📻 Family arguments over the remote before streaming existed, does anyone else remember

Was telling my own kids about how television actually worked in our house growing up, one single shared television for the entire family, a limited number of actual channels available, and genuinely fierce, occasionally quite heated negotiations over who specifically got to control the remote at any given particular time of day depending on what everyone else in the house happened to want to watch simultaneously. My kids genuinely could not properly picture it, growing up as they have with their own individual devices and separate streaming accounts, each watching completely different things simultaneously in different rooms of the house without ever actually needing to negotiate directly with anyone else in the family about it at all. There was a genuine, established hierarchy in our own house growing up, my father got the actual news at a specific fixed time without any question or real negotiation, my mother had her own specific evening serial slot that was similarly non negotiable to anyone, and us kids fought fairly constantly over whatever limited actual time genuinely remained available after both of those fixed slots were properly accounted for each day. Missing a specific episode back then meant genuinely missing it entirely, no ability to actually pause, rewind, or catch up later on your own personal schedule the way it works completely differently and effortlessly now, which somehow made the actual act of watching something together feel more genuinely urgent and important at the specific time it was actually happening live. Explaining this whole dynamic to my own kids led to a genuinely fun, extended conversation about how differently they experience actual television now, no real specific waiting required for anything, no genuine sibling negotiation needed, though I did point out they consequently also miss out on that specific shared communal family experience of watching the exact same thing together as one unit that we grew up having ourselves. Does anyone else remember those specific remote control battles fondly now looking back, and do you think something genuine was actually lost in that particular shared communal viewing experience once individual devices and streaming eventually took over completely for most families?

The remote fights were bad enough in our house that my mother eventually just bought a second, smaller television purely to end the shouting between us kids every single evening right after school. Felt excessive at the time as a teenager, though looking back now it was probably the only reasonable solution available to her given how stubborn all three of us were about it.

We had exactly this fight weekly growing up in our house, my brother controlling the remote through sheer stubbornness rather than any real argument ever winning the debate itself on most evenings. Streaming solved this whole family tension so thoroughly that younger cousins now look genuinely confused whenever the story comes up at family gatherings, like hearing about some ancient war that happened well before their time.