How Did Watching TV Get So Bad?

Once upon a time, watching TV was simple. You sat down, picked up the remote, flicked through the free-to-air channels — ABC, SBS, 7, 9, 10 — and found something to watch. If something wasn’t grabbing you, the "recall" button let you bounce between two shows during ad breaks. No lag, no loading. Just you, the remote, and the broadcast.

The Golden Era of Digital Free-to-Air

When digital TV first arrived in Australia, it came with a few growing pains — dropouts, unwatchable channels, and flaky reception — but eventually it settled. The benefit? More channels over the same networks. Digital broadcast was essentially a modernised version of the old analogue system: one-way communication, sent from a tower, received by your TV. No accounts. No buffering. No nonsense.

Early digital TVs were little more than display panels with set-top box guts built in. Sure, they weren’t perfect, but many included useful features like program guides, reminders, and even simple recording tools. TV watching felt focused — direct, communal, and mostly frictionless.

Then came the so-called "smart" TVs.

Enter the App Era

Today’s televisions are small computers. They boot up, they update, they crash, and they monitor your habits. Instead of simply broadcasting shows, they demand logins, bandwidth, and patience.

What used to be a two-button process to swap between channels is now a fragmented mess of apps. Want to flip between two shows on different networks? Good luck. You’ll need to exit one app, wait for the interface to catch up, maybe even watch another set of ads before the other app lets you resume. There’s no “recall” anymore. There’s no flipping. Just loading, buffering, syncing, failing.

Try casting content via a Google device, and you might spend more time troubleshooting than watching. Apps lose sync, freeze, or forget your place. And when they do work, you're locked into a provider’s ecosystem — their ads, their interface, their rules. Every interaction tracked, every pause or skip recorded.

We’re Paying for Less

On paper, we’ve never had more content. In practice, we’ve never had a worse user experience. And now we’re paying subscription fees, sitting through unskippable ads, and surrendering privacy for the privilege of watching a network that used to be — and technically still is — free.

So, how did we get it so wrong?

TV used to be simple. It used to just work. Now, it feels like work.

🎮 Game Dev and the Rockstar Illusion

At some point, many aspiring game developers ask the same question:

"Should I pursue game development as a career?"

It’s a fair question — and one I’ve heard dozens of times over the years. My usual answer goes something like this:

 Game development, for many of us, is the modern-day rockstar path. The huge potential upsides suspend people’s disbelief. Sheer optimism draws people into making life-changing career decisions on flimsy grounds.

And I still stand by that.

The Seductive Myth

There’s a dream attached to game development that’s hard to shake.

Make a hit indie game. Build a loyal community. Quit your day job. Maybe even go viral and rake in millions. We've all seen it happen. Stardew Valley. Undertale. Minecraft. Those stories are real — and they’re incredibly inspiring.

But here’s the thing: they’re not the rule. They’re the outliers. The exceptions. The lottery wins.

The Reality Check

Making software is difficult.

Making successful software? Even harder.

Now try making a successful game in one of the most oversaturated creative markets on the planet.

It’s not just about writing code or drawing sprites. It’s game design, storytelling, marketing, community building, testing, patching, supporting — usually with limited time, resources, or income. Even with passion and dedication, a great game can vanish in the noise of the marketplace.

This isn’t meant to scare you off — but it is meant to snap the illusion. Because game development isn’t a shortcut to fame or fortune. It’s work. Deep, complex, and often unpredictable work.

Why Do It Then?

Because you love it. Because it fascinates you. Because making something interactive — something playable — is uniquely satisfying.

For many of us, that’s reason enough. But the key is understanding that passion alone isn’t a business model. The most sustainable developers I know treat game dev like a long game. They build skills slowly. They wear many hats. They take breaks. They fail, adapt, and keep going.

Career vs. Calling

You can make a career in game development — but go in with your eyes open.

Ask yourself:

A few years ago, I picked up a budget TV tuner from Costco (Melbourne) — the TEAC HDB850. At just $40, I wasn’t expecting much more than a basic free-to-air digital tuner. But after spending some time with it, I found it to be a surprisingly handy device, especially for its USB-based PVR (Personal Video Recorder) feature.

In this post, I’ll walk through why the TEAC HDB850 caught my attention, what makes its recording feature interesting, and how you can easily join its multi-part video files into a single playable video — for free.

The Device: TEAC HDB850 PVR

At its core, the HDB850 is a digital set-top box with one job: tune in free-to-air channels. It connects to your LCD TV and acts as a digital tuner — and oddly enough, it seems to output a cleaner picture than most built-in TV tuners, particularly with our local 720p channels. This could be due to light filtering or some minor image processing, though that's just a guess.

What really sold me, though, was the recording feature.

Recording That Just Works — and Is Open

Unlike many PVRs that use proprietary or encrypted formats, the TEAC HDB850 records directly to AVCHD (MTS) format, split into ~500MB chunks. That’s roughly 15 minutes of video per file.

Better still — the files aren’t encrypted. You can drop them into Windows Media Player, VLC, or any modern video player and they’ll play without a hitch. That is, unless you're hoping to watch the full recording all at once. Then, you hit a snag.

The Problem: Chunked MTS Files

The recordings are saved as multiple `.MTS` files:

Antenna → TEAC HDB850 → TV