and stable enough to do television with slightly less quality than a DVD, but greater quality than an old VHS tape.
Our television is strictly a movie playing machine and I love it, especially when I find an old movie I always meant to see on a DVD in a thrift store.
Your mileage may very, but when I see advertising by the fracking gas industry, pharmaceutical companies, corrupt banks, and lying politicians, and propaganda presented as "news," I want to shoot the television. Since I quit television my sensitivity to these things has increased. I think it's like ex-smokers who become acutely aware of the smell of tobacco on other people.
I'm not making any moral judgments here, I know many people who love television, and I'm pretty sure I'm not existing on any higher ethical plane for avoiding it. I'm simply relating my own experience.
One of the television companies, I think it was Philips, once made a television with an auto-mute feature for advertising. It worked by detecting the artificially enhanced "loudness" most advertisers used. I think they took a lot of heat from broadcasters. As a technical problem, movie makers and pop music producers started using the same techniques for enhancing loudness, so the television would "randomly" mute music and action scenes too.
Later, as television stations were becoming increasingly automated, a subtle sound or digital signal was added to network content to indicate where the advertising should be inserted. Devices were built to detect these signals and mute the commercials, but networks moved beyond those technology too.
The future is almost certainly a model where people can subscribe to a network and remove advertising, just as it works here on DU.
That's not a progressive future, it only further insulates those with money from everyone else.
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