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.

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

Was VHS Video Really That Bad?

VHS video was terrible, right? Awful snowy, washed-out picture quality, distorted rolling images. Yeah... sadly, a lot of TV VHS recordings do look awful. But then, every once in a while, you come across a tape that was recorded from a solid source—or captured on one of those rare clear days of analog TV reception—and wow... it can look almost as good as a first-generation DVD. I said almost!

In this video, I take a trip down memory lane, reliving the VHS collection of my youth. Our collection includes a mix of tapes dating back to the mid-to-late 1980s, most of which were recorded from local television broadcasts. And let me tell you, the real time capsule isn’t just the shows—it’s the commercials! Some are hilariously bad, while others bring back a wave of nostalgia.

If you’re like me, you probably think that old VHS videos look pretty bad. Well… check this out! I recently revisited a 20-year-old PAL VHS tape, and if it weren’t for a slight horizontal wave in the image, I wouldn’t have guessed it was that old. There’s a bit of tracking misalignment, causing scan lines to start and finish slightly unevenly. Whether that’s from the recording or the playback, I’m not sure—but it’s incredible how well it has held up.

Now, I should point out that this is the exception and not the rule. I’ve been looking at a bunch of VHS tapes, and this was by far the best one. Some movies, especially those that weren’t played often, still look surprisingly good. However, tapes that were played repeatedly tend to degrade in quality.

I’ve got some other examples, including pay-TV recordings that look similar to the good-quality tape. However, free-to-air TV recordings from back in the day are a different story—many of them are extremely snowy, with lots of lateral and vertical movement. Not all, but a significant number of them. It’s easy to see why VHS has such a poor reputation. Looking back, my memories of VHS were mostly bad, but now that I’ve rewatched some of these tapes, I’m honestly stunned. When blown up on a larger monitor and viewed from a typical seating distance, a well-preserved VHS tape can look just like any other 4:3 image.

Here’s another example: one of the original Star Wars films. The tape has been sitting around for decades without much use, and yet it still plays remarkably well. It’s incredible to think that these tapes—over 20 years old—have survived this well. In fact, when comparing them to some early DVD transfers from the mid-to-late 90s, the VHS quality is sometimes better! Those early DVDs often had low bit rates, 4:3 aspect ratio cropping, and poor compression, making them look worse than expected.

Of course, not all VHS tapes aged gracefully. Some are filled with snow and distortion, making them nearly unwatchable—like trying to watch TV in a blizzard. The decline of VHS coincided with the rise of digital recording in the early 2000s, making analog formats obsolete almost overnight. However, the transition to digital wasn’t smooth for everyone. Early digital TV had low bit rates, terrible reception, and frequent signal dropouts, leading to blocky, corrupted video streams. In contrast, while analog VHS recordings had their flaws, they were at least watchable from start to finish without major disruptions.

So, was VHS really that bad? Well, it depends. The worst VHS recordings look horrendous, but the best ones can still be surprisingly watchable.

What are your memories of VHS? Did you have any tapes that looked shockingly good? Or was it all just static and tracking lines? Let me know in the comments!

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Camera: Motorola Motog9 Plus

Music:

The Sleeping Prophet - Jesse Gallagher

Back To The Future (VHS vs DVD)

Starwars (VHS)

National Rodeo Championships (VHS recorded from Satellite TV) & Many more.