I don’t know how it was for you, but from the time TV became the norm in homes, everything moved from black and white TV, to color in the 1970’s.
Then, up until the 80’s all TV was free. We had rabbit ears, sometimes shitty reception, aluminum foil that went on your antennas which was stretched to the window. (Most of the time it was with the UHF channels, which were crappy channels and needed the loop shaped antennae).
The came the scrambled TV, this was the advent of Vue and Preview. At a certain time of day, your favorite channel would go from normal programming to this scrambled video, but you could hear the audio. Some of us would try to watch the video hoping to see nudity through the distorted video.
Then came cable, which was originated in small towns that didn’t have local TV and were too far away to pick it up on antennae’s of any kind. Yes, you had to pay for it, but these companies were able to distribute TV through cable TV and a box that sat on top of your TV and had a series of buttons or a rotary dial.
Later these companies added TV channels that were exclusive to cable companies, like HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc. (Oh ya, MTV came later…much later than MTV would like you believe) You could watch movies without commercials, something regular TV couldn’t do…and the movies were edited for content that was deemed inappropriate for commercial TV (fuck you, FCC)
Things progressed where we had lots of cable channels, Superstations like WTBS (yes, it was a real free TV channel in Atlanta) and WGN from Chicago. There became so many channels that things got to be nothing but re-runs and old movies (not too different than today. But not as extreme). It was getting so dumb, even Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about it.
Fast forward 5-7 years later, scrambled channels were back…this time by your cable company. They started with the packaging of channels. If you didn’t buy the channel, they would scramble it, like they did with VUE, but it was all the time. Then technology came where you could get pay-per-view events, mostly Ultimate fighting.
Now there were ways around the scrambled TV, which were descambler boxes (clears throat and says….of could I didn’t have one of those)
Fast forward to the era of digital cable. This is eliminated the scrambled channels, but nothing was ala carte’, you still had to pay for packages that had channels you don’t give a shit about and then cable companies started raising the rates…and we said the hell with that, so TV apps have become a thing. You pay for what you want.
The problem with apps has been that when you have all the channels you want, the cost isn’t any cheaper than what you were paying for cable and people are cancelling their app subscriptions.
So what is next?
Over the air TV is making a comeback.
I shit you not.
Millenials and Gen-z’ers are finding a way to save money. They are finding out that M*A*S*H and other old shows and movies are becoming the “IT” thing.
So while the economy is getting more expensive, local TV is making a comeback. Now you can save $100 or more and ditch all the apps you don’t care about…oh, yea…it’s free…kind of like radio.