On television streaming boxes and streaming disservices.

Returning the Comcast XFi box a couple of months ago reminded me of how many of these damned things there actually are out there.

Back when people were crazy and just wanted things to work, we used discs or tapes.

Now, we have boxes.

Amazon has a box. Roku has a box. Comcast has a box. Apple has a box. There’s so many boxes that I’m sure I haven’t even started with all of the boxes.

None of the boxes run all of the same apps.

None of the apps have all of the shows.

If you use the boxes and apps, your TV will turn into a Christmas tree of boxes hanging off of it, and your bills for the apps will be enormous.

The boxes can’t run off the TV, so you’ll need to also find a way to plug them all into an outlet. They don’t power down properly, so they run up your power bill.

On top of that, these things spy on you and sell that data to advertisers who know more about you now, and use that data to manipulate you to buy more products you don’t want that clutter your house and empty your bank account.

If none of this was reason-enough to avoid the boxes and apps, the DRM means that each time you watch something, you’re downloading it again.

On slower connections, it may not work well, or could hog up the entire available bandwidth and get everyone in the house screaming at each other to turn off their boxes and apps.

ISPs like Comcast have been losing TV customers for years. They’re not happy. So after you pay for the boxes and apps, you’ll have to pay yet more for the data to run the apps on the boxes.

In the future, the apps on the boxes hogging up your bandwidth could get worse in numerous ways.

Microsoft has a patent on a method to use a camera to stop you from streaming things if there’s more people in the room than the app allows to watch the show.

They have another patent on a method to use a camera to gauge your reactions to what’s happening in the show so they can send it back and use it for advertising (knowing what makes you tick), and so that they can tweak the formula for more shows to appeal to more people.

Most of the remote controls for the boxes have a microphone in them. The microphone has a button, but you don’t know that it’s not listening when the thing is just laying there.

In the mean time, it makes your life “easy” because you can shout, “Hey wiretap! Play Wet-Ass Pussy by Cardi B!”. And the kind of people who think that boxes with apps dangling from their TV are a good thing think that this is a feature.

It certainly won’t get better for you.

In fact, just to keep the streaming apps you have, when is the last time you saw the bill go down?

This comes after the apps in the boxes cost many tens of thousands of jobs in video rental stores.

Most people grabbed a movie or two on Friday night and returned them on Monday morning in the drop box on the way to work. If there was nothing worth watching that week, there was no bill.

Netflix relies on people forgetting to cancel it, but also not watching much of anything. Most people are watching Netflix less because most of what’s on the Netflix app is crap and junk that they got really cheap, and you have to go to another app on a different box and order pay per view.

Can someone, PLEASE, tell me how this is better than going to the library and grabbing some DVDs for the week?

It would be for the best if people stopped recommending these stupid apps and boxes and DRM plug-ins that let you get at the apps from the browser (and turned off those plug-ins). If it benefited you more than the companies that pitched them, they wouldn’t exist.