Broadcast NBC was only "free" in the strictest sense. Every hour of content requires the viewer to sit through 22 minutes of mind-numbing commercials.
At a labor value of $50/hour, watching ten hours of content a week imposes an economic cost on the viewer of $825/month. By comparison subscribing to all the major streaming platforms would cost about $100/month. Let's not even get into issues of higher quality content and huge on-demand libraries. It's pretty clear ad-free streaming subscription is a massive improvement for consumers over "free" broadcast TV.
The important implication of broadcast TV being "free" isn't that there's zero cost. It's that there's no subscription.
Subscriptions mean you have to pay a certain minimum amount, even if you want to watch just one episode of something. That's a much bigger burden than changing the channel.
Yes, in theory you can carefully manage things and cancel as soon as you've watched what you wanted, but in practice that effort is a cost too (like watching a commercial is a cost).
The heavy load of advertisements is a point well made, however the cost is a bit more nuanced. By your calculation, it would cost $2,166/month (+price of service) to just watch that amount TV.
This is an opportunity cost but only if you have the stamina to be doing billable work during all that time instead of relaxing.
The biggest opportunity cost was having to schedule a specific time to watch something or not being able to pause and watch later or not being able to watch while waiting for your flight to board.
> sit through 22 minutes of mind-numbing commercials
Commercial detection and skipping has worked well for me via MythTV for nearly twenty years at this point.
Seems like there’s a free startup idea in there somewhere. $100 worth of equipment and a webapp and now your parents can watch network TV, local news, sports, and weather without ads.
You can’t skip live without a time machine.
You can disable the audio and replace the video.
Alternatively, you start the game 22 minutes / hour late.
It’s all about trade-offs but attention is being under-valued imho.
And if you lived in a location close enough to a city to receive the airwaves. I do not see what that has to do with it, but you can swap out NBC for a non broadcast media owner like Comedy Central.
Point is content is more accessible and cheaper than it has ever been in history, and that is partially due to the elimination of middlemen like cable/satellite TV distributors.
But media is always going to have an owner, who is always going to be able to license it to whoever they want at whatever cost they want.
Advertising is a thing in netflix productions too, you know. Really takes you out of Stranger Things when you see them set down a coke can with the label perfectly aligned to the camera.
HBO wasn't and you needed to pay to watch an HBO show. There's really not much difference between and premium channel cable offering and these services, at least, it's a lot more similar and closer in time than studio-owned movie theatres.
At a labor value of $50/hour, watching ten hours of content a week imposes an economic cost on the viewer of $825/month. By comparison subscribing to all the major streaming platforms would cost about $100/month. Let's not even get into issues of higher quality content and huge on-demand libraries. It's pretty clear ad-free streaming subscription is a massive improvement for consumers over "free" broadcast TV.