
Traditional TV Is in Trouble - zonotope
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/business/media/television-advertising.html
======
heroprotagonist
I feel like the decline of traditional television is behind a lot of the push
to destroy net neutrality.

The strategy being to first introduce some artificial scarcity on internet
bandwidth through data caps, and then offer exceptions. Either the cost to the
business to be on the exception list will be high, or the cost to the user
will be high to override the data caps, with the cost of service increasing as
oligopoly in a region allows.

They can use this to steer people to the services that they back, like Hulu,
or at least to make their own cable-box video on demand services seem more
reasonable.

If one were truly pessimistic, the categorization of content wouldn't stop at
simply high bandwidth services like video. A separate limit could be applied
to things like html, with websites indexed as to their type and views counted.
Which could result in an online equivalent of Sinclair media's control of
local television news as certain channels of information are more accessible
because they don't count towards a cap. And anything untrackable like VPN use
goes into a more expensive version of the existing bandwidth-based quotas.

I believe it will not come to that last part, but less because I don't believe
the telcos would attempt it than that I think it would incite people to
legislative action. If it's introduced in slow increments, though, we might
get closer to this worst-case scenario than many believe.

~~~
ClassyJacket
Traditional television is behind the push to destroy the net in general.

Look at us here in Australia - look up "NBN". we had a plan (that was already
10% complete and working great) to install gigabit fibre in 93% of homes. Then
Rupert Murdoch handed the election to the Coalition, in exchange for them:

\- Immediately stopping work on the fibre network

\- Replacing the bulk of the remaining rollout with a VDSL system (ancient
technology, my parents got it and instead of gigabit fibre their internet went
from 13 Mbps to 19 Mbps - and this costs 2400$ per house to install)

\- Using loans and taxpayer money to expand the Fox cable TV\internet network
to double the number of homes, and paying Foxtel hundreds of millions of
dollars for the privilege, while continuing to grant them exclusive rights to
broadcast on it on all frequencies they want, including the ones that are
optimal for internet

\- Purchasing and decommissioning the Optus cable TV network which competes
with it, replacing it with VDSL service

It's a national tragedy, wasting fifty billion dollars and a decade, just for
the sake of protecting a conservative TV monopoly.

~~~
PinkMilkshake
Do you have any sources on this? I always wondered why NBN was such a
disaster.

~~~
BLKNSLVR
You know not what you ask!

I didn't post what you're replying to, but I'm also an Aussie who's been
reading articles about the NBN disaster for its entire duration.

Sources are difficult because the NBN has been on on-going project for over a
decade now, so there's an absolute haystack to search through, and all the hay
and most of the needles are strongly coloured by political ideologies.

Whirlpool has what looks like a comprehensive timeline / article here:
[https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn](https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn)

I always found [http://delimiter.com.au/](http://delimiter.com.au/) to be the
best source of information around the progress (or otherwise) of the NBN. Here
are a couple of semi-targeted articles that demonstrate the depth and density
of this political quagmire:

[http://delimiter.com.au/2013/01/17/fact-check-the-nbn-
wasnt-...](http://delimiter.com.au/2013/01/17/fact-check-the-nbn-wasnt-a-
media-stunt/)

[http://delimiter.com.au/2013/07/19/breaking-the-rules-how-
nb...](http://delimiter.com.au/2013/07/19/breaking-the-rules-how-nbn-cos-spat-
with-turnbull-breaches-all-convention/)

[http://delimiter.com.au/2016/03/29/qa-panellists-agree-
polit...](http://delimiter.com.au/2016/03/29/qa-panellists-agree-politicians-
screwed-fibre-nbn/)

The whole issue goes back before NBNCo was created, however, to when Telstra,
the government-owned monopoly infrastructure owner, was sold without being
broken up into wholesale and retail arms, thus meaning their retail plans
directly competed with those of their wholesale customers. The Australian
Government at the time didn't see that as being a potential problem in the
future, and yet here we are...

~~~
indemnity
There is an interesting comparison with what could have been. When I moved to
New Zealand in the early 2000s, Internet access was worse than in Australia.

