An ode to the "previous channel" button

Hi there! I've been using the weekends (aka the days when Darren and I are not podcasting) to flex some of my creative writing muscles. It won't always be this way but that is what this is, so don't feel like you need to read it. There's no sports takes or info below, just the musings of a sports fan about how sports-on-TV has changed.

I've got a lot of uncles. Some of them are actual uncles, but most of them are cousins of my dad. See, my grandfather had a lot of siblings and they all stayed pretty close throughout their lives, so their kids mostly grew up together. As such, my dad considers his cousins and his actual brothers to be of similar closeness, and that's how I ended up with a lot of uncles.

Two of those uncles are named Ronald. Somehow, in the rush to differentiate them from each other, both of them were given nicknames and neither of them are called "Ron" by anyone but their spouses and work associates.

One "Uncle Ronald" is called Boogie. Why? The way it was told to me, he hung onto the disco era (both musically and fashion-wise) a little too long. He's been Boogie since before I was born. He was, and is, my Uncle Boogie. When I was really little, I thought he was the actual boogeyman. For a long time, his dream was to become an FBI agent. Agent Boogie. I always thought that concept was amusing.

The other "Uncle Ronald" is called Noose. Hand to God, nobody remembers why but everyone assumes that it's harmless because he couldn't be a more gentle soul. Best guesses are that it was a joke made by his younger brother that was so funny it stuck with all the cousins, but nobody even remembers that much. His wife, who he met in high school, calls him Ron but admits that he was Noose before she ever met him. The word itself has lost all meaning in my family except as a name for one of the Rons.

Anyway, Noose is a legend in my family. His legend might extend out beyond the family, actually. Much has been said about Noose's ability to watch multiple sporting events at the same time. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever been better at riding the "previous channel" button on a remote.

Some history (for the youths)

Before the days of streaming services, back when all visual content came through your TV via a cable subscription or a physical media (like a DVD or VHS tape), all remote controls had some version of a "previous channel" button.

Some of the remotes would have it printed as "last" or "last ch" or "prev ch" but it was all the same button. You would press it to return to the last channel you were on before the channel you are currently watching. Savvy sports viewers would use this button to flip between (as an example) an NFL game and an MLB game on a Sunday afternoon in September, and the best of them could do it in a way that led to the least amount of commercials being watched and the least amount of action being missed.

Watching sports at my Uncle Noose's house was a bit like looking into the future. The first time I watched the Red Zone Channel (the Andrew Siciliano one on DirecTV that pre-dated the one the NFL produces), it felt like a similar experience. Just non-stop wall-to-wall action, hosted by a sports junkie who could answer any question about what happened today or what the context of a certain situation might be.

Where I'm at with streaming

If you've been a friend of mine for any length of time, you probably remember how hard I used to push for what we have today.

I would say things like, "In the future, cable companies will die off because their business model is terrible and it'll be replaced by the production companies themselves offering a la carte streaming. No longer will we be forced to pay for channels we don't watch!"

Well, we're here. And, honestly, it's not any better. We're not paying for channels we don't watch, but we're still paying the same amount of money. And there's still a bunch of stuff on Netflix, AppleTV+, Paramount+, Peacock, etc. that I don't watch and won't ever watch.

So, I was right in theory but wrong in practice. That happens more often than you'd think, speaking as a general optimist. But the thing that got left by the wayside that I never suspected? The death of the "previous channel" button.

Now, granted, there are some variations on this. YouTubeTV has some version of this built-in. If my Roku were new enough, I think I could even just hold down the OK button while in the YouTubeTV app and it should return me to the previous channel I was watching within YouTubeTV. But that only works if everything you watch is in that one specific app.

This last Saturday night serves as the perfect example. There was a Padres game happening at the same time as a San Diego FC game but those two are in different apps, and a San Diego Wave game happening on a third app just for fun.

I do not have YouTubeTV. But, even if I did, I would have no ability to flip between these games without exiting the app and opening a new app every single time. This is why you see people with multiple TVs in their house (guilty as charged!) or watching one game on a tablet or phone while the other game is on the TV.

Gone are the days of flipping back and forth between two games, trying to catch every bit of action and limit commercial consumption. By time I close one app and open the other, I've missed something in both. And it sucks.

I will remember fondly the days of watching multiple games at family events, one uncle steering the ship with the remote and the other ones commenting on the quality of the work. It was, and is, a very stupid thing. But it was our stupid thing to obsess about and try and get better at as we (and now I'm speaking as a much older man) aged into a place where our bodies couldn't handle actual physical competition anymore.

So, as I plan out a full weekend of watching the NBA Playoffs (on ESPN/ABC/TNT) with some Padres games (on Padres.TV) and an SDFC game (on AppleTV+) mixed in...I will thank my lucky stars that there was a time and place when TVs were inexpensive enough, and my house large enough, for me to own more than one. Because flipping back and forth between them just isn't going to work.