You know you are getting old when:

[Trenchfriend]

Do kids know how to screenshot without smartphone, these days?

 

[Trenchfriend]

Anyone else likes to go back to "pre-HD tv times"?

 

[GHT]

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

Anyone else likes to go back to "pre-HD tv times"?

Pretty much everyone here goes back to the pre-color TV days when a big screen TV was a black and white CRT with a diagonal measurement of 19 inches (that's 48.26 centimeters for you Europeans) and a set of "rabbit ears" on top. You could normally get the three major networks in the US (ABC, CBS, NBC) and if you lived in or near a big city, you might also get a public television station.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
Or a UHF signal or two, where you could take in whatever programming the station operators got on the cheap.
I don’t predate television, but I clearly remember when a color TV was a BFD, and when such a magnificent thing would set a working man back at least a month’s pay. So they were often bought “on time,” as we called it back then.

 

[tonyb]

… your wife suggests you see a gerentologist, and she isn’t joking.

 

[GHT]

… your wife suggests you see a gerentologist, and she isn’t joking.

Well at least it's a gerontologist Tony. Advancing years will often keep the psychosexual therapists employed.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Lovely fresh girl OR lovely fresh bedclothing?

Be honest!

 

[Edward]

When I got serious about smoking and started seriously back in...1987?...Winston was my brand. Now, I couldn't tell you why. Over 30 years I switched two or three times, and now I can't remember what the brand was when I stopped for the last time; Benson & Hedges, I think. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"Winston: tastes like a good cigarette should." As endorsed by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, no less... It's amazing how far things have changed in tobacco advertising, at least here in the UK. I remember when, although cigarette ads were banned nine years before I was born, ads for other tobacco products, particularly cigars, were allowed. I'm probably the last generation whose immediate association with Bach's Air on a G String is "Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet". When, in 2003, these and most other forms of tobacco advertising were banned, the final UK Hamlet commercial was promoted as - and indeed was - a television event. The kids in my undergraduate media law class this year, all born in 2004/5, have never lived in a world where tobacco was advertised. Despite being a very occasional, recreational pipe-smoker myself, I have no quibbles with that, but it's fascinating when I look in on Formula One or other elements of popular culture just how dominant you realise tobacco promotion once was, by its very absence now.

 

[Edward]

Pretty much everyone here goes back to the pre-color TV days when a big screen TV was a black and white CRT with a diagonal measurement of 19 inches (that's 48.26 centimeters for you Europeans) and a set of "rabbit ears" on top. You could normally get the three major networks in the US (ABC, CBS, NBC) and if you lived in or near a big city, you might also get a public television station.

I remember having three channels here in the UK right up to the early 80s, then Channel 4 arrived. That was it until 1990, when Sky TV (and, for six short months, British Satellite Broadcasting) brought us subscription television for the first time. The 90s saw other options for cable come and go ,though none of them ever came close to as significant as the traditional free to air options. By 2004, digital TV had started to roll out, and we quicky had the forty odd free to air channels that exist now. Around that time I predicted the end of traditional broadcast television at the hands of an online, on-demand option. That began to be available in the UK from 2006 (BBC iPLayer, closely followed by the other legacy broadcasters' streaming offerings, all free to view), but the real revolution was the arrival of Netflix in 2012.

Now, streaming is fast taking over television here. Most folks much under 50 already watch streaming more than old fashioned TV, if not exclusively. My undergraduates typically don't even have a TV - once the staple focal point of any student household - unless they still live with parents. I'm also starting to hear of more younger people buying a big computer monitor instead of a TV, and streaming everything via a dedicated PC. I like it myself - much as some commentators try to push nostalgia for it, I really don't miss the old idea of "event TV, when we all watched it together". The convenience of streaming wins every time for me. That said, it does somewhat amuse me that as more and more content is available, the next generation coming up seem to be shifting again - a lot of younger kids now don't watch anything like TV, for them it's all youtube and tiktok. It's fascinating to think we might be on the edge of a bigger shift in pop-culture medium than "only" the switch in delivery mechanism from linear broadcasting to online, on-demand.

 

[LizzieMaine]

As Data revealed in a "Star Trek TNG" episode, "That form of entertainment did not survive long after the year 2040..."

 

[Trenchfriend]

Funnily, no on here in old Germany talks about Netflix and others, anymore. The fashion trend seems to be over since 2024. Exactly like WhatsApp.

But Pay-TV was never that big thing in old Germany.
I often heared young folks in the last time, talking about how they don't like to think about again and again what to choose from their Pay-TV contract this evening.

