Television certainly has changed since I was a little kid.
I have vivid memories of sitting on my couch watching reruns of The Three Stooges, and shows like M*A*S*H, Hogan's Heroes and that trippy 1960s Spiderman cartoon.
The television set itself was a monstrosity encased in faux wood that gave you occasional shocks if you touched the screen, and we received the stations for free using "rabbit ears."
The rabbit-ear antennae wasn't always that reliable if memory serves, and we would lose the channel if my mom started the vacuum cleaner, or if someone with too much change in his or her pocket walked by the set.
I also seem to remember one particularly snowy winter when we could only get the Stanley Cup finals if I held onto the rabbit ears while touching the window frame behind the TV. Every time I'd fidget, the channel would go from signal to noise, and my dad would shout, "Don't move!" until the Habs won the game.
Today, televisions are no longer space-hogging furniture, and they come in a variety of flavours from plasma to LCD and HD to 3D.
In Canada, the good old analog rabbit ears pretty much went the way of the dodo as of Aug. 31, thanks to the majority of television transmission towers making the switch from analog to digital signals.
But in fact, today you don't really even need a television set to watch television anymore.
You can download all your favourite television shows directly to your smartphone using things like iTunes or Netflix and watch them anywhere you like - as long as you don't mind seeing it on an itty-bitty-teensy-tiny screen.
Don't get me wrong.
I watch television shows and movies all the time on my iPhone, but it is a bit like reading a book from across the room.
And with such new online services as Netflix - where you can stream content to your phone, PS3 console, or computer - you don't need cable or satellite TV plans either anymore.
But Canadians are still having some problems with these new viewing freedoms, thanks to heavy caps put on our Internet use by the major Internet service providers - who also happen to be competitors and provide cable and satellite content hmmmm.
If you stream or download a schwack of movies, that sucks up tons of bandwidth, and could cost you extra in usage fees at the end of the month depending on your Internet plan and provider.
The Internet providers feel services like Netflix shouldn't be able to offer unlimited downloads on the backs of their infrastructure.
Supporters of the service say it's just the next evolution of television viewing - from analog antennae to cable/satellite to online.
Of course, now all that valuable analog bandwidth real estate sits vacant, waiting for someone to scoop it up in an auction.
Chances are it will be cell phone companies or Google who will snap it up - probably so they can use it to stream even more content online.
No matter how you feel about online television viewing, statistics say its popularity is on the rise (something like 33 per cent of Canadians now watch TV online according to some polls).
I know I'll still be turning online for more viewing freedom, and so I can show my kids reruns of the Three Stooges, M*A*S*H and the trippy 1960s Spiderman cartoon my two-year-old son loves to watch.
Well, OK, maybe it hasn't changed all that much from when I was a kid.
