The Times, They Are A Changin'

Today, this won’t be some rant against the liberal extremist. I want to talk about something else – and that’s cable TV. I remember when my parents got our first TV. In fact, it was one of the first TVs in the little community I grew up in smack dab in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains. It was a heavy metal box with a small black and white screen. For its day and age, it was high tech. Problem was we only got one channel. That was due to the mountains blocking TV signals from the ‘over the air’ antenna we had mounted on the roof of the house. (I needed to explain that should anyone under the age of 40 be reading this). Then the mid-1970s brought us Cable TV. This new technology got mixed reviews. I remember people saying, why would I pay for TV when I can get it for free over my antenna? Well, as we all know, the answer to that question is entertainment content. We only got one station on our metal box, and if the programming you wanted to watch wasn’t on NBC, which was the channel we got, you just didn’t see it. That’s why as a child, I was deprived of such classics as the Beverly Hillbillies and My Mother the Car. But eventually Cable TV matured and grew into the billion dollar industry it is today. Today, we receive more channels than we can ever watch, and consider our cable or satellite service as essential as the electricity or water coming into our homes. We could not imagine life without it. So, compared to getting one channel in the 1960s, I now pay for more content than I can ever watch, and am forced to buy what the cable or satellite sells me in ‘packages’. – Well, that’s all about to change. Even though I’m a baby boomer, and kind of stuck in my ways, I’m astute enough to notice the behavior of generations who came after me, and their attitudes about how and when they want entertainment content. And that attitude is this - I only want what I want to watch and only when I want to watch it. That pretty much describes what the internet provides. From the day that Al Gore invented the internet (I just had to say that) I always believed someday there would be a merger, for lack of a better term, between the TV screen and the PC monitor. I believe that day is soon upon us. This was reinforced to me last night when I totally turned off my DirecTV receiver and used the Smart TV option on my Samsung TV and watched ‘over the internet’ programming all evening. Now, I’m not running out and dumping DirecTV, because it does deliver content I can’t currently get through any other means – and that involves a certain NFL football team that is 1500 miles away from where I live – but that’s another story. However, for the average TV viewer, the day is very near where we will receive our entertainment content via the internet and the will be “Unhooking” from our current entertainment content companies such as Time Warner, Comcast, and DirecTV. These companies will be replaced by internet only entertainment content companies such as NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon and Crackle. The only thing holding back the entertainment content internet industry is bandwidth. You can only shove so many ones and zeros through the pipe at one time, but once that issue is resolved, through new technology or infrastructure, your days of flipping through 1000 channels of crap you never watch to find the one program you want to watch will be over. God I love technology.