I made nachos for my niece once. Put Doritos on a cookie sheet, smothered them in cheese, and put them in the broiler. She thought they were weird and broken because I didn't use the normal plain-style tortilla chips. Her mom made her a new batch the right way.
Young children have a tenancy to think that the rest of the world is exactly like their home, because that home is their world. Then when they experience the outside world things seem strange.
Like the above anecdote, I remember thinking it was weird when a neighbor made Taco Salad with Frito's instead of Doritos.
I remember how weird my grandmaa's house seemed all around when visiting. The food was different, the board games were different, it was all strange.
I think this anecdote is the same. Its not so much a case of the wisdom of the children, but just another example of a child not understanding that the entire world isn't like their sheltered existence. [I don't intend sheltered as a pejorative here.]
I'm sure there were plenty of other things on the trip that seemed broken, but none happened to be as evil as commercial TV.
While you're right in the general sense that children get surprised when they discover a world that isn't like their home, I firmly believe you're wrong in the applicability of that to TV.
Thanks to BBC iPlayer, we've had near-universal internet video on demand in the UK for some years now - and the other broadcasters had to copy to catch up. I largely stopped bothering with TV schedules; I just watch the programs at my convenience, from a menu of content - it's a far superior user experience in almost every way. In browsing UK profiles on dating sites, I've noted huge numbers of people saying they don't have TVs and just use iPlayer.
When I was young I used to react with incredulity to the idea that homes didn't have TVs and cars in the past. I remember the incredulity to which some children reacted when I took a photo on my film SLR and they couldn't see it on the back. Landline phones are already dying - children will react with horror that we used to ring a building and hope a person was in it.
And, within the next ten years, scheduled network broadcast TV will, to all intents and purposes, die. Rolling news and live sports have a reason to be live and I suspect will stay. Otherwise, I expect in 20 years time to be getting baffled looks from children to the idea that we used to have to wait to all watch a program at the exact same time and if we couldn't see it then we didn't see it. They'll all be have grown up with streaming VoD to tablets and TVs and anything else will feel as antiquated as a horse and cart.
I disagree, in that I also think it's a terrible experience to have to put up with commercials.
There's thinking something is bad because it's different, and then there's thinking it's bad because it SUCKS. I grew up on commercial TV. Now I can't stand commercials, and I think HULU is absolutely insane for not having a "no commercial" tier -- and for charging you and STILL running the commercials.
I would SO rather pay for my media than have commercials interrupt it. It's not a kid being uncomfortable with an unfamiliar situation; it IS annoying to have your program interrupted.
And I'm not even militant about advertising -- I don't run ad blockers, and I even click on ads from time to time. What I can't forgive is people wasting my TIME. I have a finite amount of that (and why am I posting on Hacker News..? sigh...), and people showing me ads for things that I have ABSOLUTELY no interest in is nothing but a waste of my time AND their advertising money. HULU has a little button where you can tell them an ad isn't relevant to you, but it seems as if they ignore it. What a waste...
That is true in general, but in 30 years time, do you think the majority of people will be using traditional TV schedules, or will it be watch on demand?
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
My fancy expensive name-brand digital TV takes a full minute to boot up from a cold start, longer than it took my tube based TV from the 1950s to warm up.
Once on, it takes almost a full second to change channels while it rebuffers the stream of the channel being changed to. This prevents quickly flipping through channels to see what is on.
As a result I just don't bother most of the time. Which is fine, I watch much less TV.
We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.
Here's a question for my fellow amateur economists: What happens to the quality of broadcast television when you increase the supply of broadcast channel-hours by a factor of 50 and you don't increase the supply of viewers at all?
I used to watch TV, like most people. Then, in the 1990's, the number of channels started increasing. More options, great. Twice as many channels did allow for more specialization, so maybe there were twice as many things I wanted to watch. When it reached four times as many channels, though, there were still only twice as many things I wanted to watch. Ten times as many channels, and now I wasn't sure if there were even twice as many as in the old days, because the budgets for the good shows were being spread among more shows to provide vehicles for more ads in all those new broadcast channel-hours.
Then, along came TiVo. Ah, TV was fun again. I could skim the cream. Couldn't imagine life without it. But as the years passed, the things I grabbed with TiVo were losing quality, too, seemingly bleeding budget to the shows "out there" that my TiVo and I ignored.
Then, my TV set broke. I assumed I'd have to get a new one quickly because, of course, everyone had to have a TV, right? I was sure I'd go crazy without it.
But I didn't. As time passed, I found I grew less motivated to get a new one, not more.
