Straight to (CO)Video: We’re finally getting around to watching these things

Sure, CES 2009 had a remote-controlled beer koozie and an indoor duck hunting game, but CES 2010 brought us TV Hat: "The hat holds your iPhone or iPod Touch in front of your face, with a lens between your eyes and the screen giving things some magnification. We're sorry we didn't grab a few for the plane ride home." (credit: Ars Staff)

Choice paralysis is real, and the only evidence we need sits a click or two away. Maybe the cord-cutting era has largely done away with the act of channel surfing, but many of us rack up an equally large amount of idling time these days. Rather than clicking from PBS through TNT, instead we're perusing what's available on various streaming services and saving the interesting stuff to our lists. Once something hits that list, of course, there's no guarantee it'll ever get watched anyway (perhaps making channel surfing more productive in retrospect).

But, like seemingly everything, our viewing habits and rituals have changed drastically in the last month as society settles into its temporary, at-home COVID-19 reality. Around Ars, some of us have taken advantage of the extra time in proximity of a screen and hit "play" on the stuff that has forever been "eh, I'll watch it next time." Others face new realities from ever-present kids to newly shared selection duties that make us regret never revisiting those queued up films and shows beforehand.

All of us, however, undoubtedly have more time to think about how our streaming queues have been affected. These are those stories (Law & Order: SVU marathons not yet included).

Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments