Rare Medium

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how today’s technology has simplified what and how I watch television.

I can still remember the day my Dad brought home the Zenith TV set. I must have been six years old. It was a black & white site, naturally, but I can remember watching test patterns on Saturday mornings waiting for stations to sign-on at 6 am. The test pattern would go to black and the “Star Spangled Banner” would play as fighter jets soared though the sky and my morning of cartoons had officially begun. It seems like only a few years later, I started watching programs on National Educational Television — the forerunner of PBS.

Since that time in 1957, technology has changed everything. Now with an HDTV set (I elected to stay with a modest SONY’s XBR standard set and give LCD and plasma screens another seven years to improve their quality and drop in price), A/V Receiver w/ Dolby DTS, DVD, VCR, DirecTV, and a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) I could watch just about anything at anytime.

But, to my surprise, I didn’t. All that increase in technology had not increased the time I spent viewing television. In fact, it may have made me a lot more selective.

While my wife and I enjoy buying or renting DVD movies as much as anyone, we found our lives only had time for about a movie a week. With the DVR set to record our favorite series, I realized we were watching just a few hours of television a week. With busy lives, I calculated that the cost we paid for DirecTV was $5 to $10 per program.

I realize my viewing experience is probably anything but typical, but the reality of what I was actually watching (vs. recording) was nothing less than what business author, Tom Peters, used to call a “blinding flash of the obvious.”

Now, if I were in a location where it was possible to receive FREE digital broadcast signals — and the mountain between me and the transmitter guarantees I am not — I’d be more than satisfied with free, over-the-air public television stations’ digital signals, captured by my digital video recorder (DVR), and viewed when I chose in HDTV with Dolby DTS 7.1 sound.

Digital television broadcasting and other improvements in technology may do little for commercial network reality series or game shows, but when used with PBS programming that brings the world into my living room the results are stunning.

NATURE, NOVA, FRONTLINE, MASTERPIECE THEATRE, THE NEWSHOUR WITH JIM LEHRER, AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and other PBS favorites have never looked or sounded better.

As promised, a future post will describe why the very highest quality television signals may well require you purchase a new antenna. But for now, I’ll settle for defining “television happiness” as my digital PBS TV stations, my DVR, and me . . .