When I was a boy all television signals were free, picked up by a rabbit-ear antenna sitting on top of a massive television set filled with tubes. We were only able to view about four channels but three were the American network signals, ABC, CBS and NBC and the fourth was the local CBC outlet.
There are still two tall television towers in London but it is a question as to how much longer these will remain standing. The one shown was slated to be shut down a couple of years ago. At the last minute, it was given a reprieve.
Cable has replaced rabbit-ears almost everywhere. Television is no longer free. It can cost the better part of a thousand dollars annually. On the plus side there are so many extra cable channels. On the downside who cares as sometimes there's less to watch today with 50 or 60 channels than there was in the past with only four.
Some nights the same program is playing on as many as three channels at the same time. It doesn't take long before one has seen every episode of Frasier, Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory or Modern Family. Other times a Living Dead festival will commandeer one or more channels to present days and days of solid gore. Ugh! The Living Dead is one series that is dead to me.
We get three network news channels: CBC, CNN and FOX. CBC is essentially a loop a lot of the time and some days it can be an awfully small loop. CNN get hung up on a story, for the past few months this has been Trump, and like a dog with bone CNN just won't let it go. Both CBC and CNN can be downright boring on account of the repetition. And watching Fox News is simply bad for my blood pressure. Interestingly enough, repetition with Fox News would not be boring but I might pop a blood vessel as my blood pressure climbed.
So what did we watch on our in-house entertainment centre last night? My wife found Roman Holiday in black and white and starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck showing on TCM, Turner Classic Movies. I can recall watching that film on an old Coronet television set when I was a boy. Of course, Roman Holiday wasn't a classic back then.
2 comments:
Same here, although we had 8 over the air stations in NYC. Our mid-level cable service got over $200/month including the outrageous, never-ending monthly rental fees for the set top boxes. We canceled it and went with Roku streaming service at a much lower price. I still don't know if it's worth it. It's more difficult to use. My granddaughter watches some children's shows when she's over. Our daughter will watch some drama shows when the girl is with her father. My wife stays up half the night dozing over left wing talk shows on MSNBC. I watch almost nothing, maybe a couple of innings of a baseball game while waiting for dinner to go on the table. I have better things to do with my time.
However, it looks like we will get over the air indefinitely from most broadcast stations but it's all HDTV in this country. You use a different, smaller antenna. Unfortunately, not all station broadcast this way, including the local public television station, which has the most interesting content.
I watch so little television that what I do watch, I can see on a computer.
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