“Broadband” was 256kbps ADSL at best, insanely expensive, with punitive data
caps, and the monopoly telco had no interest in investing to increase service
or drop prices. There were other ISPs but they had a hard time competing due
to underhanded tactics by the monopolist as well as having to build out their
own infrastructure entirely whereas the monopoly had inherited all its
infrastructure from the taxpayer built state owned company that was privatised
for a song.

Around 2007, the government removed this monopoly power and broke up the
company into infrastructure and service companies, with the infrastructure
company having to provide equal access to any ISPs.

Then the initiative to build fibre to the home started in 2008. Luckily, the
government of the day did not compromise on the technical approach and it
remained fibre to the home, not the node.

Roll forward to today, and I have gigabit fibre to my home, with no data caps,
for a decent price.

There’s still a fair bit of build out to happen but the option now exists for
people in most urban areas.

~~~
BLKNSLVR
I've read the occasional article about the New Zealand rollout. Rest-assured,
the Aussies who care about the NBN are jealous of what New Zealand now has.

It really pushes the point home about how much politics and special-interests
(as opposed to real things like technical limitations) got in the way.

Now I'm angry all over again.

------
andreasklinger
I think the perfect example is "The Expanse"

\- Easily the best sci-fi show in 10 years(1)

\- Latest season has a 100% score on rotten-tomatos

\- The visual effects are absolute top of the art (2)

\- The fanbase is franticly close to the show (look at twitter how much they
interact w/ the cast etc)

\- Season 3 and we are about to start the big turn of the story arch

BUT… Canceled by Syfy because not enough people catch it at the time they
happen to transmit it into the air.

If this show would be on Netflix it could become on of the defining sci-fi
shows of our generation. Now we have to hope Netflix or Amazon happen to pick
it up before the team disperses. (3)

(1) seriously watch it… the first few episodes are a bit slowish worldbuilding
but it gets really good

(2)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yKn_EqA0ik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yKn_EqA0ik)
(shitty rip unfortunately)

(3) Please sign: [https://www.change.org/p/netflix-or-amazon-please-buy-the-
ri...](https://www.change.org/p/netflix-or-amazon-please-buy-the-rights-to-
the-expanse-savetheexpanse)

~~~
gr__or
While I love RottenTomatoes for Movies, I find it abysmal for TV Shows. Here
are some shows with a >90% score:

\- Almost all seasons of Supernatural

\- Seasons 3 & 4 of Veep

\- Seasons 4, 5 & 7 of New Girl

\- Season 2 of The Flash

\- Season 2-4 of Arrow

Now I'm not saying that those shows are all shit (tho they are certainly not
in my ballpark), but I doubt anyone thinks of them as 100% shows, in the same
sense that Moonlight is a 98% movie.

The problem comes with few reviews (which is also a thing with more niche-y
movies), which is probably amplified in later seasons, where reviewers who
don't like it stopped watching.

~~~
ghaff
To a far greater degree than the vast bulk of movies, TV shows, especially
genre ones, spawn pretty fanatical followers. And, as you suggest, rather than
ragging on a series for wasting 2 hours of their life, they just stop
watching.

Among the series you listed, I see several that, for me, were basically meh
superhero shows I might have watched an episode of and then tuned out. There’s
too much good TV for me to bother with stuff that I suspect I’ll be
indifferent to in the 5 hours or so if TV I watch in a week.

------
otakucode
None of this discussed the 'why' traditional TV is in trouble, it just said
that younger viewers aren't there. The actual WHY is that it is a terrible
product which is being successfully outcompeted by a much better product.
Television networks got large because they solved a very valuable problem -
distribution. With the Internet, distribution is worthless. A clever 12 year
old can do global media distribution on their free time as a hobby. It's not
something to build an empire on. And it's certainly not something people are
going to pay you $100+/mo just so you can lace it with ads and fill it with
garbage content that exists not because an audience is wanting it but because
some programming director wanted to make a name for themselves by going in a
'bold new direction'.

Public response to creative works is random. Truly random. Maximum entropy.
There are no patterns to discern. So humans do what they always do when they
face randomness.. they invent myths and replace reason with bullshit. If you
control distribution, you can still force a win by leaning hard on your
successes and kicking out your losses as fast as possible. But once the
audience has extremely broad choice... you are screwed.

The future for media distributors is death. The future for media production
companies is probably either working for Netflix, Amazon, or similar services
or being supported by viewers who want their content directly via Patreon or a
similar avenue. The creatives will be fine. The suits will be jumping off
ledges.

------
drblast
What's most fascinating to me is that the 50-64 age group spends vastly more
time overall viewing nearly every medium except streaming TV and video games.

My own experience with my parents bears this out; the TV is always on and
they're also on their phones as much or more than teens. But it looks like if
habits don't change, there will be fewer hours overall spent on "consuming
content" as the population ages.

