Hank Green - k** your TV lyrics

Good morning, John. I come to you today in a series of ones and zeroes pa**ed through tubes made of copper and gla** retrieved instantaneously whenever you want to see it, in fact, wherever you want to see it in the entire world. In an age of such wonders I cannot help but ask the obvious question 'Why are we still doing television at all?' I did it just the other day, sat down in front of a television - the last time I had cable inside of my house was 2002 so all of the small little changes that have happened in those ten years have come rushing on to me all at once and I have to say, it freaking s**s! One of the joys of television used to be flipping channels. Now, this is no longer possible because something in the last ten years has necessitated a five-second gap between when I push the up bu*ton and when the next channel comes up. But flipping isn't supposed to be a thing anymore because we have this wonderful thing called 'The Guide'. And if you could find the bu*tons on this monolithic remote that allow you to access and interact with the guide, good on you but once you do, not only was I forced to scroll over one advertisement for every four channels I saw, but huge expanses of the guide were not accessible to me. There were channels that I could not see. WHY ARE THEY IN MY GUIDE? This should be a fairly simple technical challenge to overcome. I want to see the channels that I can see. And then I realize, "Hey, this is NBC. Channel seven-hundred AND TWELVE?!" NO! NBC is supposed to be, like, 4 or 5 or 6. It's NBC. Why is it 712? So I asked my friend, Dave, this and he's like 'Oh, NBC is lower down as well. When you upgrade to high definition you get high definition and standard definition NBC.' WHY DO I WANT THE SD-NBC IF I HAVE THE HD ONE?! And the HD one, the one that you want to watch, is in the 700s. I'm not gonna talk a lot about the content of television because YouTube has crap too, you know? But I'm a little bit frustrated by the advertisements running on my science channel right now for a show called 'Finding Big Foot'. Ad: "I do think there's a 'squatch in these woods.. FINDING BIG FOOT" On animal planet? Which is supposed to be about animals. Not fake anim- well I guess insane people wandering around in forests are technically animals too. When I finally find something that I would like to watch it's invariably in the wrong aspect ratio because there is good television out there, there's plenty of television that I would like to watch. Unfortunately, it's on, like 7 of the 130 channels that they give you. And four of those channels aren't even cable! I could get them with antennas so that's three channels that I'm paying $130 a month for. That's why I can pay $8 for Netflix, get some of the best television of all time and never have to watch a single advertisement because I'm freaking paying for it! Oh, what's that I hear? You have to pay for cable and you still get advertisements? Great. An average hour of television about 36% advertisements if you include product placements, which means, if the average person in America watches 5 hours of television a day, which apparently they do, that means that they will, in their lives spend 4.5 years watching advertisements. I have done the math, my friends. Here in the world of YouTube a 15-second preroll on a 4-minute long video is 7 times less advertising than you get on television. Not only that but I think in general, online video is more engaging, it's more likely to be what you want, it's more convenient. It's a much better interface, it's easier to discover cool new stuff and I think it's more rewarding. So let me be possibly the first and hopefully not the last person to say: "Everyone, cancel your cable subscriptions! It will be okay." John and I are doing our part with a total of at least 6 videos on YouTube per week if you subscribe to vlogbrothers, SciShow and CrashCourse, which will launch January 25th, and you can more than double that number if you subscribe to hankgames and truth or fail as well and I don't see why you wouldn't. Thank you to the world of online video and for you, the pioneering viewers who are making this transition not just possible but necessary. John, I will see you on Tuesday. That sounds so weird.