In the US, our media overlords have been threatening us with the end of streaming as we know it: No more account sharing. No more commercial-free content without extra $$. No More premium content, because who wants it? Even Millennials mostly watch reruns of Seinfeld or Friends.

Moreover, these changes are being implemented now. Tonight we decided to watch a Paramount movie, but sharing has ended; we declined to sign up. That has happened to us more than once this month. Even Prime, to whom we have paid a three-figure membership fee annually for years, is adding ads unless we pony up a little more each month.

It’s the next logical extension of the Age of Greed, and I think it’s great.

I vaguely remember when I first got cable, maybe in the early 1980s? Among the tens of channels on offer, I was astounded to find many with imbedded ads. Wasn’t the entire point to pay in advance and therefore avoid the ads associated with broadcast TV? Silly me, being so logical. Only the premium channels–pay for cable and then pay more–were ad-free.

I hate ads, I’m pretty lukewarm on sitcoms, I can no longer bear to look at SD format shows, I have a low tolerance for violence, and I am Very Picky about writing, story arc, and production quality, so for many years, even decades, I managed not to watch much TV, at least not compared to most people, as was made obvious by all the references I didn’t recognize, the episodes I hadn’t seen, the memes (as we now call them) that left me shrugging. I remember being stunned by the movie Mash compared to the weekly show, of which I was a fan until I realized it was both cheaply made and derivative.

But all this changed sometime this century, when premium channels started producing stellar content. I have not been able to resist Ted Lasso, or The Crown, or The Queen’s Gambit, or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, or Downton Abbey seasons 1-3, or The Expanse. Many other great shows have been recommended to me, but I can only commit so much time to TV, so I try to limit myself to 4-5 series, plus Last Week Tonight.

I won’t have to do that any more. Asking me to pay even more for streaming, particularly the chance to stream lower-quality fare, forces me to confront my inner couch potato, and I’m thinking it’s time to say fare-thee-well. I know I can do it. I used to be an I’m the Slime fan! I think I still own my Pernicious T-shirt!

The timing perfectly coincides with the new semester of wind band, in which I have much more challenging roles needing more practice, and my retirement starting March 2, an infusion of extra time I can use for more hiking, more dancing, and more jigsaw puzzles, rather than more TV.

In other good news, on Marketplace tonight I learned about two technologies designed to help artists protect their content from machine learning scraping algorithms, one by disguising the style of an image to make it hard to reproduce and the other by introducing false results that obfuscate the topic being pursued. These are rare cases of technology advances designed to protect people who do their own laundry from predation by the mega-yacht set, who always need another yacht, or whose mega-yacht needs a baby yacht.

Once I was moved from despair to elation watching a wild rabbit easily elude my leash-slipping dog. Although my role as prey in the streaming world is clear, tonight I’m feeling a new strength, the possibility of resistance.