In a front-cover article of today’s (April 24, 2023) edition, The Wall Street Journal decried streaming services as “overwhelming.”
The “abundance [of entertainment options] and the indecision it causes,” wrote the Journal, “is prompting some of [American viewers] to rediscover the joy of channel surfing.” That conclusion was clearly shown in the story’s headline: “Americans Get Nostalgic For the Cable TV Experience.”
The paper went on to describe how a family was “overwhelmed by the variety of TV shows and movies they could watch [and] after several minutes of decision paralysis, they gave up and opened [an app for] a free streaming service whose interface mimics cable TV’s. They flipped through a few channels and quickly settled on an episode of Antiques Roadshow.”
What the Journal discovered is not new: The car industry faced the same familiarity issues when forced to adopt horse-carried wagons breaks for the automobiles. And the Russians experienced the same indecision paralysis when faced a multitude of the products in supermarkets after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Leave A Comment