~~~
ImaCake
I wonder if the real reason advertising companies are worried about millenials
is that they just avoid advertising whenever they can. There is a growing
awareness about the effects of advertising, and the popular trends are towards
reuse and recycling, even if those trends are mostly bullshit.

In Australia we have a popular TV show called Gruen Transfer which does
nothing but breakdown ads and explains how they do what they do.

Finally, a biased anecdote from a millenial: Myself and many of my friends
avoid ads by using ad-blockers and subscription services and not leaving the
TV on when there is nothing to watch. Whereas my parents (about 60) watched
far more television and didn't use ad-blockers... although recently they have
been turning the TV off and using their ipads instead.

~~~
tomhoward
_I wonder if the real reason advertising companies are worried about
millenials is that they just avoid advertising whenever they can_

I don't think advertising companies are worried about millennials; they can
target them and measure results far more effectively with online advertising
than they ever could via television, and thanks to smartphone addiction,
screen time/ad exposure time is the highest it's ever been.

 _Myself and many of my friends avoid ads by using ad-blockers and
subscription services_

That may be true of sophisticated users like yourself and your peers, but I'm
fairly sure you're in a small minority. Most people just use Facebook and
Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and read news articles unfiltered, and
outside of that, brands can insert their message directly into the content via
sponsorships and product placements with online celebrities.

Broadcast TV may be declining as millennials spend their time and dollars
elsewhere, but the advertising industry has never been stronger.

~~~
malka
idk about ad companies. But publisher are kinda worried about ad blockers :),
I head numbers as high as 50% of users with ad blocks. normies use ad block
now.

~~~
JKCalhoun
I expect then publishers love the Facebooks where ad-blockers are impotent.

~~~
malka
i havent seen an ad on facebook (the website, i do not use apps) for quite
some time.

~~~
tomhoward
Yep but regular folks do much/all of their Facebook/Insta/Snapchat viewing in
the apps not the web.

------
throwaway287391
What I find weird about most of my generation is not that they don't buy
overpriced cable subscriptions, but that they don't buy _TV screens_ and
instead choose to stream video at home on a 15" laptop screen at best or a 4"
phone screen at worst. TVs are obscenely cheap these days -- to the extent
that it blows my mind that anyone doesn't have one.

(And then once you have a TV screen you might as well pay another $10 for an
HD antenna, which gives you completely free access to unlimited content, most
of which is admittedly total garbage. But even if you use it once a year to
watch the Super Bowl, Olympics, or live coverage of some local emergency, the
tiny cost is easily justified. The existence and free-ness of HD antennas
seems more or less unknown to most millennials, who have a "mind blown"
reaction when they come over to my apartment to watch the Super Bowl or NBA
finals or whatever and find out I'm paying nothing for it.)

~~~
ggg9990
A big part of the problem is effortlessly getting content from your phone
(where it’s easiest to find) to your TV (where it’s best to watch) through the
competing hostile ecosystems of Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook.

~~~
King-Aaron
My HDMI cable would disagree with you on that one.

I understand a lot of people want the convenience of wireless / push to screen
functionality, but it always makes me laugh when friends sit there for several
minutes trying to get content on a screen, and I just bung a cable into my
laptop and it's up and running.

~~~
vetinari
In last few years, you can also connect HDMI cable to your phone; MHL has been
a thing for a while.

------
drewg123
One of the reasons traditional TV is in trouble is because it is a pain in the
neck to deal with. The episode-at-a-time schedule is frustrating, now that I'm
used to binging on Netflix. To get around this, I tend to watch network TV
shows only at the end of the season, so I can save up an entire season and
binge watch the show (I have a PVR and an antenna). However, you often find
that some or all of your season is missing because the networks can't keep to
a schedule.

Just last night, Golf on NBC pushed their primetime schedule back by 10
minutes, causing me to loose the last 10 minutes of the series finale of
something that I was binge watching. This is ... disappointing.