So, they often skip the thing and simply watch classic (public) TV, as long as they have a TV staying there, of course.
Like in every commercial channels market, all these competitors finally destroying themselves with commercial trash.
So, in the end people switching back to Arte or 3Sat. Or going back fooling around with smartphone...

Ha, we Kids learned from Al "Godfather" Bundy, how the things in life work. Remember the episode, where he got Pay-TV? I do!

 

[Trenchfriend]

As Data revealed in a "Star Trek TNG" episode, "That form of entertainment did not survive long after the year 2040..."

Better not think about 2053...

 

[tonyb]

"Winston: tastes like a good cigarette should." As endorsed by Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, no less... It's amazing how far things have changed in tobacco advertising, at least here in the UK. I remember when, although cigarette ads were banned nine years before I was born, ads for other tobacco products, particularly cigars, were allowed. I'm probably the last generation whose immediate association with Bach's Air on a G String is "Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet". When, in 2003, these and most other forms of tobacco advertising were banned, the final UK Hamlet commercial was promoted as - and indeed was - a television event. The kids in my undergraduate media law class this year, all born in 2004/5, have never lived in a world where tobacco was advertised. Despite being a very occasional, recreational pipe-smoker myself, I have no quibbles with that, but it's fascinating when I look in on Formula One or other elements of popular culture just how dominant you realise tobacco promotion once was, by its very absence now.

The cigarette pushers got heavily into motor sports (and sports in general) after the ban on television ads, because so many of those sporting events were televised and that got their brand names in front of billions of eyes. The ads were not only on the vehicles and the attire of the various participants, but also on the venues themselves. The Kingdome in Seattle (among the worst, most ill-conceived major sports facility ever) for several years had a huge Marlboro ad, featuring the square-jawed Marlboro cowboy, right next to the huge video screen.

The progressively more stringent limits on tobacco advertising here in the U.S., where the deadly weed was/is a major agricultural commodity, had the tobacco companies aggressively expanding into other markets. My views on our government’s trade and drug policies going back a few decades now might have me venturing into forbidden territory here, so let it suffice to say we showed little compunction over pushing our deadly drug wherever we wished.

 

[Edward]

As Data revealed in a "Star Trek TNG" episode, "That form of entertainment did not survive long after the year 2040..."

Heh, yes... I remember confidently saying in 2004 that "in 20 years time, linear TV will be gone and we'll all watch everything streamed from a big database online..." I was ahead of that curve, given the dates, if out by maybe a decade or two on just when they'll pull the plug on old-style TV in the UK.

In terms of Str Trek: TNG, 2024 was an ominous date as I recall.... (and that line was part of the reason that episode wasn't screened in the UK back in the 90s).

The cigarette pushers got heavily into motor sports (and sports in general) after the ban on television ads, because so many of those sporting events were televised and that got their brand names in front of billions of eyes. The ads were not only on the vehicles and the attire of the various participants, but also on the venues themselves. The Kingdome in Seattle (among the worst, most ill-conceived major sports facility ever) for several years had a huge Marlboro ad, featuring the square-jawed Marlboro cowboy, right next to the huge video screen.

The progressively more stringent limits on tobacco advertising here in the U.S., where the deadly weed was/is a major agricultural commodity, had the tobacco companies aggressively expanding into other markets. My views on our government’s trade and drug policies going back a few decades now might have me venturing into forbidden territory here, so let it suffice to say we showed little compunction over pushing our deadly drug wherever we wished.

Similar over here in terms of sports sponsorships - in fact, F1 was among the very last areas in which the ban came into full force, a stay of execution having been negotiated (I think they had two years longer than any national sport, if memory serves) after Bernie Ecclestone convinced our then government that F1 would collapse without a longer period to phase out big tobacco's money. Mercedes, Jaguar, Ferrari et al operating on a shoestring as they do...

About a decade ago, one morning in Beijing I read in the China Daily about a Provincial government who got into trouble with the Federal Beijing government for encouraging their citizens to smoke as a patriotic duty. (Mao himself is said to have been a sixty-a-day man.) Apparently there was a ciggie factory within that province that kept a lot of jobs in the local area, and the officials saw this as a way of protecting employment. The central government of course were more concerned about the health implications!

When I'm asked what's the most Chinese thing I've ever seen, I remember being in Beijing about a week after the smoking ban came in there, about 2013 or so. I saw a guy at the next table in a restaurant sitting looking, contemplating the "no smoking" sign. After a few moments I could see a light damn in his yes - he flipped it over, lit up, and used it as an ash-tray. Standard-issue, Chinese belligerence, sort of thing that makes me love the Beijingers.