I want to do bad things with you

Hi. My name is Yahya, and I’m a TV-aholic — and I recently fell off the wagon.

Last Sunday morning, I woke up with a crippling craving for “True Blood” like I’ve never felt before. Though I tried for months to make myself forget, I knew the third season of the best vampire TV show to grace cable would premiere at 9 p.m. on HBO.

Thick southern accents, blood-suckers, changelings, Maenads, drug addicts, duplicitous evangelists, homoerotiscim and gratuitous nudity were all I could think about.

No other show has been able to sufficiently satiate my thirst for shameless, irreverent fantasy soap operas since the second season ended last year. Sure, “Lost” kept my attention for a bit, but TV shows on basic cable simply can’t display the same sort of graphic violence and explicit sex scenes as premium cable channels can.

Feeling this itch, I set out in search of a way to watch “True Blood” that night. Unfortunately, my roommate and I don’t subscribe to HBO. So I set upon my phone with a passionate intensity, sending out mass texts and calls to any other “True Blood” fans. To my immense disappointment, all of my friends were too cheap for HBO.

In desperation, a friend and I even contemplated having his out-of-town girlfriend set up a Skype video conference, with her computer’s web camera facing her TV while “True Blood” was premiering, so we’d be able to watch it live. Yet, common sense prevailed, and we realized the grainy video conference would ruin the whole experience.

In our failed quest to watch the premiere, we received friendly advice about how to watch it for free, albeit not live.

Everyone had planned to stream the show Monday morning for free, only hours after the premiere ended. So, sure enough, I woke up a day later on Monday morning and easily found more than 40 sites where I could watch it.

Currently, countless websites blatantly advertise free TV show streaming. Lots of them are scams, though, and simply reroute duped visitors to pop-up ads and Internet surveys. However, with discernment, one can find nearly any TV series, with numerous episodes available.

Though some of these websites, such as Hulu, are legal and operated by TV networks, most are not. Thus, the unaffiliated sites are violating copyright laws and killing the networks.

Though TV advertising revenue was forecasted to decline only 4 percent this year, the networks have seen a significant dip, losing 12 percent compared to 2009. Online TV piracy and more time spent on the Internet are major factors contributing to this loss in revenue. As such, we will likely see more and more shows being canceled.

Consumers must make the difficult decision to stop streaming illegally to save the shows we love. Promising shows such as NBC’s “Heroes” are being canceled left, right and center because of high production costs and declining viewership.

In the halycon days of TV in the 1990s, “The X-Files” could average about 17 million viewers in a season. The 2006 debut of “Heroes,” on the other hand, received the highest rating for an NBC drama premiere in five years but only averaged 14.3 million viewers.

This downward trend will likely result in a creative abyss, killing off other critically acclaimed shows.

As consumers, we must cough up a few extra bucks a month to watch our shows legally. It’s time for us to rehabilitate our TV-watching ways.


E-mail: yzchaudh@indiana.edu