Similarly, a previous episode of the same show was been 100% interrupted by
overzealous local news/weather folks covering phantom "severe weather" which
was basically some high wind and lighting.

Except for sports, I'm now planning to just ignore linear TV, and wait for the
shows to appear on streaming services, which actually deliver the content..

~~~
nkrisc
The idea of "channels" seems so archaic now. Why should extended news coverage
push back the schedule?

News going long? Spawn a temporary, new channel and the coverage can continue
there for those interested while the scheduled content continues on the main
channel.

I know why things are the way they are, but we have computers now: we can do
anything.

~~~
InitialLastName
> we have computers now: we can do anything.

That's the title of my upcoming self-help book for millennials dealing with
their aging baby-boomer parents' technology issues.

~~~
nkrisc
Will there be a chapter called, "Can't you just...?"

~~~
magic_beans
Brilliant. This phrase is so loaded with passive-aggression and condescension.

------
newscracker
> It’s hard to keep up with the many devices and apps people now use to watch
> shows. And there is a host of material from Silicon Valley that is competing
> for viewers’ attention, including Google’s YouTube, Facebook and Netflix.

It's very hard to keep up with streaming services and knowing what's where
too. It's a big mess since the streaming services seem to provide control on
what to watch, when and where, but that turns out to be a kind of illusion
when one can't figure out how to achieve that with content either moving
around services or being produced and restricted to one service. While
BitTorrent traffic may have reduced over the years because of streaming
services, it still reigns supreme if you want to choose what to watch, when
and where.

> Both NBCUniversal and the Fox Networks Group have said they will trim the
> total time of commercials shown during some of their shows; Fox has
> announced a goal of reducing ad time to two minutes an hour by 2020.

This is one of the worst aspects of traditional TV once you become accustomed
to streaming services, especially ones with no ads. Traditional TV literally
puts ads for about one third of the air time in many cases, and that's a huge
waste of time for those who just want content (and there are many; how many
times can one watch the same ad even if it's the best ad ever?).

The writing has been on the wall for a long time coming. Better user
experience, with lower prices, will eat into traditional modes of content
distribution.

------
snarfy
I tried watching a Star Wars movie the other day. The play time on TV was
7-10:30pm, 3.5 hours. The actual play time of the movie is 2.25 hours. And
they cram most of the commercials towards the end. They do it so much so that
I got sick of them cutting to commercial every 5 minutes and pulled out the
blu ray and finished watching it. There was still 40 minutes left on the TV
after I'd finished watching the blu ray.

Here I am, willing to pay for cable and watch it, and they ruin it by trying
to milk every last cent out of it.

~~~
roryisok
I thought pay tv in the US had no ads?? Is that not the whole point of it? Are
there ad breaks in game of thrones and silicon valley and all the other hbo
shows??

~~~
pickpuck
Regular bundled cable has ads. (What IS the point?) HBO is a premium channel
you pay for beyond the bundle. It has no ads except lots of self-promo in
between shows.

------
mfoy_
As a millennial, I can proudly say that I never cut the cord, because I never
even signed up.

~~~
sgtmas2006
Same here, but gen Z instead. Only been out of the house for two years (i'm
20) but I have never had an inkling of a desire to sign up for television
service. I'm sure part of that is skewed by torrenting, but I still probably
wouldn't sign up if such things weren't possible.

~~~
abraae
Stick to it. In your latter years you'll never wish you had watched more TV,
but you might fondly remember that moment you walked on a beach at sunset
instead and had an amazing encounter.

Same applies to your phone too though :)

~~~
criddell
Most of the time when you walk on the beach, you don't have an amazing
encounter.

There's a long list of television shows I haven't started yet and wish I had.
Game of Thrones, Sopranos, The Wire, Mr Robot, and lots of others. It's
surprising how often conversations with friends and strangers revolve around
our common culture.

I think a lot of people my age credit their love of sci fi while growing up in
the 70's and 80's with putting them on their career path.

My advice would be to watch the TV you want to watch, then take your dog out
for a walk after. Best of all worlds.

