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Cable TV viewing numbers show drastic audience decline
- Thread starter michael hagerty
- Start date
Did you have to teach one neighbor, or all the neighbors of that age?
I’ve lived in a couple high rises and one had a contract with a certain internet & cable company that was included as part of the rent.
How did things ever get so Don Fanucci that those communities and HOA bodies can force homeowners to pay for an unwanted, non-utility, commercial service (cable)? Surely it must be possible under law for such residents to opt out, even if it sometimes requires the "finesse" of having a cheap lawyer encourage a stubborn building owner or HOA to set you free via a template C&D...?
Sometimes I allow the ever-hastening passage of time to skew my perspectives on the generations. Rest assured I had no one of your age range in mind when I wrote about cable companies exploiting technology-illiterate retirees for their nest eggs. As an example, both my parents are older than you, in their mid-70s, and each is fully Windows, Office, Roku, and smartphone literate. It was in actuality my grandparents' generation I was imagining. None of them could hack any of those items, and all insisted on keeping lifetime subscriptions to the likes of cable and satellite despite their incessant price hikes and the availability of superior alternatives. In fact, while helping deal with one of my grandmothers' estates some years back, I was amazed to see that her Charter account had been continuously active since she first opened it in April of 1984. She was born in 1929.
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Great question. Yes, I can confirm that 100% of my neighbors over age 70 asked for help with their Roku. With the caveat that only one of my neighbors is over 70.
To be clear, I'm fine with Roku for streaming (although I find the actual television tuner to be hard to use, since the remote has no digits). I just found it amusing that your example of an easy-to-understand UI collided so perfectly with my neighbor's lines of questions.
Okay, see, that's valuable perspective. Grandma would be 96. That's the same distance from 70 that 44 is.
And the reason I am pushing this angle is not personal vanity (we all get old), but there really is a tendency when you're younger (and I'm guilty of it too) to believe that a switch gets flipped at a certain age (usually that of your parents) and suddenly you're just gone in terms of understanding anything new. So, at 55, 60, 65----you figure people are hopelessly out of touch with even the simplest stuff.
For those of us who are my age, many of our parents lived through the Great Depression and ALL of our grandparents did. So they'd buy something and keep it. Upgrades were for people who didn't know the meaning of a dollar. My mom (born 1922) didn't get a color TV until 1984, and that was because, since my salary doubled when I moved from the CBS TV affiliate in Reno to the ABC TV affiliate in Las Vegas, I bought her a Sony Trinitron for Christmas (and got lectures on frugality in between thank yous).
Now, understand, she wasn't buying black and white TV sets all that time. She bought a black and white in 1966 (widowed the year before, with a young son), she was careful about money)---and it was still working just fine eighteen years later when I replaced it.
Tastes and perspectives change, though.
When I was 39, this is what people in their 60s drove:
I mean, literally---in 1995, that was the best-selling car among people in their 60s in America. A Buick Century, which had been in production with only a few updates, but the same generation, since 1982.
My neighbor three doors down is a guy named Phil. He's a few months younger than I am, so he just turned 69. He's a dead ringer for Steve Carrell and this is what he drives:
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Great question. Yes, I can confirm that 100% of my neighbors over age 70 asked for help with their Roku. With the caveat that only one of my neighbors is over 70.
To be clear, I'm fine with Roku for streaming (although I find the actual television tuner to be hard to use, since the remote has no digits). I just found it amusing that your example of an easy-to-understand UI collided so perfectly with my neighbor's lines of questions.
There's a range of IQs out there. Still, "press the icon" is something we've been doing for decades:
Like they say 69 is the new 59!
Seniors from 30 years ago are different from seniors today.
They're living longer, more health conscious.(most people I see at the Whole Foods near me are over 50), Seniors are increasing in numbers at the gym I go to. Advancements in medicine, and new and better scrips have also helped.
Take care of your body, and your body will take care of you.
Seniors from 30 years ago are different from seniors today.
They're living longer, more health conscious.(most people I see at the Whole Foods near me are over 50), Seniors are increasing in numbers at the gym I go to. Advancements in medicine, and new and better scrips have also helped.
Take care of your body, and your body will take care of you.
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That Depression-era frugality will once again be back in vogue when the next Great Depression comes.
My grandparents on my mom's side still had their black and white portable TV, though they never used it in the last 20 years after my grandpa replaced it with a flatscreen for my grandma to watch in the kitchen. I still have the first TV my other grandparents bought new in 1957, a Sylvania Halolight, in my garage.
My dad's dad was born in the 1890s, but I think he was still up on technology when he was in his 70s and 80s via my grandma. My grandma had to use technology because she became deaf due to a mumps infection when she was a teenager, so she learned how to lipread, use closed captioning and had a TTY. She told me once that closed captioning made TV much more enjoyable, because often shows don't have the character who's talking facing the camera, so she couldn't always read lips to understand what was going on in the shows.
@michael hagerty My grandma got that same Buick Century when she was in her 80s and she kept it until she had to stop driving. Before that she had an Oldsmobile Delta 88 that she'd bought new, which she gave to my brother. He drove it for a few years until our houseguest borrowed it, wrecked it by pulling out in front of another car, and didn't even try to pay for any of the damage. Isn't that the limit!
My dad's dad was born in the 1890s, but I think he was still up on technology when he was in his 70s and 80s via my grandma. My grandma had to use technology because she became deaf due to a mumps infection when she was a teenager, so she learned how to lipread, use closed captioning and had a TTY. She told me once that closed captioning made TV much more enjoyable, because often shows don't have the character who's talking facing the camera, so she couldn't always read lips to understand what was going on in the shows.
@michael hagerty My grandma got that same Buick Century when she was in her 80s and she kept it until she had to stop driving. Before that she had an Oldsmobile Delta 88 that she'd bought new, which she gave to my brother. He drove it for a few years until our houseguest borrowed it, wrecked it by pulling out in front of another car, and didn't even try to pay for any of the damage. Isn't that the limit!
it was a popular rental fleet car like the 4th gen Taurus
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
We've gone too far down this siding, IMNSHO. The Ford Taurus' history has nothing whatsoever do do with the decline in cable television subscriber numbers.
I see the relevance of discussing television receivers pre-cable; I went down a similar tangent in the ATSC 3.0 thread when I compared the two ATSC transmission modes with the CBS vs. NTSC color standards.
But ... come on, now ...
My point was specifically about sales to individual owners as an illustration of the 60-plus demographic 30 years ago.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Which sort of makes my point about going too far with a tangent more valid. Your example was relevant on the original basis, but all the side points that followed lacked relevancy.
Stand by for whateverthehell based on the Coke machine photo.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
"Coke made a huge fail when they tried New Coke in 1985 and had to quickly bring back the original as Coca-Cola Classic".
There. Now the thread hijackers are blunted.
It wasn't true classic Coke as it didn't have sugar.
Coca-Cola made the switch from sugar to high fructose corn syrup the year before the New Coke debacle.
The secret history of why soda companies switched from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup
Nixon, Reagan, and a Midwestern Machiavelli all figure.
www.motherjones.com
