Recent events have me turning introspective regarding my consumption of traditional television programming. I find, as increasingly has become the case in many areas, my age group can be characterized as dinosaurs on the matter.
This is nothing new, across the board. At 69 years of age, I’ve seen oh so many changes in the audio world. Just the other day I was explaining to two granddaughters that the falsetto chipmunk songs were the result of playing 33 rpm records at 45 rpm.
Albums, the big vinyl discs played on turntables, used the 33 rpm speed. Smaller discs, with one song on each side, used 45 rpm. Many an hour was wasted in my childhood playing records at the wrong speed.
And then there were people who actually played the records backward looking for hidden messages. I did not indulge in this.
Over the course of my life, I’ve had to change my listening library storage method from vinyl, to 8-track tapes, to cassette tapes to CDs.
No, I’ve not moved on beyond CDs because, at this point, I’m tired of paying for the same music over and over and over again. Trust me, you will become tired, too, eventually.
Let us move to television. A recent story from statista.com, posted on zerohedge.com, notes that young people watch precious little traditional television (broadcast or cable). A full 50 percent of those 18-24 say they watch zero traditional TV.
This is the same sort of bad demographic news I noted decades back as being a death knell for newspapers.
Younger people watch podcasts and various other nontraditional entertainment such as streaming services. Repeat, the younger they are, the less they watch traditional broadcasts or cable outlets.
Meanwhile, oldsters such as me, defined as those aged 65 and above, watch about 10 times as much TV as the young people.
But, increasingly, that’s becoming an ordeal. For example, I subscribe to satellite television – DISH – because Johnstown area cable TV is so overpriced.
One of the tradeoffs is where once satellite dishes were huge, maybe 16 feet in diameter, now they are small, at maybe 3 feet. Size does matter when it comes to signal acquisition.
That means signals are lost in periods of heavy weather (thunderstorms, snowstorms, even very high wind with thick clouds) and one gets the dreaded blue box of total signal loss.
Because they are overly bold. DISH managerial types have come up with a signal guarantee. Lose your signal and call them for an account credit.
I don’t usually do this. But the past Friday (perhaps you remember big snow in the Johnstown area) I was five hours into an outage when I called. Using my special loyalty phone number, my wait was short and eventually I was told I’d be receiving a credit. The signal returned after about 9 total hours of being AWOL.
Saturday was spent watching copious amounts of sports. Shortly after 11 p.m. I was killing time awaiting the late night Formula 1 race from Las Vegas by checking in on the UCLA-USC football game. This was on the area NBC outlet that thinks it’s located in State College.
Imagine my surprise when they went to a commercial – United Airlines, I believe – and the screen froze on a guy in the ad grinning like he’d just won the lottery.
When I went to bed four hours or so later, after Max Verstappen had secured yet another World Driver’s Championship, grinning guy still was frozen on Channel 6. I emailed a cousin who awakens much earlier than me, and appreciates these Channel 6 funnies, to alert him
Said cousin would go on to email me periodic updates, noting the channel still frozen on laughing boy.
His last missive noted that as of 11:15 a.m. Sunday, still smiling.
I checked at 12:12 p.m. and, voila, regular programming was running, Predictably, it was an infomercial.
What amused me by all this is the problem with a frozen Channel 6 signal seems to have created little in the way of a fuss. Where once such an occurrence would have had neighbors in the streets comparing notes about the malady, there was nothing of the sort as far as I could tell.
Even worse, as noted by my cousin who partakes of social media, the station’s Facebook page had zero comments early in the morning.
Could it be no one missed them? Was this the electronic equivalent of the philosophical chestnut asking if a tree fell in the woods and no one was around to hear it, did it make a noise?
In this case, I guess not.
Sam Ross Jr's site 