A couple nights ago, my wife and I were watching a bit of TV. Specifically, a bit o’ baseball.
Neither one of us is a huge baseball fan. But we sometimes tune in for a few minutes here and there during the playoffs, just to see what’s happening.
I think it was the Yankees/Rangers game. I say I think because, well, something happened that dampened our enthusiasm for checking out even a few minutes of the game.
Specifically, changes to the broadcast’s aspect ratio—the way the image fits on your TV screen, in layman’s terms—had actually pushed the score completely off the screen of our dinosaur CRT (that’s cathode ray tube, for all you acronym lovers out there) TV. You know, the kind of TV that takes three guys to move if you need it somewhere else.
Without being able to see what the score of the game actually was, there wasn’t much point in watching the game … even a little bit of it.
Now, I know time and technology march relentlessly forward, and there’s no stopping either one of them. But I found myself surprisingly frustrated that because we haven’t yet upgraded our old-school TV set, it felt like we were being penalized. It’s as if broadcasters in the new digital world are saying, “All you people with ancient TVs, well, you don’t really matter. Get with the program.”
But our old TV works fine. And, if my parents’ fossilized TVs are indication, it might continue to work fine for many years to come. (The TV we watched when I was growing up lasted close to 20 years, I think). Thus, I don’t feel particularly compelled to pay for the privilege of the flat-screen, HD experience.
I guess the tradeoff for my luddite stubbornness when it comes to upgrading our TV is a viewing experience that’s impaired so much at times that we’ll just turn the TV off.
Which, by the way, is exactly what we did.
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