Twice recently I've been pushed, by unnecessary limitations of the technology I pay for, into the arms of unauthorized copies or downloading of media. In the first case, Maya and I had been watching the Showtime series "Dexter" on demand. We took our time watching it, sometimes watching more than one episode per week and sometimes less. One day I noticed that all the episodes we had watched so far were gone from the selection of available episodes. Chastened, I realized I had not been checking when the episodes would "end", and when I later checked on the rest of episodes, I realized they all ended in a few days, "on 1/23." So we would have to have something of a marathon to watch the rest of it in time, about two episodes each day. The thought did occur to me at the time that "on 1/23" is a bit ambiguous; it could mean either the end of the 23rd or the beginning. But I repressed it, because I thought it would be poor interface design to make it the beginning of the day, and I didn't see how we could watch the episodes any faster anyway.
On the 23rd, sure enough, all the episodes were already gone, and we were thrust into a desperate situation. At that point, having watched four episodes in the last couple of days, we were very involved in the escalating plot, and really wanted to find out what was going to happen. We couldn't possibly wait for the DVD. And there simply wasn't any other way to see these episodes. So I turned to alternative channels, and found downloadable versions that looked almost as good as a DVD. By hooking up my laptop to the TV and the stereo, I was able to recreate the immersive viewing experience that we had become quite accustomed to.
Why did I have to do that? Why did they have to cut off the on-demand availability of the episodes on that particular day, long before a DVD release? Either there is some technical limitation to the amount of on-demand content that Time Warner can host at one time, or they just don't think what I pay for on-demand entitles me to a service quite that good.
Two days ago the Academy Awards aired, and thanks to a party planner lacking foresight, we had to spend most of the evening out. We DVR-ed the program before leaving, but didn't think at that time to program extra recording time because the show usually exceeds the nominal schedule. We got back before the end and started watching. When the scheduled time ended and recording stopped, we were switched from watching the recording to live TV, instantly ruining one award for us by showing the winner giving the speech, but also showing us that we would need to program more recording, which we did before going back to watching the playback. We only made it about halfway through before we had to go to bed.
Yesterday I had the unusual situation of having to try not to find out who won the big awards. My coworkers are not likely to talk about it, so that wasn't a problem, but my Google personalized homepage and all but a couple of the web sites I usually visit daily were off-limits. This was a wake-up call to how 'plugged in' I've become and how much harder it is not to find out the latest news, than to find it out.
When we watched the rest of the recording last night we gradually became aware of impending doom: the show had gone more than 35 minutes over. Again, this possibility had occurred to me the previous night, but I had banished it, remembering that they had been trying to rein in the overruns in recent years. The recording ended during the acceptance speech for Best Actor. I knew it would be impossible to go looking for videos of the last two award presentations without finding out who won, so I sacrificed my own surprise for Maya's. After scouring a few sites the best I could find was on YouTube--a pretty good video for Best Director, and one with Spanish voiceovers for Best Picture. Something of a Pyrrhic victory.
Why couldn't the official Oscars site host videos of the awards being presented? They had lots of videos from the "Thank You Cam" and "Ellen's Video Diary." I'm sure we were not the only ones who encountered this problem as a result of the Academy's inability to schedule adequate time for its show.
