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Originally Posted by bozey45
great read, thanks; good find in what was probably a very hot attic. I've got several old guides from our local area (Tampa, FL) going back to 1955, when TV Guide magazine put all the peninsular Florida TV stations in one magazine. Great memories of some great and not so great shows of the past. I think there was more to see on 3 or 4 local channels back then than 180 channels now when half of a broadcast day is devoted to infomercials.
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I know what you mean. The ION television affiliate in this area (which was an ABC affiliate until about ten years ago) runs infomercials literally all day long, running regular television shows from the network only during prime time. After 11 p.m. or so, it's back to infomercials all night long and into the next day, all day long; a vicious cycle which seemingly has no end.
Since about 1990 (plus or minus a year or two; I don't remember exactly when infomercials actually started on US television stations), infomercials have taken up the time between shows on the regular TV networks. I remember when TV stations showed old off-network reruns between network programs, and to be very honest, TV was a lot more fun to watch in those days. Now we are bombarded with advertisements disguised as half-hour TV shows, and they are shown at ungodly hours of the night--usually after the last network show ends, and all night long (or until the network's first early-morning program starts).
Who watches these late-late night infomercials, anyway? I think TV stations would be a lot better off if they went back to the old system of signing off after the last network program left the air, as most infomercials are a crashing bore (IMHO). Most of the few stations that still sign off after midnight or one a. m. do not say anything in the form of a formal announcement ("This is television station K--- in Podunk City, Idaho, now leaving the air . . .") or even play the National Anthem before ending their broadcast schedule (simply dropping off the air suddenly after the last program is over), but that's material for another thread.
BTW, my cable service is the lowest tier of service available from Time Warner Cable (standard basic, what I call "bare bones" basic--broadcast channels only). I used to have expanded basic and even digital cable, but when these services raised their rates higher per month than I was willing to pay, I had my service downgraded as low as one can go without actually having the service disconnected.
Do I miss those extra cable channels? No, not really. I have a DVD player, a VCR and a subscription to Netflix (in addition to a small but slowly growing collection of DVDs and about 60 VHS tapes, most of the latter having old and vintage TV series and movies which I taped about 25 years ago), so if I want to see my favorite shows from, say, when I was growing up (the 1970s), I need only look up the program in my video library. For newer shows I used to watch on cable, I can always go to that show's web site and watch full episodes online. With a selection of programs like that, who needs high-priced cable service, with an extra fee on top of that for a digital converter box? (That's my opinion and my view of the situation, of course).
I have never had pay-cable movie channels in all the years I've had cable (Lake County, Ohio, where I live, didn't get cable until 1982), except for one month some time in the late '80s when I decided to sign up for HBO. The channel did nothing, for the most part, but show the same movies over and over again all week long (the movies themselves weren't that good either, IMHO); needless to say, after about two weeks of this, I decided I'd had enough, so at the end of that month I had the service disconnected.
I don't miss it, and do not intend to get pay-cable again. If it gets to the point where all TV (even the networks) becomes scrambled pay cable service (as I think it might, eventually--from what I've been reading in Broadcasting and Cable's daily newsletter lately, the advertiser-supported business model for broadcast TV isn't working anymore), I will drop my cable service altogether, get an ATSC->NTSC converter box and an antenna, and start watching TV over the air as I did for years, before cable arrived. I don't know how many OTA stations I'll get here, 35 miles east of Cleveland and maybe ten or fifteen miles further east of where the TV transmitters are located (they are all in a southwestern suburb of Cleveland), but I do know that, once I get the box and antenna, that's all I'll have to pay to get TV reception from that point on. I know someone who has just such an arrangement; this person gets more TV stations with a box and antenna hooked up to her TV than most folks in this area used to with just an antenna in the "dark ages" of analog TV, before June 12 last year.