The Umbilical

            Know what this is?



            If you’re of the television generation, you’ll recognize it immediately:  a Television Signal Enhancement Device (TSED).
 

            The other day, my wife and I contemplated a $4000, 4K, Ultra High-Definition, curved-screen TV.  The image was incredible:  nearly 3D without dork glasses, sharp and precise like the finest studio still photography, color of purest hue … 
 

            Impressive.  Mesmerizing, in fact.  It’s not anything like what we grew up with.
 

            It’s not just that, for nearly a decade and a half, television was black and white.  It’s that, most often, the image was nearly indecipherable and required constant attention and adjustment.  Even in the cities, not far from the transmitters, the picture could be wavy, filled with electronic “snow” or horizontal bars.  It could start “flipping” vertically, out of control.  And the signal was subject to weather conditions or time of day.  Sometimes, we could quite clearly watch programs from KTNT in Tacoma or even KVOS in Bellingham, 85 miles away.  Other times, we couldn’t even pick up KIRO in Seattle itself.  Hence the coathanger, often supplemented with flags of aluminum foil.  It was all part of the delightful and frustrating mystery of television.
 

            Ironically, the solution was already at hand, coincident with the very birth of television in the Pacific Northwest.
 

            Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River, is the oldest white settlement in the Northwest, dating back to the Fur Trade; it’s an unlikely place for technology revolutions.  But the wife of an engineer (and owner of a small radio station) named Ed Parsons had seen a demonstration of television in 1947 in Chicago, and she wanted her own set.  She must have been very persuasive, because not only was there no broadcaster in the region but, even if there had been, Astoria is behind a wall of mountains that blocked broadcast signals from either Seattle or Portland.  With a population at the time of around 10,000, it was far too small for its own TV station, either. 
 

            In time for the first broadcast from Seattle on Thanksgiving, 1948, Parsons put an antenna on the roof of the Astoria Hotel and strung a coaxial cable from it into his apartment.  The result:  happy wife—and the birth of cable television.  You can read his own account here.
 

            In a way, this genesis was unfortunate, because it created a perceptual block to the potential of cable.  This type of service went by the acronym CATV:  Community Antenna Television.  It was seen as a means to improve what already existed—a (much) better coathanger, if you will.  CATV could bring in distant stations, all right, but only if they were technically within the broadcast range.  The FCC, under pressure from broadcasters and their supporting advertisers, decreed that all local stations HAD to be carried and no distant stations could be offered if they duplicated local programming.  For three decades, this service lay dormant.  Most of us didn’t need it:  coathangers were far cheaper, and we were used to squiqqly, snowy images.
 

            But in the mid-seventies, things started changing.  First came Home Box Office (HBO), offering (for an additional price) recent-run, uncut movies.  Then the cable systems started offering WTBS from Atlanta.  Atlanta, Georgia!  Cool!  There was something especially exotic about watching old movies and second-run programs from the opposite coast.  There was even something exotic about watching Canadian news from Vancouver B.C.  And MTV.  Little melodramatic musicals!  Video Killed the Radio Star.  And ESPN.  My wife and I became, for a time, big fans of Australian Rules Football (although I suspect she was mostly drawn to the tight shorts the players wear.)  

 



            And from there it was but a short sprint to The Sopranos and Mad Men and home renovation programs and 24-hour golf and clear, sharp pictures—and 4K, $4000 screens.
 

            And now it’s all changing again.  Just in the past few days, HBO and CBS both announced that they will make their programming available through internet streaming without a cable or satellite subscription.  More and more people, rebelling against mandatory “bundling” of programming and outrageous cable subscription fees, have been “cord-cutting” and relying upon such services as Netflix to enjoy television. 
 

            Cable, if you’ll pardon me, may already be reaching the end of the line.