Why even in 1976-1982 color tv where still expensive for people from USA?

[Colly0410]

Yes the 1970's/80's UHF antennas all seemed to look the same, some were a bit longer in the few weak signal areas. When digital terrestrial TV fired up in the late 1990's/2000's the sales people would tell buyers their old antennas would no longer work & millions of people bought new ones. (including my in-laws, I was annoyed when I found out they'd paid 225 pounds for a new so called digital antenna) & now there are lots of antennas with 4 to 6 reflectors, a dipole & up to 10 X shaped directors. My old loft antenna works perfect on digital TV but the digital sales lady tried her best to get me to have a new antenna.

In 1982 a new channel called channel 4 fired up, although it didn't transmit on VHF channel 4, (BBC1 was on there till 1985) in my area it was confusingly on channels UHF 31 & 54. In 1997 channel 5 fired up, that was on UHF 37 from 2 distant TX's that interfered with each other, a year later it fired up on the local TX's on 34 & 35. We thought it was great to have 5 channels after so long with only 3. Now we have about 50 odd on digital freeview...