I am old enough to remember helping my father adjust the directions of the television antenna in order to achieve the clearest picture when watching broadcast television. I remember the large brown box with the giant dial on which he carefully marked the direction the antenna should be facing to receive a particular station’s signal. At the time, there were three broadcasters – CBS, NBC, and ABC – in the VHF spectrum and just one in the UHF, the nascent PBS. As some people who continue to receive broadcast television “over the air” know, reception was free. It was the advertising that paid for what you watched.
At some point in the seventies, most homes changed over to cable reception. While you paid for the service, in return you got a constant, clear signal and you also got additional channels – I think is when the idea of “channels” emerged? – which became known as “super stations” and later became the basis for broadcasters like TBS. (There was a station out of Chicago, but I don’t remember what it was called and I don’t know what became of it.) In the era of cable television, we both paid for television and still got served advertising. We understood that cable was a middle man, a broker if you will, and some of what we were paying for was not only reception but the additional channels. (This is when ESPN got its start?)
And then along came the internet revolution and a lot of us became “cable cutters,” with the idea that we would subscribe directly to broadcasters, who were now reborn as “content providers.” This new model promised an era of better television because the audience would pay for it and we would fewer “suits” mucking about on the content creation side. These new providers, which now included Netflix and Amazon, were going to act like studios, which are themselves a kind of broker, acting as a hinge point between actual content creators and their audiences.
It was a splendid moment. But the suits were not going to stay away for long, and soon they overbought and overbuilt and their “costs” went up and the subscriptions most of us had agreed to were no longer enough and, sigh, that ended in the return of advertising. So, like in the era of cable, we pay to have access to content which is additionally monetized through advertising. And this is true except for Apple TV+ and Disney+, which may be one reason to subscribe to one or the other. (A little pricey to subscribe to both.)
Each service offers a way to “opt out” of receiving ads by paying for a Plus or Premium version of the service, which in the case of PeacockTV, for example, is a 50% increase.
So what? That’s how business works. True. And what that means is that our little household now does what other households do: we sign up, watch what we know we want to watch (and purposeful watching rather than grazing is probably better for us) and then we cancel the subscription, perhaps changing to another subscription in the process.