What's your preferred way to watch TV shows?

[Trollheart]

Back when I were a lad, and you could get done for stepping out onto the road into the path on an onrushing Stegosaurus, we had one way and one way only to watch telly. That, children, is why they were called TV programmes. Today, of course, you have a multitude of choices: you can download, watch on streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime etc., watch on demand, watch on YouTube sometimes, and you have a whole host of devices to watch telly on, from phones and tablets to computer screens, Fire sticks and, um, tellys, So how do you usually consume your TV?

I still use the tried-and-trusted method of watching the actual box, but even for this old-timer it's changed. Time was when you watched a programme when it was on, or you didn't get to see it. No repeats, no video recorders, no plus channels. And most shows were one episode a week. Even for a coffin-dodger like me (wait: that's a bit insensitive a term, isn't it? Hmm. Nearly dead. Much better) it's hard to just watch one episode and wait, so my usual MO is to tape a show and get all the episodes, then watch them back to back, or at least watch one or two (if it's a new show) to see if I like it, and if I don't, then delete them all. I've become, in my own way, just as impatient as this generation, unwilling to wait.

So how do you guys do it? Or do you?

[SGR]

Back when I were a lad, and you could get done for stepping out onto the road into the path on an onrushing Stegosaurus, we had one way and one way only to watch telly. That, children, is why they were called TV programmes. Today, of course, you have a multitude of choices: you can download, watch on streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime etc., watch on demand, watch on YouTube sometimes, and you have a whole host of devices to watch telly on, from phones and tablets to computer screens, Fire sticks and, um, tellys, So how do you usually consume your TV?

I still use the tried-and-trusted method of watching the actual box, but even for this old-timer it's changed. Time was when you watched a programme when it was on, or you didn't get to see it. No repeats, no video recorders, no plus channels. And most shows were one episode a week. Even for a coffin-dodger like me (wait: that's a bit insensitive a term, isn't it? Hmm. Nearly dead. Much better) it's hard to just watch one episode and wait, so my usual MO is to tape a show and get all the episodes, then watch them back to back, or at least watch one or two (if it's a new show) to see if I like it, and if I don't, then delete them all. I've become, in my own way, just as impatient as this generation, unwilling to wait.

So how do you guys do it? Or do you?

I'm just old enough where I got to experience the best of both worlds. I remember being a kid and anxiously awaiting some cartoon special so much that I ended up recording the airing on a blank VHS tape so that I could watch it again later. I remember having certain shows (like Prison Break) that would, as you mention, air weekly, and me and my family would anxiously gather on the couch to watch it. I remember renting VHS tapes from local video stores during the weekends, and eventually those turned into DVDs, and those turned into blu-rays, and now we have on-demand streaming. I remember when my mother first got Netflix, years ago now, it wasn't even a streaming service - it was subscription service where they'd mail you a certain number of DVDs every month, and my mother was always anxiously trying to watch the movies soon after they arrived so she could ship them back and get her money's worth.

Nowadays, streaming is just the easiest option. For shows or movies I truly treasure, I might spring for a physical copy if I think I'll watch them again, but otherwise, whenever my wife and I want to watch a movie or a TV show, we see where it's streaming and usually it's on something we have a subscription to. The best part though is movies - if I dig and find a movie I think we'd enjoy, we sit on the couch, I boot up Amazon Prime, and I spend $4 to stream it. No hassle, no physical object, no worries.

Though I can sometimes find nostalgia in the old VHS tapes, the physical experience of opening them and looking at the boxes, and the Blockbuster mandate of 'Be Kind, Rewind' - I often find myself not missing the hassle that it entailed.

[Trollheart]

Oh I can get where you're coming from with videos. You'd go mad and rent maybe three, and then realise they all had to be back the same day, so you'd either look at ten minutes of one and if it was no good go on to the next, try to sit up all night watching them all, or else just eat the overdue fine and bring them back late. I also remember forgetting to return certain videos and weeks later realising they were under the telly or in my room or something, and then having to shell out what would have been considered a big fine (20 quid maybe, with rentals about 1.50 each), and sometimes I'd even forget I had ones out and go down to the store to take something out and be told sorry, you can't rent anything new till you bring back the ones you still have!

The best though was just trawling the shelves, looking at what they had and trying to decide if something was worth getting or not. Believe me, like yourself I imagine, I watched a whole lot of shitty movies. I mean, this was back when you couldn't Google or use IMDB to see what a movie was like, and you only had the information on the back of the jacket to go by, unless someone had recommended it.

Oh and may I ask, does the word Betamax mean anything to you? 

[Lexi Darling]

I cut my teeth on VHS; as soon as I learned how to tape things off of live TV I would often record the shows that were important to me. This was a practice I learned from my mom, which ended up backfiring on her sometimes, like the time when I ran out of blanks and taped an episode of Digimon over a portion of her tape of the 2000 Oscars. I just grabbed a random tape lol, turns out she hadn't watched the Oscars and was taping it for later, so imagine how mad she got when she was about to hear the winner of Best Supporting Actor and it randomly cuts to this cartoon monster show. 

I did enjoy the ease of use and how you didn't have to worry nearly as much about accidentally damaging it like with DVDs; those would get scratched and fingerprinted all the time, and felt way more prone to having skipping parts that would never play the same again. I do have nostalgia for the VHS era, and quite honestly I'm so fed up with modern streaming services that will randomly remove things and make you subscribe to 8 different recurring payments just to watch all the stuff you want. I can't help but miss the simplicity of the 90s, when all you needed was a VCR and tapes. That's one reason I gravitate more to Youtube content than actual movies/TV these days; the ease of access and breadth of niche video topics is more my speed at this stage of my life.

[Psy-Fi]

I do most of my viewing on my flat-screen TV via YouTube. I also occasionally purchase complete TV series DVD sets when I can find them for dirt cheap prices. Once in a great while, I'll watch a show on another channel besides YouTube but most of what I'm looking for is usually available on YouTube.