When I was a child in elementary school the only kind of television there was in existance was free television. We received the signal via an antenna either on the back of the television set, on top of the television set, or on the roof of our house. I can remember when we changed the channel on the television we always had to change the position of the antenna. I don’t know exactly when color television was invented, but I am pretty sure that it was available for sale for a few years before our family had one.
The televisions had two different types of antennas, one was for VHF, which was commercial television, and one was UHF, which was commercial-free public television. Right around fourth or fifth grade I can remember one of my school teachers telling our classroom that cable television was coming to the area, and that people would have to pay to watch television. We thought that was absolutely amazing and outrageous; imagine, having to pay to watch television! The teacher explained that a lot of people would prefer to have cable television because if the paid for the shows then there would be no commercials.
Fast forward to the year 2012. We have options – either cable television or satellite television. Either way we have to pay a subscriber’s fee for the service. And either way we are watching commercials. There are a variety of choices between the providers, and almost everyone I talk to has either comcast or direct tv.
When I had to make a choice between comcast and directtv I chose comcast because I was able to hook up the most television sets for the least amount of money. But recently all of the channels have become scrambled and I need to pay extra fees for the receivers if I want to watch television. To be perfectly honest I felt like I was being ripped off and decided to check out the options for satellite television at www.dx3.net. I ended up ordering Directv, but I still have some television sets at home that do not get ay reception at all. I just can’t afford the extra monthly fees, and it makes me angry that what was supposed to start out as commercial free in exchange for a monthly fee has not turned out that way at all.