Sunday, May 31, 2015

The Golden Age of Television is back, another reason to "cut the cord".

There was once a time when television had 12 VHF and nearly 70 UHF channels - - the golden age of television when TV first started in black and white then color in the mid 1960's.  Shows from I Love Lucy, Dragnet (original) and Twilight Zone in the 50's,  Batman, Star Trek and Mission Impossible (my favorite) the 60's, Hawaii Five-O, All In The Family, and the Saturday night killer Love Boat with Fantasy Island in the 70s.  It was a good time for television back in the days until cable brought more channels and more choices.  But while there are still great TV shows such as Scandal and Empire, both shows I love - many other shows now on cable are dismal offerings.  Fortunately, the Golden Age of Television is back with new digital broadcast networks showing classic moves and TV episodes - - among them Cozi-TV (NBC related), This-TV (Tribune Broadcasting), Movies, Retro TV, Antenna TV and most recently, Decades TV.  Over the past 5 years, these networks have been popping up with brilliant offerings of many TV shows from the 1950's to the 80's.  Each network has something special to offer, such as the Movies network which offers classic movies with a twist - - they start and end at odd times instead of the allotted 2 to 3 hour blocks so they can run the film mostly uncut with only required edits to conform with FCC broadcast TV standards.  Cozi-TV offers NBC-Universal and Columbia Pictures programming, Antenna TV has TV and movies from Sony while Decades, the most recent channel, has a stellar lineup of CBS TV programming as well as archival news footage from CBS News under the Through The Decades documentary show.  Launched on May 25th (with a countdown of all the shows offered in binge marathons from February), Decades offers a TV series for the weekend where you can binge away all the episodes - - such as episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore show being broadcast this weekend.   

If you really want to relive the shows you missed the most, then give these channels a try - - what's even better is that you don't need a cable subscription  to watch them - - broadcast basic or old fashioned DTV receiver will do just fine.  Just another reason, along with streaming sites such as Netflix, Amazon or Hulu, to "cut the cord"

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