> I feel like the invisible degradation of responsiveness in TV and radio is an un-noticed contributor to their decline. Most of the time I don't bother even scannig the airwaves when I get to a new town cause it's too annoying.
I don't think that's much of a contributor. It's just really easy now to bring your own music (or podcast, or audiobook, or...) to the car with you via your phone, and I suspect people generally prefer to listen to their own curated music (or music a streaming service has curated for them) rather than putting up with radio ads, songs they don't like, etc. Just about the only benefit to listening to the radio would be to stumble upon new music, but you can do that with streaming services too. I guess some people like to listen to talk radio (NPR and the like), but most of that stuff is also available online.
I still have a fairly old car with an analog radio, and I haven't used it in at least 5 (but probably closer to 10) years.
Ditto for TV: the on-demand experience via Netflix (etc.) is just so much better than watching regular network or cable TV. Why would I subject myself to having to be in front of the TV at a particular time on a particular day to watch what I want to watch? Honestly, it baffles me that the standard cable TV model still even exists. Obviously the Comcasts of the world still make enough money off of it to make it worthwhile to sell, but it just seems like an entirely poor experience no matter how you look at it.
I have to agree with epivosism about the TV experience. Waiting for the digital decoder to catch an I-frame slows down browsing immensely and it's just a lot less fun. Tivos are better, because they have multiple tuners and can scan the channels above/below the one you're on, which helps a lot. But it's still not as good as pushing the button on an analog tuner's remote and getting a new signal in < 1/15 of a second.
Maybe your comparison of live vs streaming TV is skewed because it takes so long to start a new stream that it's hard to imagine browsing content directly, instead of trying to imagine the content from movie posters.
Streaming video doesn't need to use I-frames for sync, there's a technique called intra refresh they can use to limit the error. That also helps with the nasty "pumping" artifacts you get on static images.
Some codecs do reorder frames for efficiency though (H.264 can be 10 frames out of order but realistically only goes up to 3), which means you have to decode a few before displaying the start frame.
That said, I recommend listening to college radio wherever you are. I truly love the station from my hometown, WHRW broadcasting from Binghamton University. What a strange and beautiful melange.
As a counter-point, I also have an older car with an analog radio and 100% prefer to listen to it while on the road than to listen "to my own music from the phone" (tangentially, I don't even have my own music on the phone, nor a Spotify-like subscription).
I found out that listening to the radio gets you lots of excellent unknown-unknowns when it comes to music, especially if you listen to public radio (which, in my country, has almost no ads). For example, during my last trip I remember that tuning in to the arts-oriented public radio station got me the chance of listening to some great tango classical music which I would have never thought of purposefully listen to.
I'm 100% with you when it comes to TV, the cable signal broke or something (some decoding stuff, can't tell) a couple of years ago and I didn't bother calling in the TV cable guys to look at it and fix it. It is quite excellent. We do have Netflix, which we spend some time on but not that much lately, plus I do have a TV-sports station subscription which I use for major events (like the Olympics right now). For sports I have to be careful though not to visit any sports website that day in order not to have the results revealed too early (I generally do not watch the events live).
The mindless chatter of radio hosts is still enjoyable for me. After a long day of work, getting to listen to replays of which ever prank call they made in the morning while trying to merge through traffic is a nice way to unwind and begin the evening. Plus I appreciate their small attempts to get community together for events and do ridiculous giveaways.
Jeff Gilbert, of Brain Pain fame, is the only DJ I ever enjoyed listening to. He was always giving away tickets or albums via a contest. One of his contests was "what is your name?" The next week, he announced that was too easy, and he was going to amp it up with "spell your name". His fake commercials were great comedy.
I tracked him down one time, and asked if his shows were recorded. He said nope. I had made a few recordings of his shows, and sadly the rest is surely lost to history.
I can't count the number of times I had to stop in the middle of an interesting NPR story because I'd arrived at my destination and didn't exactly have time to sit around in my car until it ended. I never looked back from podcasts once I got into them.
I have one very good use for analog radio, which is the 50kW AM radio station that does traffic notices in my city every ten minutes. It's often more accurate and better described than looking at red lines on Google maps for traffic jams, and provides other unique local knowledge of construction, temporary detours, etc.
I don't think that's much of a contributor. It's just really easy now to bring your own music (or podcast, or audiobook, or...) to the car with you via your phone, and I suspect people generally prefer to listen to their own curated music (or music a streaming service has curated for them) rather than putting up with radio ads, songs they don't like, etc. Just about the only benefit to listening to the radio would be to stumble upon new music, but you can do that with streaming services too. I guess some people like to listen to talk radio (NPR and the like), but most of that stuff is also available online.
I still have a fairly old car with an analog radio, and I haven't used it in at least 5 (but probably closer to 10) years.
Ditto for TV: the on-demand experience via Netflix (etc.) is just so much better than watching regular network or cable TV. Why would I subject myself to having to be in front of the TV at a particular time on a particular day to watch what I want to watch? Honestly, it baffles me that the standard cable TV model still even exists. Obviously the Comcasts of the world still make enough money off of it to make it worthwhile to sell, but it just seems like an entirely poor experience no matter how you look at it.