They say if you live long enough you’ll see the return of everything.

So it is that I’ve been trying to explain to my two kids, who have never known anything but cable and satellite TV feeds, that with our new (budget!) HDTV there are actually over-the-air signals we can simply pluck from the airwaves with a good antenna. (The Zenith Silver Sensor in this case–highly recommended.)

My son looked at me with a very puzzled expression.

“Do you mean we can get all these channels for free?”
“Sure.”
“So if we lived even closer to a big city we could just take down the satellite dish and watch all this stuff without paying for it?”
“Yep. We wouldn’t get Nick and Cartoon Network and all the cable channels, but we’d get all the networks on the local channels.”
“But how can we do that without paying for it?”
“That’s what the commercials are for. And that’s how we used to watch TV all the time.”
“Cool! But this stuff just comes in from the air?”
“Just like the radio.”
“Cool!”

So it’s back to the future, my friends.