Back in the Before Time, one presentation was the norm for televised entertainment. That was back when "Let's go to the tape!" was an exclamation restricted to sportscasters and studio types. The thoughts of everyday people (aka viewers) having such re-view power seemed as remote as, well, remote controls. You could see the summer rerun of some shows if you were lucky, but for the most part shows were presented serially like ducks in a row. Looking at it as a bandwidth choke helps somewhat. With only so many regulated megahertz-minutes to schedule, it makes sense that suits would value new material hoping that material might catch the public's approval as a hit new TV show. The thought of replaying old shows - what, while we don't have enough hours already? - would have seemed mad to the bean counters.

But by strange coincidence or cause and effect the demise of Star Trek accompanied a sharp rise in off-network syndicated television. (Towards the end of the 1960's the FCC restricted network broadcasting, inadvertently creating a program vacuum in the early evening.) Selling entertainment material more or less guaranteed to draw an audience in order to sell ad time might not be as lucrative as fresh material, but could pay the bills, and (unfortunately) was in many cases easier and less expensive than dedicated local programming. All sorts of creative financing arose around the bandwidth flood found as steadily increasing source material was set to be delivered - in rerun ("strip") form - to new generations of improved technology (like UHF tuners) in cheaper and cheaper television receivers.

Oh yeah, and then came the video cassette recorder. Prerecorded material found another conduit to the consumer a wee bit earlier in the form of videodiscs, but the video-on-disc idea was premature and arrived some two to three decades later in the form of DVD. Videocassettes were more convenient and better still, were recordable (even once would have worked but repeatability was an added bonus). Trekkers being a bright bunch, it occurred to them a collection of taped recordings would enable on-demand retrieval of the TOS archives and challenge the monopoly produced by the punctuated, episodic structure characteristic of early television. What a ways Trek has come. (Good heavens, there's even an entire channel devoted to Science Fiction.) From straining with hope to catch an unwatched episode to accessing it instantly over the internet. My first VCR cost $700, about what a computer costs now - the cost of Trek at one's fingertips.