When I was your age, television was called books.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN
One of the issues that plagues me with my traumatic brain injury is visual processing. I get sick and fatigued when I get overstimulated in this area. Big box stores are bad for me especially Lowe's and Home Depot. I can handle the grocery store because I let my wife do the shopping as I push the cart. If I had to hunt down what we eat, I would get that sick feeling there, too. It is not seeing that causes me issues but actively looking for things. Another issue is when there is an overload of visual stimuli. They have these kaleidoscopic videos on YouTube that take me to the edge of vomiting. When I went blind with the cataracts, life was hard, but the dimming of my vision provided relief from the visual processing issues. I have learned that wearing dark sunglasses helps, and I destimulate each day in a dark room.
I have never been a huge fan of movies or television shows. I spent the entirety of the 1990s without owning a television set. I preferred the radio and my CD player. I prefer listening to watching. The brain injury only added to a way of life I already had. I don't feel deprived of anything. The only thing missing from my life is binge watching which I don't need.
I have been adding visual entertainment back into my life in small bites. After six years, I can watch two hours of dramatic content without getting sick. Action movies and eye candy movies sometimes make me sick. An old black and white show like Perry Mason where talking is more prominent than action is the fare I can handle now.
My attention issues make it hard for me to listen to people talking. People will talk, and I will miss a sentence or two. It is like someone hit the mute button briefly and turned it back on. This is aggravating in a conversation, but I can tolerate it in a podcast because I sometimes listen to the same program twice. You can't hit repeat on a real world conversation. I carry a voice recorder for times when the conversation counts to play back later. I never had these issues before the TBI.
Physical Media and the End of OAB TV
I could live the rest of my life just reading books, but reading is not a shared experience. I could read aloud, but this becomes tedious. Passively listening to audiobooks is not the same as actively reading a page. So, I took to watching the free programming that was available on my dog ear antenna. I remember that we watched Andy Griffith on MeTV, Columbo on Cozi TV, and a bunch of western movies on Grit TV. We had a good time until our old second hand TV gave up the ghost. When I looked into buying a new TV, the market is dominated by smart TV sets that I can't stand. When people cut the cord on cable, they replaced it with the streaming cord and now pay more to watch movies and TV.
Instead of buying a new TV set, we bought a portable DVD player. This solved one problem for us. As for watching television, we have turned to watching free streaming channels like Tubi and Pluto. This leaves OAB TV that still exists for free and the temptation to buy a new dumb TV. This is where things get nasty.
TV broadcasters don't want to broadcast TV anymore. I learned this from the Antenna Man on YouTube. They make more money from rebroadcast fees on cable and streaming. Those stations are now lobbying the FCC to make it possible to turn broadcast TV into over-the-air cable TV where you pay for programming you now watch for free. Naturally, this will kill broadcast TV, but these stupid bastards don't care. The people that will feel this the most are folks living in rural areas that don't get cable or streaming. The broadcasters are hoping to shut it down by 2028.
Knowing that they want to put the screws to me, I don't see the point in buying a new dumb TV set to replace the old set. They don't want my business. It is sad to see things going this way. Some folks like the Antenna Man don't think it will come to this. I think he is wrong. I totally believe they can and will kill broadcast TV as we know it.
Like I said, I don't watch much visual content. I would be more upset with the loss of AM radio which is also endangered. At the end of the day, I like watching old movies and TV shows with my wife. I can get those on DVD, and those portable DVD players are big sellers right now as people reject streaming. I think this will become more of a thing going forward. Physical media will persist especially among people who live in rural areas who don't have high speed internet. I think these people are the ones keeping DVDs alive.
