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Because who hasn’t been up at 1am in the morning thinking ‘just one more episode’ as they hit play on the dvd/iTunes/PVR during a binge watch of their favourite TV show? I love a good marathon hit of my TV loves. Like The West Wing.

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How about you? I love seeing the shows uninterrupted by adds and being able to see how the overarching plots and threads come together over a season (much easier to do when watching a show in shorter time period).

I think the first TV show I ever bought on VHS (and back then the series were EXPENSIVE here in Oz) was Buffy.

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And I gave those tapes a good workout. In Australia, for a very very long time the TV channels had Aussies over a barrel. We didn’t have iTunes or region free DVD players or broadband and so we had to watch what we were given when we were given it. And TV programmers here are horrible. They move shows around without warning (seriously, even my intelligent record on my PVR has trouble keeping up), they declare episodes to be ‘season finales’ when they’re really episode ten and they’re just breaking for a non ratings period and not giving any hint of when shows might reappear. In the last few years they’ve started to “fast track” shows from the US so we get them a day or so after they air in the US but there’s still lots of shows we don’t get or are several seasons behind on. And shows don’t start up again when they do in the US necessarily once the stations feel they’re not the hot new thing anymore. We get hour upon endless hour of terrible reality TV and everything else is a mess. All this goes triple for anything thats sci fi or fantasy related. Plus pay TV (cable) has been limited to basically one provider who charges a fortune. And sometimes lock down shows so that they don’t appear on free to air or iTunes. They’ve apparently locked down the next season of Game of Thrones so that it won’t be on iTunes (I don’t understand the appeal of this to the company selling the program…why cut off legitimate sales and guarantee that people will pirate the show?) Netflix is arriving in Australia this year, so hopefully that will help break up the monopoly and keep the pay TV prices heading downwards (they have been forced to bring prices down thanks to iTunes in recent years).

Because of all this, these days I tend to wait until a show is on iTunes at a reasonable price or the DVD is out in the US or the UK (yay for region free DVD players) and I can buy it via Amazon or other online stores. The DVDs often come out months before the season starts in Australia and I no longer have to deal with the vagaries of Aussie TV programming (seriously, the networks are big proponents of cutting off your nose to spite your face). And then I settle down with some popcorn and a few spare nights and feed the muse big chunks of story (I believe all writers need to consume story in large quantities and various formats) with delight. The hardest part is hitting the stop button before it’s way past my bedtime. Because who can resist just one more hit of shows like Downton Abbey?

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How about you? Who likes a good TV glom?

 

 

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