Will B.

We humans sure are hard to please and a quirky species for ure. When I was younger there were four tv channels: three major networks and one public access channel. I was just amazed that all these fun and cool shows could be enjoyed through a little box that sat on a stand.

Fast forward to now - I will skip how many years - and we have hundreds if not thousands of channels available at the flick of a button. We don’t even have to get up to change the channel. But the problem with technology, and progress in general, is that sometimes it advances in the wrong direction. It used to be simple to watch college and pro football: all the games were available for free to anyone with a TV and antenna.

Then came cable and satellite and, finally, the Internet. That gave us a ton of content but also higher and higher bills. And then streaming arrived, which at first seemed cheaper and on top of that, allowed you to access what you wanted to watch from pretty much anywhere.

Back to my point: as any football loving person now knows, you need three to four different streaming services if you want to watch the majority of the games. And now, we find ourselves right back where we started from with extremely high streaming bills (the equivalent of cable and satellite).

Of course, you don’t have to watch every game or choose to just miss most of them. That’s where I find myself now, missing most of the games I want to watch.

Ignorance is bliss some say and this is never truer when it comes to television. When I was a young’un, I was perfectly content with just four channels. Of course back then we spent most of our time outside or hanging out with friends in real time. We had Saturday morning cartoons galore, football on Sundays and Friday nights there was Elvira or some other horror or fantasy show. Later came shows like Dallas, Fantasy Island and the Love Boat to name just a few. This was plenty for my generation.

Ignorance is bliss because now we’ve opened Pandora’s box of a thousand channels and access to almost any show or movie even from our phones. We can never put that back in the box and just be happy with four channels again. We can’t get all the football we want to follow either - at least without paying lots of money.

Don’t get me started on smartphones, we will save that for another day! This is Will B saying, pass the popcorn, Fantasy Island is about to start.