Bring Back Cable Television

Paul Cantor
4 min readOct 14, 2024

--

The other night, my wife was bored and looking for something to watch, so she wound up ‘renting’ a movie on Amazon Prime.

It cost like 3 dollars (inflation hasn’t hit the cost of a rental yet; wasn’t it 3 dollars in 1992?).

She said the movie was good, and I guess she didn’t mind paying for it. But then, a day later, I’m browing Hulu. I see the same movie streaming for “free.”

Of course, it’s not free. You pay to watch it because you pay for the cost of Hulu. But you get the point — she had just paid for something through one service that was available to watch, without additional cost, through another.

I asked her — didn’t you just rent this? She was like, yeah, what the fuck?

Now, this probably happens a billion times a day, all over the world. And accounts for more money than Hollywood would have you believe it is earning (they never earn money, they say, only lose it).

The ultimate loser, in this situation, is you. You spent the money, you can’t get it back, and they’ve got you locked into this ecosystem — the streaming app — because that’s where you’ve been lead to believe all the good stuff is.

But the truth is, the streaming apps are all very confusing. And there’s no way to tell if what’s on one app is available on another. I mean, you could figure it out. But you’d have to do a lot of googling. Which means you have to to do a lot of homework. And nobody wants to do homework. You just want to watch a movie.

I would say I feel the same when I go to a hotel and there’s a “smart” TV. It’s got apps, you can watch Netflix, Apple TV, MAX, whatever!

But then you have to sit there and log in to every single app, going through each one until you find the thing you want to watch. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve started this process and given up before I finished because I can’t remember a password, which then requires me to enter an email so I can receive a code that’ll get me a text that’ll help me set up a new password so I can once again enter an email.

I mean, can we make this any more complicated?

Cable television is the solve for all of this crap. And given the rising costs of streaming services, which seem to increase every month, it might even cost less.

In fact, if I go to a hotel now, or even visit someone’s house, and they have cable television, I look at that shit like it’s a perk. Like it’s luxury. You mean to tell me you have a thing where you can just press a button and you have all these channels with programming and I don’t have to scroll through a thousand options just to find something to watch. Look at all that work you just saved me!

Naturally, I might miss out on binging the latest series or have to get stuck watching re-runs of Kitchen Impossible. But I might also, amidst all that channel surfing, actually discover something I’ve never seen before. Which is, on the low, something that has been totally lost with streaming.

Look at some of the movies we now consider classics. They could be things like Fight Club, Trading Places, Tommy Boy, Groundhog Day. Hey, is this elite cinema? Debatable. But in their own way, they are comfort food for the soul, and when you see one playing on TNT or something, you let it run. Watching one of those movies is like seeing a distant family member or something.

So many movies, so many shows, I would know nothing about, had I never just landed on them because I was sitting at home, bored with the remote control in my hand.

But this never happens anymore with television, or movies, which is partly the reason why those businesses are struggling so much. Other than the algorithm, there is no way to discover anything. And since you can never enter a piece of programming from the middle — i.e. after all that boring parts have occurred — you have to give everything a significant chunk of time to capture your interest. Even worse, you can’t say, sample five or ten minutes in the middle, then move on to something else if you don’t like it.

Every little choice you make on a streaming app requires you to exit one thing and go into the next. And it’s all so cumbersome.

Which is also why people just don’t even care to watch television or movies anymore. Because it’s much easier to look at the phone, where they can quickly go from one thing to the next, never needing to truly commit. They can watch but not watch, linger or not linger.

This is how we used to channel surf. It’s been replaced with the infinite scroll. You just keep scrolling until you find something you like.

So at this point, I’m all for bringing back cable television. The streaming experiment was cool. It was fun. We cut the cord! It worked. Until it didn’t. Streaming is now expensive, annoying and makes people watch even less television before. All in all, it’s been a bust.

And hey, what’s old is eventually new again, right? If we can bring back bicycles, vinyl records and baggy jeans, anything is possible.

--

--

Paul Cantor
Paul Cantor

Written by Paul Cantor

Wrote for the New York Times, New York Magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vice, Fader, Vibe, XXL, MTV News, many other places.