THB #328: Is Choice The Best Choice?: Filmed Entertainment Discussion

Generation after generation, things change. The elders reject what the youngers embrace and maybe some of what the youngers embrace is meant to put some distance between themselves and their parents’ generation.

But what we are in now… it might be something very different.

For the first 50+ years of television, we flipped channels, looking to choose from whatever was available. We went from 1 or 2 channels of live programming in a fairly narrow window of time to 5 or 6 channels, with a wider broadcast day, to cable, which started with 36 possible channels and quickly grew to hundreds

Remote controls were already growing in popularity, but once cable grew past those Jerrold cable boxes, you needed a remote to manage all those channels. HBO adjusted from being just HBO to HBO and Cinemax to a multi-channel version of their premium network.

And now, starting with Hulu and Netflix, but expanding with ferocity, we live in an on-demand universe of content.

It is clearly better, in the context …