Hello everyone, how are you doing?
This week's edition of the Hive Digital Lifestyle Weekly prompt got me traveling down memory lane, and I couldn't help but think about how we have followed the trend from back in the day, how our TV experience is where it is, and fast forward to now, and all I can say is how time flies.
The first few years of my life were in a not so developed and not so rural area; our first house was a room and parlor apartment in my grandfather's compound.
My first few years growing up, we had a small 14-inch TV, and it was back in the days when cable TV wasn't so popular, so we had to get signal antennas, which were installed on very long poles, and we had a very long metal pole almost the length of an electric pole right now, but these were the days of NTA, ITV Benin, and a few other state television channels.
Back then, based on our location in Delta State, we had access to quite a number of channels, like NTA-Yenagoag, which belongs to the Bayelsa State government; NTA Asaba, Delta State government; NTA Benin, Edo State government; and ITV Benin, which is also a private TV station in Edo State, just to mention a few.
These were the days where, for you to tune into any of these channels, someone had to practically go outside and turn the pole in order for the antenna š” to face the direction of the station, and it wasn't always a palatable experience. This happened mostly when the children in the area started playing hide and seek, and some of them just couldn't do without touching the pole.
During this period, one of our favorite TV shows was Super Story by Wale Adenuga Productions, which was shown on NTA every Thursday at 6:00 pm. Even people who didn't have TVs in their houses found a way to follow each series every week. During this time, some of the series that caught my attention were "The Staff" and "Omoye: A Child Like You.".
Since Dad was a lover of football and the TV station we had access to didn't show the football matches, especially when it was a Nigerian match, Dad would take me along to a location where we saw matches together.
By the time we moved from that area to a bigger house we got a new TV and we had a video cassette player this was before video CDs came on board so we would go to a video club where we rented movies to watch but dad and mum mustn't find out otherwise we were in soup during this period I can't forget movies like "egg of life" and lots of mount Zion movies like "The gods are dead, catch them young, the great mistake " š¤£ and a few others then video CDs became rampart and some people went as far as converting their video cassette into video CD and up till date we still have some of the video cassettes in our house
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There weren't really any remote control fights between me and my siblings then because somehow we always had a mutual understanding about what we wanted to watch before we did. We moved to the city of Warri, and there we found a kind of cable connection where someone would get a lot of decoders and then connect them such that by sending just one signal cable into your TV, you had access to about 15 TV channels, but the problem with this was when the vendor didn't have light and you did, you couldn't watch anything, but up to date in the city of Warri, there are still areas where that business is thriving because subscribers only have to pay a month token, which is relatively cheaper for them compared to paying for the likes of DStv and Gotv.
After some time we got a MYTV decoder, popularly known as Strong, which at the time was free to air. It only cost so much to get the receiver š” and the decoder, and later Gotv, and now we have DStv, where we have exclusive access to various channels of your choice.
This is my response to the hive digi-prompt if you haven't joined you can click here @digital.hub/your-antenna-drama--digi-prompts-026
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