~~~
sgtmas2006
Man, this is literally my Plex library. <15 shows that I ever enjoy watching
(ATHF, Mr Robot, The Wire, Sopranos, GoT, Squidbillies, House, King of the
Hill, Silicon Valley, Buffy, Futurama to be exact.) They still take up a full
1.5TB because I like to get the highest quality rips possible.

Some shows like House I have edited personally to create 'binge versions,'
with the intro and outro cut out, with only special episodes that have special
endings or intros included. Saves a good chunk of time with House and The Wire
when I rewatch them. I wish a lot of other people did this as well. Instead
groups stick to following scene rules that leave us with ugly formats, poor
management and naming schemes and more. They were created for a different era.

Maybe I'll try to put it out there.

------
nikanj
The dopamine-per-minute is so much higher with smartphones. Can’t compete with
the super-instant-gratification.

------
seanalltogether
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-
rated_United_States_televi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-
rated_United_States_television_programs_by_season)

Going all the way back to 2000, it's pretty clear that the top rated tv shows
have always skewed towards older demographics. ER, CSI whatever, Lawyer drama
#25.

~~~
Retric
That and the top raised shows have fallen dramatically, in the 50's you had 60
million people watching now it's capping under 12 and steadily dropping. Not
to mention how much larger the population has gotten.

~~~
snuxoll
Maybe the traditional networks would make a decent comeback if they started
producing view-worthy shows again. There was so much content actually worth
watching and getting excited for one or two decades ago, now at most I’m
looking forward to the next episode of Bob’s Burgers as far as domestic
network shows are concerned. Anything else worth watching to me comes from
Netflix or Amazon, or premium networks that are already preparing for the
death of cable like HBO.

There just isn’t a modern day equivalent to ER, and THAT is why TV is dying
(along with absurd price hikes).

~~~
ruytlm
I'd argue another angle to it, which is there were fewer channels to choose
from back then.

Modern shows aren't just competing to win their timeslot; they're competing
against the choice to stream whatever you feel like.

~~~
snuxoll
Maybe I’m just overly picky, but I am constantly at a loss as to what I want
to watch. My wife gets more use out of our streaming services than I do, as I
have mostly watched or own digital copies of everything I care about - so I
get more use out of Hulu, Crunchyroll/VRV and iTunes to keep on top of current
shows.

I think the era of strictly scheduled programming may be coming to an end,
though there’s still people who like to channel surf - but I think the
networks could find something in the middle if they tried (especially as
somebody who doesn’t like the binge model that Netflix operates on).

------
oh-kumudo
The new generation don't watch TV, period. TV is ancient, forced ads, too few
choices.

~~~
paxys
Yeah, I was surprised that live TV was still on the top and tied with
smartphones in terms of hours per week for 25-34 year olds. I figure live
sports makes up a majority of that.

~~~
ghayes
And live sports are slowly moving online. The biggest problem, in my
estimation, is the cost to consumers is very high per game (to make up for the
large advertising spend on traditional TV broadcasts).

------
martinald
"Fox has announced a goal of reducing ad time to two minutes an hour by 2020."

Is this correct? Two minutes of adverts per hour? Or is this a typo from NYT
and 'by two minutes'. Two minutes of ads would be 4 slots an hour, they'd have
to increase prices by ~7x per slot to make the same amount of money.

------
mrguyorama
Just the other day my mother asked me why I don't sign up for a package deal
to get TV for essentially $10 a month. Why would I? Why pay $10 a month to be
force-fed overly loud advertisements that play for more than 50% of the
runtime of the shitty shows that ruined the networks I loved as a child. The
vast majority of my curiosity about history comes from the history channel and
discovery channel, learning about wars and "science" and things, while my
interest in tech can be traced back to Modern Marvels, a show on the History
channel. All that was dead by mid 2000's, replaced by "Deadliest Catch" and
"Did aliens do history? (probably not but we will lie to you and say they
might have" and "Is bigfoot real? (OH COME ON)"

Sometimes I try to watch TV when I visit home, and it is infuriating in every
possible way. An ad break every five minutes, sometimes twice in a row. The
thirty minutes of ad space is populated by a grand total of two different ads
that scream at the top of their lungs to get your attention. Sure the ads may
have seemed funny or insightful or unique the once or twice the marketing
department for a company viewed it, but I promise you after the tenth time
seeing it it in one hour.

