Yes I'm old enough to remember when we had one of these beauties - and I can actually remember the full television line-up from Sunday nights back in the late 50's. The World of Disney followed the 6 o'clock news; then Gunsmoke; followed by the Ed Sullivan Show. (It was off to bed after that)
The evolution of television, to oversimplfy it, then evolved through the 1960's - adding more 'local' television stations (ITV - which is now Global TV) - and finally cable came to town, offering television signals from Spokane, Washington.
In the 80's the evolution then turned to satellite - and many of us had these giant units in our backyards - bringing in (at that time) FREE television from the United States that often was 'scrambled' - meaning we'd have to either buy black market codes for the channels we wanted OR actually PAY for them, a la carte (which I loved).
Now that 2 channel universe became the 500 channel universe and it dwarfed that famous Bruce Springsteen song "57 Channels and nothing on."
Today, as I scan through my cable television guide in both Canada and the United States it's absolutely amazing to scoot through the 'hundreds and hundreds' of channels and end up saying that same statement..."there's nothing on television tonite."
It's a matter of personal choice but the amount of programming we now have is nothing short of amazing - and guess what - we're getting more!
If you have an ipad, or any other tablet, you can sign up to several MOBILE Video services, including iTunes and Netflix. You can now 'rent' video's that appear on your tablet for a 30 day period for anywhere from 99 cents to an average of $4.99. You can also 'buy' those video's as well.
Netflix service is available now in both countries - and in Canada for less than $8.00 a month you have unlimited viewing of an ever growing library of movies and tv shows.
Me? I'm addicted to the old classic shows - the Mad Mad Worlds; old TV shows like Rockford Files; the great documentaries that often were aired only once and on a specialty service that was so far up the channel guide you'd often miss the program.
In the United States there has been an unprecedented 'cancellation' of traditional cable and pay services since the introduction of 'mobile video'. One of the reasons, quite simply, is that we are 'over paying' for our cable/satellite service for the actual usage that the average viewer consumes. We are now also paying a premium to watch in High Definiation (HD) - as it is an add on to your regular cable meaning you're actuallly paying TWICE to watch it in HD instead of 'regular' cable.
*We subsidize the channels we don't watch by paying more for channels that we do watch!*
Where am I going with this?
Well at this moment I'm sitting in Edmonton Alberta Canada watching my Netflix feed from my condo in Phoenix Arizona on my ipad. It's a MOBILE world and the huge growth in tablets and the success of services like Netflix are 'only the beginning' in the mobile world.
There are 'several' new services being developed in the States, mostly from satellite and cable companies, or from companies like Disney that have huge libraries of movie content, that will be available to the consumer 'shortly,' and the consumer is only going to put up with being over charged for so long.
With devices like Slingbox we also now live in a borderless world and can access our home television virtually anywhere in the world on our tablets and smart phones.
We've come a long way from the two channel black and white universe - and I look forward to seeing where our giant Canadian cable and satellite companies go with this immense amount of competion that is very quickly coming to our borders.
I remember the one-channel universe when CFRN TV was the only channel, several years before CBC started up. And I had the first C-band satellite dish in Edmonton well before any of the channels were scrambled. First time I saw scrambling was when a Don King fight had inverted video. It was a simple thing to insert a toggle switch into the receiver circuit to un-invert the video.
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