I’m just warning you, this will be an “In my day” article, but I’m also sure most of you will agree with me, even those born in the last 20 years. Here we go.
Like everyone else who watches television, I am being forced to make some tough decisions. You know the kind, “cut the baby in half” choices. What am I saying? Have you noticed how your favorite television network or streaming service gets you hooked on a show, then makes you upgrade your plan to continue watching it, and charges you an exorbitant amount to do so? It seems that each month, the cost of watching television increases. A perfect example was me trying to watch the Masters Golf Tournament, my favorite, and to see the early tee times of the round, I would need to go to Paramount+ to follow along, at a price. If you’re not subscribed to Paramount+, you need to sign up and pay the subscription fee for this particular hour. The price goes up every few hours.
I know most of you are amazed that I like watching golf on TV. Hey, I even listen to the radio broadcast of golf tournaments when I am in my car. All the other stations have too much depressing news, and golf is my escape.
Are you old enough to remember those days when we had a choice of only three television stations to choose from? OK, I am really old and remember seeing Elvis’s premiere on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 1950s. I was very young, but it was such a big deal that it’s easy to remember. All the kids in my family running around the house, trying to imitate “The King” singing “You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog” probably drove my parents up the wall.
The only remote we had in the house was my little brother, who, at my dad’s command, would go to the television and change the channel and turn the sound up or down to his liking. Since we had eight children in our family, it was similar to your television experience today, with five remote controls on your coffee table, each controlling a different aspect of your TV-watching experience. We didn’t need batteries, just a meal once in a while.
In those days, we didn’t have to subscribe to “streaming” services to be able to watch television. All you needed was to buy a television and have a father who was brave enough to climb onto your roof and install an antenna to pick up the local broadcast stations. Those rabbit ears, once the symbol of watching television, never really worked and usually ended up with a wad of tin foil on them in an effort to make them work at all.
I remember when TVs were not flat, and in fact, pretty thick, and they took up a lot of space. The television itself was a piece of furniture, and many were quite large. Not the picture, just the television. Television screens were very small in comparison to the cabinets that housed them. If you think that’s amazing, you should have seen the radios our parents listened to. They were huge and the centerpiece of the living room. It looked a little like a wooden refrigerator. Now that would be a wonderful invention. Combine a television and refrigerator so you can just get up, grab a cold beer, and not miss any of the game,…or your little brother could do it on command.
We also watched whatever my dad or mom wanted to watch. We were not supposed to watch television after school (we did), do our homework (that’s a funny one), and were constantly reminded that television would rot our brains (it did). A perfect example is that we elected a reality show host, with absolutely no experience successfully running anything, and made him President of the United States, and he happens to have brain rot. Isn’t it ironic?
On that sour note, let’s jump ahead a half-century or so to today’s television landscape. The act of watching television today requires knowledge in electronic engineering (have you figured out that remote in your hand?), high finance (the ability to juggle the cost of the many subscription services), and an especially sharp memory (to remember all the passwords you will be required to create).
Instead of receiving your entertainment choices over the airwaves, then via cable and satellite dishes, we eventually had to go to the internet. Television jumping to the internet was the end of reasonable pricing for watching television. In our house, we do not have a dedicated service delivering television to our giant flat-screen television. We do not have a box that brings our signal into the house or gives us the ability to record shows we might miss. It’s all apps now. We have one app that lets us watch local networks and general television. We are also subscribed to a handful of apps that let us watch shows no longer available on the regular networks. We now “pay for” shows we really want to see. Star Trek and Star Wars fans know all about it. If you want to see Picard, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, The Mandalorian, The Marvel Universe, or one of the many movies from these franchises that are now tucked into an app, you have to pay for it. Even the apps for my favorite British murder mysteries are going up in prices and holding my favorite “who-done-it” shows hostage until I pay a ransom.
There is one good thing about watching television: once you get past the cost, you can watch it on all your devices. Besides the TV, I can watch on my computer, tablet, and phone. Do I really need to watch the road when I’m driving, when my favorite British detective is about to solve a murder case in Oxford? That’s a legitimate question…right?
I guess I could give up watching television and just listen to the radio on all my devices again, or read more books. Yeah, like that’s going to happen. My wife just pointed out that television has truly rotted my brain.
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