> Did people forget that on cable you could only watch what was being broadcast in that moment?

On-demand cable content existed and was significant at the tail end of the period when cable was still dominant, so it is probably lost of most people's baseline (at least, those that didn't either abandon it early or never had it at all) in comparing to cable.

Wasn't this "on-demand cable content" just streaming delivered by a cable company?

growing up I always had on-demand and recording on the set top boxes

Certainly TiVo came in--as well as boxes from cable companies (though I only had TiVo). And, if you really want to go old school, you could program VCRs to record shows if you were off on vacation.

But there was a long period even after cable came in for more channels and potentially better reception when TV was largely on a set schedule.

Didn't the VCR still work with cable? (I haven't used one)

I was probably still using recordable VCRs when I had cable--though it was probably still composite video/audio input. But at some point I started using TiVo. Don't remember the whole tech evolution.

It did, but it was awkward.

Analog cable channels were on a wider range of frequencies than regular TV (radio broadcast) channels. So the VCR's tuner had to be "cable ready".

Some cable channels, especially premium channels, were "scrambled", which meant you needed a cable box to tune them. So the VCR, by itself, could only record the basic channels that came with all cable packages. To record something from a movie channel (HBO, Showtime, etc.), you needed the cable box to tune it in and provide an unscrambled signal to your VCR.

And that meant the cable box needed to be set to the correct channel at the time the VCR woke up and started recording. The simple method was to leave it on the correct channel, but that was tedious and error prone. As I recall, there were also VCRs that could send a command to the cable box to turn it on (emulating the cable box remote) and set the channel, but you had to set that up.

Later, when digital cable came along, you needed the cable box involved for every recording because the channels were no longer coming over the wire in a format that the VCR could tune in.

So yeah, you could do it, but it was a pain.

For a short time there VCRs and DVRs even came with ad blockers that automatically removed commercials!

I remember upgrading the tivo for this

How was that possible? Audio loudness?

On possibility is that there are a few black screens before and after the commercial block is inserted. I know there was talk about using it. Don't know how much it actually was.

Where I lived the local cable company boasted something like 250 channels on the base tier. But when your cable box arrived you discovered there were less than 50 actual broadcast channels, and the rest were pricey on-demand channels. I think it was about $5 for a movie, which is more than Amazon Prime today and much more in constant dollars.

Steaming is slowly going back to that too. Netflix got popular for letting people binge shows that released but increasingly they are putting out shows one episode a week so that they can keep the hype up over a longer period and better monitor/control social media.

Netflix also hides a ton of their content and aggressively pushes whatever is new because it makes it easier for them to get immediate metrics on how popular something is.

Right now, you're pretty much stuck watching whatever is being "streamed in that moment" as it is. For example, netflix added the austin powers movies in October, but by Dec 1 they were removed. You had a window of just 2 months to watch and if you missed them you're stuck waiting for them to "rerun" just like regular TV. I expect that trend to continue with shorter and shorter windows as Netflix pushes people to watch shows when they want you to watch them.

Among other things (like saving on licensing fees), that's at least partially also because it's a lot more efficient to broadcast - it takes more energy and thereby cost to stream obscure bits to one user than to leverage the hot CDN caches and re-stream the same bits to millions of users. So there's a financial incentive to get everyone watching the same swaths of content (in addition to the social angle).

I expect that eventually we may even circle all the way back to time synchronized broadcasts, because it could be even more energy efficient to multicast than to unicast the bits.

We'll see.. right now, the tech for IP multicast doesn't work very well at internet scale, but if that changes...

Then again, to play my own devil's advocate, the surveillance capitalism aspect of building a profile of the users likes and dislikes and selling that data might be worth more than any savings on energy efficiency, so maybe streaming will remain flexible on the surface, to better continue to spy on users habits.

You could plan ahead and record and time shift. This isn’t as convenient, but no-one was removing content you didn’t get to watch. BTW, in countries like the UK recording TV - especially over Christmas - is still a way to build a legal personal archive. Streaming is better today, but don’t rely on it being better forever.