That's an insult to 70's TV
TV was arguably much better in the 70's. Basic cable had just as many or more watchable shows per hour, and much less advertising (fewer commercials per hour, no banners, no crawls etc.). The show you wanted to watch was usually on at the same time and channel from week to week.
I don't understand how TV has gotten to the point it has today. It is like the cable execs all meet once a month to try to figure out how they can make there product worse. For example, my STB once had a feature to filter the guide down to only subscribed channels (which still included all the crapvertising stations). Without it, you would have to troll through 500 possible channels every week or two to see what channel your show was on that week and perhaps find out what what else the cable gods had deigned to allow you to see. Suffice to say that feature didn't last very long.
The real irony here is that the main selling point of TV is "instant entertainment". Turn it on, flip to the Simpsons and veg out. Now it is a case of install the software update, fuss around with the peripherals until the HDCP handshake completes successfully, turn on the guide, scroll through an entire app store of crap reality shows and spam all while being bombarded with advertising. Then, after 15 minutes or so, turn the box off because all that effort spent making the experience crap doesn't leave any budget for developing programming that doesn't suck.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
