I haven't owned a television since March of 1995.
I mostly read and indulge my hobbies for entertainment.
TV used to be free over the air.
Then Cable TV showed up and you had to pay for it, but on the bright side, there were no commercials!!
Then they added commercials.
Then it got really expansive.
Then the shows mostly got bad.
I cut the cord a few years ago. No regrets.
Besides all of that, even if we never tuned in, we were paying every month for CNN and other fake news.
No more.
TV has always been free over the air. Still is. There's more there than ever.
Nobody was forced to pay for cable.
The shows (some of them) are better than ever. Some of the best TV shows ever made have been made for cable channels in the last couple of decades.
All that said, I cut the cord a few years ago, including telephone cords, saving about $150 a month.
“TV used to be free over the air.”
It still is.
I agree with what you said, but I’d like to add that when HBO & Showtime first came out they offered movies after theaters got them and before they were rented on tape. And of course, no commercials. Movies in that era promoted little to no political agendas, violence was the pretend type (someone gets shot, the just fall over vs getting shot and brains fly all over the place) and the nudity was not the full blown sexual intercourse.
And in the news department, fake news existed, but much of it was believable as compared to today’s CNN grade mass-fakery.
And if my memory is correct, cable TV at first was mostly watchable. Of something like 30 channels, about 10 had something interesting. When we cut the cord, we were getting about 150 channels, with only 3 or so worth a darn.
I don’t know what’s worse, paying for more channels and fewer worth watching, or subsidizing crap we totally detest like CNN.
I haven't owned a television since March of 1995.
I mostly read and indulge my hobbies for entertainment.
That was cable tv's biggest mistake, and is the exact point where it broke the fundamental contract with consumers. Once they chose to charge the advertisers and the viewers, they sealed their fate.
It was only a matter of time until someone figured out another way to deliver programming to consumers. If the operators of that new platform chose to restore the old rules, they'd likely be overwhelmed with cord cutting customers.
That's exactly what happened.
In my area of Pennsylvania, Xfinity (Comcast) and Verizon have a lock on cable. How can I cut the cable? but use something like Roku, and latch onto wifi somehow for internet. My current Xfinity Triple Play, with the big movie packages, etc. removed, still costs me just under $200 per month. One thing I DIDN’T give up was BIG10 Network. Thanks.