It’s Sunday night and for Mark Ewen, 61, this means turning on “The Wonderful World of Disney” on his family’s fuzzy television screen, sitting at the foot of his parents’ bed. Even now, many decades later, Ewen still remembers this weekly tradition, which was the highlight of every week.
While many adults today have lived through the development of entertainment into what it is today, primarily dominated by on-demand streaming services like Netflix and HBO Max, the majority of younger generations are unaware of the quick evolution of entertainment from limited cable channels to on-demand services.
Ewen, a PAUSD parent, said the rise of the digital age has reduced children’s outdoor and interactive playtime, activities he often enjoyed as a kid given his limited access to entertainment.
“We didn’t have instant and unlimited access to media through phones, and laptops and tablets did not exist at that time,” Ewen said. “There’s an element of losing that in-person, three-dimensional interaction with the human being.”
During the early days of television in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the entertainment industry was popularized by appointment television, sometimes called scheduled media. The Big Three commercial broadcasting networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, also took control of television for kids during this time through Saturday morning cartoons like “The Flintstones” and “Scooby-Doo.”
In the ‘80s, the booming growth of cable channels provided a previously unprecedented surplus of options. Cable television became widespread and entertainment culture evolved, providing more choices and niche channels from cooking shows to the “Simpsons” to Disney Junior.
Additionally, MTV, an American cable channel dedicated to playing music and music videos, gained popularity along with the rise of cable programming, providing reality shows, documentaries and more.
PAUSD parent Linor Levav said the growth of videocassette recorders, devices for recording and playing back TV programs, popularized rewatching shows in the late ‘70s.
“We had VCRs, so people could record things,” Levav said. “As kids, Saturday morning cartoons were a big deal … so we would go and you’d park yourself from about 8:30 or 9 in the morning until noon, and you could watch three hours of cartoons for children. Years and years later, there was actually a company that was aggregating the content from all these classic cartoons, and they called themselves Saturday Morning TV, and they were distributing these cartoons that all of my generation grew up with on Saturday mornings.”
At the turn of the century, on-demand streaming services like Netflix, YouTube and Hulu emerged.
Levav, who was the Vice President, Content Strategy and Acquisition at Joost, one of the first peer-to-peer television technologies launched in 2007, said initially, major media companies were skeptical about streaming platforms.
“When I joined (Joost), it was called the Venice project,” Levav said. “It was very secretive. Everybody wanted to know what it was. Everybody knew they were on to the next big thing.
And the idea at the time was basically what Hulu became … We were the ones that really started the vision of people (starting) to watch long form content … It sounds crazy because you take it for granted, but it didn’t exist.”
The rise of streaming services has also caused a decline in the popularity of traditional TV. The U.S. Media Consumption Report found the percentage of people who watch TV for over three hours a day declined throughout 2024 from 64% to 61%. And the percent of Americans not watching any live TV increased by 4% in 2024 to a total of 24%.
In recent years, COVID-19 intensified this trend, with binge watching becoming more prevalent due to stay-at-home orders and the growth of services like Netflix.
Levav said entertainment consumption used to be a cultural and social experience with everyone remembering the last episodes of all of the same shows, but now that aspect is lacking.
“You had a very shared cultural conversation,” Levav said. “The Super Bowl now is one of the last things that’s true about. Even the Oscars have declined in popularity, but there were these moments in time where quintessential shows were part of the zeitgeist … What I observe generally is most of (the younger generations don’t) have the attention span anymore to watch a full two-hour film. What makes me sad is that there’s something lost for the art forms that are out there.”
Given the new prevalence of mobile devices, junior Jonathan Bakhash can see the truth in Levav’s analysis.
“My parents (used to) put (shows) on, and me and my siblings would group around and watch it,” Bakhash said. “I’d say we definitely do less of that now.”
Junior Zoe Sherer said she hopes future generations will be able to control their screen time to strengthen social skills and avoid missing out on opportunities around them.
“A big part of being a kid and growing and learning (and) is about play and interacting with the world around you,” Sherer said. “I see all these people at restaurants (where kids) are just on their iPads to distract their kids, and that’s taking away valuable experience.”
For Levav, reflecting on the advancement of entertainment, she thinks people are aware of the drawbacks of accessibility, but she hopes everyone also recognizes the benefits.
“There are a lot of things that are amazing about where technology has evolved and how we have access,” Levav said. “If you think about it, you pretty much can find any kind of content you want anywhere. I think that’s incredible.”