My Wheel of Choice

I like the makers of things getting paid for their creative endeavours, and I will chase them to near enough any non-Murdoch affiliated platform. And so it has come to this:

It's been working well for me. Feel free to try the same. Recent choices on each platform include:

• Poldark and Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont-Spelling Bee on ABC iView
• Die Sendung mit der Maus on ARD Mediathek (auf Deutsch)
• Karambolage on arte (en français)
• Tom Scott on Nebula
• Game Changer on Dropout (Season 8 has been spectacular)
• Adrian Cantrill's gone off the deep end, but I fervently believe in Death of the Author and don't spend too much time here
• Archer on Netflix
• K-On!!, Jaadugar, The Ghost in The Shell (episode 7 went _deep_), Chihayafuru, Non Non Biyori Nonstop, etc., etc. I have a MyAnimeList Tampermonkey script that picks what
• Current re-watching Matt Smith's run... originally dropped it around that time.
• The Bear on Disney+
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Paramount+
• 3rd Rock from the Sun on Stan - it feels like no episode leaves anything behind, these scripts are tight
• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel - the Catskills arc is astoundingly good
• Samurai Jack on HBO Max - I've heard about it forever, but the time has come, and it lives up to its reputation, hasn't aged a day
• Stargate Atlantis - committed to finishing all of what's out there for Stargate and almost done with Atlantis

The wheel is a necessity. It makes sure I get my money's worth everywhere. The wheel is my linear TV.

Here's the thing though: all I'm doing is replicating something that's existed for about 100 years, and in order to explain what I'm replicating I better take a detour to the other side of the planet.

A Brief Introduction to Public Broadcasting in the Netherlands

What I've built isn't some quirky personal hack. It's a subscription-era reenactment of a media system the Dutch have been running for nearly a century. The key idea is pillarisation (verzuiling): society made up of distinct pillars, each with its own worldview, institutions, newspapers, schools, and crucially, broadcasters. In the Netherlands these pillars weren't cultural tendencies so much as fully fledged ecosystems. Before later mergers, they included:

• Protestant broadcasters (NCRV, EO)
• Catholic broadcasters (KRO)
• Socialist broadcasters (VARA)
• Liberal broadcasters (AVRO, VPRO, TROS)

And the broadcasters weren't on different TV channels. They all shared the same single radio frequencies, and up to three TV channels as those appeared over the decades, rotating by day, or later by timeslot. This was a civic design choice. A deliberate defence against monoculture, gatekeeping, and filter bubbles long before those terms existed. A deliberate decision to get the pillars to know each other.

Broadcasters with statutory responsibilities in the areas of news, sports, education, and culture: NOS and NTR.
Broadcasting associations that represent either a social or religious movement, or a specific target group, such as young people or the elderly. These associations are firmly rooted in Dutch society through their membership and reflect the historically segmented nature of Dutch society that emerged in the first half of the last century. Their continued existence makes the Dutch public broadcasting system unique in the world.
- About NPO

To this day, the different focuses:

• NTR → knowledge, culture, education
• VPRO → experimental, intellectual, boundary‑pushing
• AVROTROS → arts, entertainment
• KRO‑NCRV → humanistic, social
• BNNVARA → youth, activism, satire
• EO → religious programming
• NOS → news, sport, national events

  

  
  All on the TV channels NPO 1, NPO 2, and NPO 3.

None of this is abstract to me. Growing up in Europe, on TV we had a plurality of countries' views: Austrian, the Swiss channels in all four of their languages, and from Germany, BR and SWR of ARD along with ZDF. Three countries' worth of schedules, four languages, coming out of the same box. It didn't feel like pluralism at the time. It just felt like what was on.

And How My Wheel is built around that

And similarly I get these things from the platforms I enjoy:

• ABC iView → public‑service storytelling
• ARD/arte → continental cultural literacy
• Nebula/Dropout → creator‑driven innovation
• Netflix/Stan/Prime → mainstream narrative comfort
• Anime → aesthetic and emotional exploration
• Disney+/Paramount+ → franchise continuity
• HBO Max → animation canon

The wheel is my anti-filter-bubble mechanism. It forces rotation, and that's the point: every pillar gets a turn, even the ones I'd forget about or neglect. I've embraced what it gives me without it being remarkable, and that's the whole point. My preferences absolutely still matter, but they're funnelled through a mechanism designed to break down my cultural biases.

The problem with the streaming era is that every platform wants to be your entire world. Every app is a silo. Every algorithm is a shepherd. And every "Because you watched…" nudges your taste narrower until you become a single-genre creature. Left unchecked, streaming becomes a filter bubble with a monthly fee.

That's exactly what the Dutch system was designed to prevent, and choice of organisations being foundational is what feels familiar to me. Public broadcasting in the Netherlands, my wheel here, isn't just about content. It ensured people encountered viewpoints, aesthetics, and cultural traditions outside their own bubble, simply because the schedule rotated through them. It wasn't perfect, but it was intentionally plural. It assumed democracy works better when people regularly bump into things they didn't choose.

So for example, starting in 1988 you had: Radio 1 with NOS, VARA, KRO, EO, and VPRO while Radio 2 with AVRO, TROS, KRO, and NCRV, for example. And on TV with KRO, NCRV, and EO on Nederland 1, AVRO, TROS, and Veronica on Nederland 2. There's been mergers but also more spread out programming windows since.

Fast-forward to today, and we've replaced that rotation with hyper-personalised feeds that reinforce whatever you already like. The wheel is a way of restoring the breadth, serendipity, and cultural cross-pollination linear TV used to provide, before everything became a personalised funnel. It forces me to step outside whatever bubble I'm drifting into.

The Wheel of Choice isn't a gimmick. It's my way of keeping a broad, democratic media diet in a world that keeps trying to shrink it. Streaming platforms want to trap you in a perfectly tuned bubble; linear TV used to pull you out of it. The wheel restores that pull.

The wheel has spoken.