I was in downtown Atlanta today and saw a billboard that threw me for a loop.
I was sitting at a traffic light and an advertisement for a channel called Peachtree TV was bragging that on Friday night there would be an Atlanta Hawks basketball game on FREE TV.
Imagine that. You can watch an NBA game featuring the mediocre local team without having to pay for it.
I watch very little television these days, at least live. As for paying to watch sports, I do pay about $150 a year to MLB.TV to watch baseball involving every team except my hometown Atlanta Braves. As for other sports, I haven’t watched football — pro or college — since I saw John Elway’s last Super Bowl in 2000.
Basketball? I’m not an NBA fan, and I don’t even watch much college basketball anymore.
If I watch anything of games other than baseball, it’s just short clips on the Internet.
But the first I ever heard of pay television was around 1960, when people started saying people might pay extra to see special shows or events they couldn’t otherwise get. Nobody really had much interest in it then. The feeling was that they had laid out the money for the TV set and they had to sit through the commercials that broken up telecasts.
That was enough. That was all they were willing to do.
Pay TV got its proverbial foot in the door with championship boxing. At least at first, it wasn’t in the home, so people bought tickets to go to movie theatres and watch live events.
But it was the mid 1970s before people did start paying to be able to get special programming at home. It started with Home Box Office bringing uncut movies into the home for a monthly fee.
But it was the late ’70s and early ’80s when cable TV really took hold. Two of the cable networks that would become huge — Ted Turner’s CNN and sports network ESPN — were part of the monthly basic cable fee. At least part of the reason people subscribed to cable was if they iived in areas with poor reception or limited network options.
But networks like HBO and Showtime and their sister networks Cinemax and The Movie Channel were known as premium networks and went for an additional monthly fee. Whyat they provided was movies, uninterrupted and uncut. In additional, they showed movies with more explicit violence and nudity than would ever be allowed on broadcast TV.
But as time passed, the people controlling programming found more and more ways to get viewers to pay extra. The smartest thing they did was not asking for money for what people were already getting for free, but giving them things they couldn’t otherwise get for a small fee.
I mentioned baseball. When I lived in Los Angeles, I followed the Dodgers. Living in Georgia, I can watch most Dodger games as part of my MLB.TV package. As long as they’re not playing the Braves.
Where it really started changing was when various cable companies started offering pay per view movies, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when people stopped going to theatres. As I wrote the other day, people are becoming less social. They hole up at home and pay for what they want.
Don’t call this a change for the better.
OK boomer.
Aw, come on now.