Whatever Happened to Scrolling TV Channels?

As a 60-plus-year-old man living in Small Town, West Virginia, I remember a time when watching TV was simple and straightforward. You turned on the TV, grabbed the remote, and started scrolling through the channels until you found something you liked. It was easy and enjoyable. But now, with the proliferation of apps and streaming services, watching TV has become more complicated and overwhelming than ever before.

Instead of scrolling through channels, we now have to navigate a maze of apps and services, each with its own interface, content, and subscription model. We have to remember which shows are on which service, which ones we've already watched, and which ones we want to watch next. We have to deal with ads, buffering, and technical glitches that can ruin our viewing experience. And we have to pay a lot of money for all of this, probably on top of our cable or satellite bill because none of those apps have yet to give us local news!

What happened to the good old days of channel surfing? Why do we have to keep up with a bunch of apps and services that make watching TV more of a chore than a pleasure? I think we should bring back the simplicity and ease of scrolling TV channels, for so many reasons.

Scrolling TV channels is faster and more efficient than searching through apps. With channel surfing, you can quickly scan through dozens of channels in a matter of seconds, and find something that catches your eye. With apps, you have to navigate menus, search boxes, and recommendations, and hope that you find something that suits your mood. It gets frustrating and overwhelming, and you ultimately just start scrolling through Facebook videos on your phone for two hours instead.

Second, scrolling TV channels is more democratic than relying on apps. With channels, everyone has the same chance to discover new shows and programs, regardless of their tech-savviness. With apps, some people have access to more content, depending on their subscription plan, location, and device. This creates a digital divide that reinforces existing inequalities and limits our cultural horizons. Which is exactly what those totalitarian b*st*rds want!

And what about the quality of the TV shows themselves? It's painfully obvious that these streaming platforms prioritize churning out vast amounts of content to attract and retain subscribers, often at the expense of investing in truly remarkable projects. This new kind of TV dishes out easily digestible, formulaic content over truly original storytelling. Consequently, innovative and thought-provoking shows often struggle to gain attention or get prematurely canceled because they don't fit that immediate "viral" mold. Remember Twin Peaks? It was slow, and weird, and kind of off-putting, and I just couldn't stop watching it! A show like that wouldn't have made it as far as it did today. Cable and satellite, though, with their curated, long-term programming schedules, can provide a platform for these hidden gems to flourish and be appreciated, preserving a space for creativity and originality amidst the overwhelming abundance of content available today.

It's hard to believe that I've come full circle like this, but I guess it really is true that you don't appreciate some things till their gone. There was a time, that feels like yesterday, that I was regularly complaining about getting nickel-and-dimed by my cable company over all these different packages and add-ons to get extra channels, but now we seem to pay even more for all of these different apps combined! We should demand that cable and satellite providers offer more channels and fewer apps, and that streaming services adopt a more user-friendly and accessible approach to content distribution in the meantime. Let's reclaim our TV viewing experience, and enjoy it, or at least complain about it, like we used to.