Viewer arguments / 'The Other Side', column by Omar Rincón

When watching television, there are sublime moments, others sentimental, and many moments of anger. Here are some recent ones:

Ditu. Jorge Orlando Duque writes to me that “Ditu (what Caracol promotes as its new business status) is a terrible app because on a tablet it’s a pain to set up properly; it spins and spins, and most of the time when you put it horizontally, the image is only a quarter of the screen. Now, my sister tells me that if she wants to watch previous episodes of a soap opera, it’s not possible; that’s one of the terrible things about that app.”

The apps . Caracol wants us to go to their app, Ditu, RCN wants us to go to their app. In their commercial spaces, they tell you, don't watch this stuff here, go to the app. Perhaps that's why they despise their commercial spaces and include so much of their self-promotional nonsense and excessive commercials; so much advertising is enough to drive you to the app. But their apps are terrible; they don't flow, everything is slow, you don't see well, they have intrusive ads. It's a shame because the only reason it's worth paying for them is to avoid the ads.

Max is HBO again . They were told here that it was a terrible idea to kill HBO and call themselves Max, that such an idea would only lead to failure. And said and done, two years later and with the same content (that is, the poor and deficient Max content), it's HBO again, which is the mark of quality and great content on global television. I hope they come back with HBO-style productions and stop with their Max nonsense. And the other infamous thing is that now they put commercials at the beginning or middle of series (if you pay, it's for that: not seeing ads); they continue with the nonsense of one episode per week (if that's dead now that the viewer decides where and when to watch it without paying attention to the broadcaster). Not everything can be bought!

RCN seems to have made two business decisions long ago. One, to bet on being the channel of the Colombian far right, and two, to go all out for MasterChef and nothing for its soap operas. The result: the ratings are failing. The game show now lasts two hours, with a silly show called After after the insipid celebrity show. Oh, and one thing: that show's music is infamous, boring, repetitive, abusive, and expelling: mediocrity can't be covered up with music.

Her new telenovela, La hija del mariachi 2, is fun, playful, joyful, and enjoyable to watch, but by 10 p.m., it's asleep in the sleep of oblivion. The same thing happened with Darío Gómez, which was a beautiful and fun bionovela to watch, but it was killed by scheduling. It's a shame that these shows, so distinctively Colombian, well-made and different, are disregarded by the network. Who understands them?

PS: No more drug commercials! They're making us sick.