There was a time when watching television required absolutely no decision-making skills. You turned on the TV, grabbed the remote, and started flipping through channels until something caught your attention.
Maybe it was a rerun of your favorite sitcom, a Saturday morning cartoon, or a soap opera you had no business watching as a child. You didn’t need an algorithm to tell you what to watch. Now, a new Roku app is hoping to bring some of that nostalgic magic back.
All the Comforts of ’90s Cable, Without the Cable Bill
BackWhen TV is a free streaming channel designed to recreate the experience of watching television during the 1990s. Developed by AlfredFLIX, the app offers 100 dedicated channels covering everything from Saturday morning cartoons to daytime soaps, all presented through a retro television guide. Rather than scrolling through an endless library of titles and deciding what to watch, viewers can channel surf just like they did before streaming took over the living room.
Some of the selections include MTV, Nickelodeon, Toon Lab, Turnbuckle TV, Looney Tunes, Reading Rainbow, Saturday Morning/Live, soaps and novellas, and all the 90s ads and infomercials of your dreams.
The concept couldn’t have come at a better time. For all the convenience streaming services have given us, they’ve also turned watching television into a chore. Between competing subscriptions, endless ads, price hikes, disappearing titles, and confused algorithms, sometimes you just want to turn on the TV and let someone else make the programming decisions. BackWhen TV taps into that feeling by bringing back the spontaneity of traditional television.
If you’ve been missing the charm (or were too young to experience it) of what the 1990s had to offer, this is it. Television during that decade occupied a very specific place in popular culture. It was the era of TGIF, Saturday morning cartoons, MTV still reigned supreme, and afternoons were spent watching whatever happened to be on. A time period where daily routines were predicated by program schedules. And if you missed an episode? You had to wait for a rerun.
Of course, BackWhen TV isn’t actually transporting viewers to 1997. It’s recreating the feeling of being there, which makes it just as appealing. At a time when the younger generations are becoming increasingly interested in old-school technology, digital cameras, flip phones, and other relics of the pre-smartphone era, the appetite for retro is understandable.
The post This Free Streaming App Recreates the Magic of Watching Cable TV in the 1990s appeared first on VICE.
