Streaming television online is the future. I get that. But it is definitely a work in progress.
This hit me again last Thursday night, when I only watched a few minutes of the Green Bay-Tennessee football game on Amazon Prime.
Granted, Mary Ann and I had some catching up to do on other shows from our primary service, DirecTV. Those shows definitely affected the time I had for the ballgame.
“Jeopardy” is in the middle of the Tournament of Champions. We record each episode of “Ghosts,” a 30-minute CBS comedy that really is fun. And we watched the Thanksgiving episode of a new CBS show, “So Help Me Todd,” that has potential.
But in the past, when Thursday Night Football was on NBC, I didn’t skip many games. Last night was important: Aaron Rodgers is the quarterback on one of my fantasy football teams, and I have Tennessee running back Derrick Henry on another team.
For personal bragging rights, this was a big game. But it was better to watch the recorded shows for one reason: During a live broadcast on streaming TV, you cannot surf during commercials.
Generally, sports commercials are above average. But long ago, armed with my DirecTV remote, I learned to check out other channels when the ads came on during a show I was watching.
I’m not anti-advertising. The newspaper and website have plenty of ads — but you are not forced to look at them for two or three minutes the way you are on TV.
With a cable TV or DirecTV remote, you can surf all over the place during commercials. I tend to put on the TV guide, which lists two hours’ worth of shows on six channels at a time, and scroll through it to see what else is on.
I’ve developed a good sense of when a block of ads end on the show I’m watching, and usually get back on time.
I tried doing this recently during a break in a Thursday night game on Amazon. You can look at what else is available, but if you choose one, it starts at the beginning unless you were already watching it. What’s the point of that?
Last weekend, Mary Ann and I were in Memphis for a weekend of grandson babysitting. Audrey and her husband Zach have YouTube TV, which has a lineup of channels just like cable and DirecTV.
That’s nice, but it’s way more difficult on YouTube to bounce from one channel to another during a commercial. Or, to put it more accurately, the service probably has shortcuts that I don’t know about.
I asked around the office, and someone who uses the Hulu streaming service for broadcast and cable channels said you can set up lists of favorites to find them more quickly.
If you get right down to it, the problem is as much with the TV remote as it is the way streaming systems have set up their programs.
There is no “back button” on any streaming remote that I’ve seen. I don’t get that. The back button makes anything with dozens of channels more manageable. Who had the bright idea to leave that out?
It turns out that YouTube, and I assume other streamers as well, does have a back button. You just have to know how to find it.
Someone else in the office called her husband, who told me how to get a list of channels you’ve recently watched. It seems easy and I’ll try it next time I watch YouTube — now that I know about it.
That is probably one of many Easter eggs hidden in the operating systems of streaming TV. I remember a similar confusion when Mary Ann and I switched to DirecTV about 13 years ago.
While it is annoying to have limits on your TV surfing abilities, I will concede that it’s a minor nuisance — even though it does make a fun topic for a column.
And there’s no doubt that online streaming is winning the battle for viewers. Although, just gotta throw this out there — what happens when the internet goes down? Because it does happen.
Between them, Mary Ann and our three kids have access to Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Disney+ and probably a couple of others that I can’t recall. They all talk about how streaming is less expensive than cable or satellite, and maybe that’s true for a single service. But don’t try to convince me that having all that access is cheap.
