In 1971 we had a small 18-inch color TV that sat on a stand in our front room. The television had a wire that ran through the wall to a pole located outside the west wall of our home. On top of the pole was an antenna. We received three channels on that antenna, CBS out of Hays, which often ran commercials for Weilert mobile homes. Jan Weilert’s mission in life was to put everyone into a mobile home, from Weilert homes in Hays, America. We got NBC out of Great Bend, where the station’s sole newscaster,
a Midwest institution named Bob Dundas, did the news, weather, and sports. We also picked up an ABC affiliate from Fairbury, Nebraska. This is relevant because in 1971, ABC carried the biggest sporting event of the week, Frank Gifford, Dandy Don Meredith, Howard Cosell, and Monday Night Football. In those days, Monday Night Football was big medicine.
To get the ABC channel, either Dad or I had to go outside, usually in the dark and often in miserable weather, to insert a rod in the pole and turn the antenna to get the best reception. We alternated this task each week with the other leaning out of the front door and shouting instructions on how much to turn and when to stop. The sports pickings were slim in those days. Saturday was the baseball game of the week, followed by ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Wide World of Sports was a wildcard. It might be a heavyweight boxing match or the Harlem Globetrotters. It also might have been gymnastics or harness racing. On Sunday, we got two games, an NFC game at noon and an AFC game at three.
The reception was often fuzzy and prone to weather disruptions. Three channels, and we liked it. We had no choice.
Within a couple of years, we purchased a rotor, a small box with a knob that sat on top of the TV. The rotor was hooked to a small motor on the pole, and by turning the knob, it would turn the antenna in the desired direction. No more going out in the snow and cold to turn the antenna. We thought we were short dogs in tall grass with this invention.
I soon went off to college, and things began to change rapidly. By 1983, cable television was in full swing in the hinterlands. We thought we’d died and gone to television heaven. You want to watch WKRP in Cincinnati? No problem. How about Benny Hill? Gotcha covered. The Elvira hour. You bet! An obscure channel from Atlanta, WTBS carried the Atlanta Braves almost every night and Superstation WGN out of Chicago broadcast Cub games nearly every day. For a baseball fan, it was manna from heaven. Cubs in the afternoon, Braves in the evening. There was even something called MTV that ran music videos 24 hours a day. That’s the way you do it, you play the guitar on the MTV.
Every night at 10:30 we watched the esteemed show Sports Tonight with Fred Hickman and Nick Charles on CNN. George Michaels’ Sports Machine followed on Sunday evening. What a great time to be alive.
If you really wanted to get fancy, you could buy a satellite dish and cut out the cable cabal. These dishes were large, UFO-looking things that sat in people’s front yards and were a bit of a status symbol among America’s rednecks and early techies. My friend Mark’s parents had one. One of the crazy things about having a satellite dish is that you got the direct feed from space without commercials. You could get channels from all over the United States. It was a mind bender watching the Tonight Show without commercials and seeing Johnny Carson and his guests having a drink and most often, smoking cigarettes until the show resumed from the networks commercial break.
Over the next 35 years, the basic cable model was: you’d go to the local cable office (yes, such a thing existed) and select your package and any premium channels (HBO, Cinemax (dubbed “Skin-a-max”), Showtime, etc…) at an additional cost, and you were set.
This model worked well as it could for many years but eventually cracks started showing.
Eventually, the sports leagues, led by the NFL, started shopping their product to multiple platforms, as is their obligation to maximize the profit to their owners. This chain of events started bumping games away from the networks to alternate platforms, like ESPN, and eventually newcomers like AppleTV, YouTube and Prime.
This competition for sports programing was driven by a new phenomenon: streaming. Understand, I’m a technology luddite, so by the time I adopt a new tech application, it’s already old news.
A few years ago, it became fashionable to tell your friends that you “cut the cord”. Back in the 1980s, whenever you’d be at a cocktail party, people would talk about their new jobs, hot stock market tips, what concerts they’d been to recently, what books they were reading and maybe who they were dating. Those parties were fun.
During the 2010s, cocktail parties had become almost insufferable with people talking about their new, oversized SUVs, how brilliant their preschool-age children were, what trendy IPAs they’ve been drinking and whatever the latest fad they were engaged in, like essential oils or cutting the cord.
The move to streaming has completely disrupted the viewing experience of the typical sports fan. If you’re a hardcore fan, you can buy into the leagues dedicated network, like the NFL or MLB network. If you’re just a schlub like me, you pick a service and hope for the best. Our local cable provider has gone out of business, which has forced me to join the legions of once-proud cord-cutters. We went with FUBO, since they carried Bally, which carried the Royals. Bally eventually went belly up and was reconstituted as something called FanDuel Sports. FUBO does not carry TBS, which means I missed the National League playoffs and, worse, a lot of the NHL playoffs. According to FUBO, I can add TBS for just $39.99/month. Man, I miss regular old cable TV. Luckily, I was at my mom’s house for the Shohei game. She’s one of the lucky ones who still has a decent cable package.
My television is fantastic. It’s a 65-inch, high-definition, smart TV monstrosity that’s about an inch thick. It’s a wonderful piece of tech to watch your favorite sports on. The picture quality is outstanding.
FUBO? The show selection is average at best. Yes, there are the major networks, FS1 and ESPN. There is also the FUBO channel which carries the original Point Break movie, 24 hours a day, every day, 52 weeks a year. If you need a Patrick Swayze/Keano Reeves fix, they’ve got you covered. I watch about four channels out of the 100 or so that are available. Like Bruce Springsteen sang years ago, 57 channels and nothing on.
My frustration stems from the little things. Every time I turn on my television, it asks me if I want to update the television software. No, I don’t. I just want to watch the game as soon as possible, thank you.
A second hoop is the screen that informs me that FUBO has another software update to download. Would I like to do that now? No. Absolutely not.
A software update often means having to reenter the passwords, which I don’t have. My wife has those. For many men, if they outlive their wives, they must remarry soon, because they can’t cook or do laundry. It’s a necessity for survival. If that ever happened to me, I’d have to remarry someone who can handle the streaming services.
Once I get past all the FUBO obstacles, and get to the game, it’s quite common to have the channel suddenly freeze up and start to buffer, usually in the middle of a big inning or an exciting football drive. This means going back to the guide channel and starting over. Sometimes, it inexplicably jumps from the game I’m watching back to the guide channel. The streaming experience has brought my vast profane vocabulary out of retirement. My only wish is that a high level FUBO executive was nearby to hear it.
As consumers, and sports fans, we’ve seen peak television, and we are now on the downside of a long-running industry shake-out. I have a feeling it’ll get uglier before it gets better, which isn’t good news for sport fans. Whatever cool factor streaming might have once held, is long gone. Streaming isn’t an efficient way to watch television nor is it a huge cost savings (if any) over regular cable. Maybe I’m the only one who feels that way. Excuse me while I go yell at these kids on my lawn.
I’d pay a premium if there were a cable provider where we could select, ala carte, whichever channels and streaming services we wanted and have those packaged together with the ability to bypass all the garbage channels. That would be as sweet as a Dilly bar on a hot summer day.