TV content used to enrich my mind, at least on certain specific and enjoyable
channels. Now I view it as actively being cancerous, and am disgusted every
time it's on in my mother's house. I worry for her mental health.

I mean for christ's sake, just look at "The Learning Channel"!

~~~
dragonwriter
> I mean for christ's sake, just look at "The Learning Channel"!

No such channel has existed for 20 years. TLC is not, and does not pretend to
be, The Learning Channel, any more than the Paramount Network pretends to be
The Nashville Network.

------
upofadown
Advertising supported media is in trouble in general. The networks still have
a PVR problem from since forever.

All this really means in practice is that prime time dramas are in decline and
will become more and more marginal. Stuff like sporting events and news is the
future of advertising supported real time streaming. The medium is not
important. Some of this will still come from TV transmitters.

~~~
jerrre
What is PVR?

~~~
severine
I think it's Programmable Video Recorder?

------
peterjlee
Millennials still watch sports and it's still pretty hard to watch sports
without having your parent's cable service logins..

~~~
dasil003
Pretty hard to watch them with their logins too. The Comcast stream for game 1
of the Eastern Conference Finals was completely borked yesterday with a weird
mixed-content warning in the dev console, and I'm fairly certain it wasn't
just my account affected.

------
fredsanford
I remember watching MASH, Sanford and Son, Carol Burnette and Flip Wilson with
my mother when those were first run shows. 5 minutes per half hour for ads and
credits. But the shows were good enough to tolerate the garbage.

That has not been true for a long time now.

Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well-done. --
Ernie Kovacs [0]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Kovacs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Kovacs)

------
stevenjohns
I personally don't have a TV antenna plugged in[0]. I do however have my TV
connected to my WiFi directly and an Android TV device (with Chromecast)
plugged in.

I'm not the only person like this I imagine.

[0] This is mostly due to the inconvenience of a TV antenna, maybe partially
related to where we position TV antennas in older homes and apartments before
the TV became so big.

------
ahmedfromtunis
Off-topic question: shouldn't this be 'Why is traditional TV in trouble'? I
see that there is no question mark at the end of the title too; is that why
'is' is after the subject?

~~~
Analemma_
It's phrased as a statement, with the usual headline-speak of dropping
articles: "[This is] Why Traditional TV is in trouble".

Why they chose that over an interrogative form ("Why is traditional TV in
trouble?"), I don't know. Maybe the NYT has a style manual that prefers the
first formation.

~~~
lainga
I have noticed US media convention, both print and web, is to prefer
statements: "Why <x>", "How <y>", and "<z> did <z'>, and it's <z''>"; the last
one even conveniently tells you how you're supposed to feel about the article.
I imagine it conveys more authority than questions do.

------
eip
The diarrhea analogy still stands.

Two restaurants:

One serves random food at random times. It's $80/plate and each plate is going
to be 30-50% diarrhea. The bill has at least 20% unexplained markup.

The other serves whatever is on the menu all the time. It's $10/plate and each
plate is diarrhea free.

~~~
the-pigeon
A more accurate analogy would be

One restaurant that serves only one dish a day and there's always a 30 minute
line. You have to purchase a monthly pass to eat there.

The other has no wait and a menu that rotates slowly over the year. You have
to purchase a monthly pass to eat there.

Each is comparable in quality of food.

------
tomkinson
When u cancel 'The Mick' no wonder

------
nunez
I can’t fucking wait to get rid of our TV. There is so much better (and
worse!) programming on YouTube and Netflix.

------
skookumchuck
Some channels do not show commercials, and they show old movies that are not
available elsewhere other than buying a DVD.

I used to watch CNN, but don't anymore because it doesn't have news anymore.
Tune in at any moment 24/7, and it's an editorial on the topic of "we hate
Trump".

------
HumanDrivenDev
NY Times writing an article about why TV is in trouble.... in 2018.

Can we just ban this trash website from HN?

~~~
tomhoward
One flimsy article doesn't warrant banning what's arguably the most prominent
news outlet in the world. I can agree that a lot of NYT content is lame, but
its stature remains strong and the HN community would justifiably revolt if it
were banned altogether.

------
gaius
Post- the GDPR adpocalypse maybe TV advertising won’t look so bad!

~~~
Analemma_
The GDPR isn't going to make millenials start watching network television,
which is the main issue here.

