Americans, how do you watch TV?

[Brazen]

My ISP, which provides my TV service, is upgrading at the end of the month which involves wiping the entire hard drive of all my recorded series and films. Not a happy bunny 

[sbr]

You should be able to burn and/or download backups, shouldn't you?

[Maladict]

I rarely watch live TV as I can't stand commercials (and 99% of the shows). But for some reason I watch recorded stuff (including DVDs) even less, I just can't be bothered to put it on. If my gf would let me I'd probably get rid of the whole thing and just keep the PC.

[viper37]

A German blogger says - and it seems to be reflected by comments on the board here - that in the U.S. the trend goes in the direction that only news and sports are watched live and in realtime and that (almost) everything else gets either recorded or streamed.

It says it's not there yet, but moving towards it.

Would you agree?

Not American, for my part, mostly true.  I even sometimes record the news.

[Josephus]

It's really put a damper on what used to be called "water cooler talk" or these days, forum discussions. No matter how long you wait until after the first viewing of a show, there's always some clown yelling, "Don't talk about it. I haven't seen it yet!"

[dps]

A German blogger says - and it seems to be reflected by comments on the board here - that in the U.S. the trend goes in the direction that only news and sports are watched live and in realtime and that (almost) everything else gets either recorded or streamed.

It says it's not there yet, but moving towards it.

Would you agree?

Yup. Only a huge fan of a particular program would actually watch something premier. The only show I can think of doing that for if I were home would be Game of Thrones.

That's fucking backwards, though.  I'm not going to bother recording something unless it's a program I really want to see and I can't be watching when it airs.  Anything else is just background noise--I'll watch it as it airs if I have nothing else to do, otherwise the heck with it.

recordings have no commercials

A lot of the commercials are funnier than the so-called comedies.