Well, after years of no TV, we finally got one a few weeks ago, so we wouldn't have to gather 'round the laptop for Netflix and slide shows of family vacations. The image is spectacular. But I can't believe what I'm so clearly seeing. They may call themselves The Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, History Channel, Food Network, Science Channel, or whatever, but they're all "Paid Programming", reality for rednecks, and pseudoscience for suckers, punctuated by screaming ads.
Even the islands of quality have clearly suffered extreme beach erosion.
But at least DVR technology has improved. Sorry, JUST KIDDING. You'd think that after years of Moore's Law, Comcast could make a cable box that didn't act as though I was waking it from a nap with each key press. You'd think that a product called an "HD DVR" would have an HD interface (wouldn't you?), instead of one with the display resolution of the lower half of a Nintendo DS. You'd think with so few needles hidden in the haystack of broadcasting, their interface would help you navigate the guide and find shows to watch, but apparently nobody at Comcast HQ has ever used Amazon to find a book.
Some validation: In the UK, the BBC has a pretty fixed budget, a pretty fixed (low) number of channels and a pretty fixed audience. They have continued to produce a high quality output of world-class educational and entertainment TV for a good chunk of the last century.
They also managed to build a free streaming service superior to Hulu, and a bunch of great websites.
It costs $230 per year ($19 per month). And there will never be any ads.
Actually the BBC had it's remit massively widened by the last government so that it had to fill sections of DAB, a large amount of Radio channels, Freeview, set up iPlayer and run a whole load of channels that aren't even targeted at the UK (such as BBC Persian), largely to meet the FCO's propaganda needs. Additionally, the dodgy dossier episode has emasculated and distorted large chunks of the BBC's programming leading to some completely bizarre side effects[1].
The BBC still does produce a large amount of quality progamming, but budgets and purposes have been affected. Top Gear for example used to be about cars but is now an entertainment show - a wildly successful entertainment show, but no longer something you'd seriously watch to get an idea of what cars to buy and what to avoid. The BBC is also responsible for the One Show, which one day will be recognised by the UN as a crime against humanity. There's also been considerable dumbing down of shows like the Apprentice and Dragon's Den over time, eschewing quality in favour of personalities and entertainment. The natural history unit still put out good documentaries, but even they're not entirely untarnished[2].
The quality of news has also suffered, particularly thanks to spin doctors in previous administrations, the simon gilligan dodgy dossier affair and other stresses on the BBC. When was the last time you saw a proper debate? The other week I saw Alastair Campbell jogging around forests, talking up the end of civilisation through alcoholic poisoning brought on by drinking at home, demanding minimum pricing as the only way out but completely ignoring the impact of the smoking ban as a factor in home drinking increases. It was a terrible attempt at a documentary and a case study in what's wrong with the BBC at the moment.
I do apologise for getting on my soap box about this, you didn't deserve it for pointing out the good stuff. Still, the BBC is not a perfect organisation and the amount of media it has to produce combined with political interference has meant that quality has dropped, perhaps not as much considering the volume of material it puts out, but it isn't immune.
You definitely make some fair points. The BBC is definitely not a perfect organisation, although most of its value comes from the fact that it is intended to strive to be one.
I'd certainly take commentary from the commercial UK press with a pinch of salt, though. They have a tremendous amount to gain from the BBC's demise.
But I don't think your second reference is really a fair criticism, and I think this was blown completely out of proportion in the UK. I certainly didn't feel that the series was "tarnished". After all, getting a camera inside an actual polar bear den in the arctic? I think that'd be somewhat invasive. Still a beautifully shot, enjoyable and educational series.
The BBC has also been responsible for all of Adam Curtis's documentaries, which are often excellent, and still get made (although the most recent one was perhaps not so good, but I digress).
Proper debate occasionally happens on Newsnight, although I think Jeremy Paxman's role has developed into some sort of entertainer of late.
They did spend a lot of time paying vast amounts to... Jonathan Ross.
About Adam Curtis: Watching, say, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" was fun. But I don't see any reason to believe that his other documentaries about subjects I know less about are any more trustworthy than that piece on computers.
I'm British, but I live in California, and I'm eagerly awaiting the day that I can pay monthly for BBC iPlayer (their streaming service). There are sketchy proxy services available, but it feels terrible to be paying a third party and effectively stealing the content.
On the other hand, they could easily provide paid service internationally but choose not to.
It's disingenuous enough when the word 'stealing' is re-purposed in discussions about copyright infringement, since it is very doubtful that every copy of a shared file resulted in an actual loss.
In this case, though, it seems easy enough to establish that the BBC has provided no way to compensate them for viewing their content from the United States. You might be "stealing" bandwidth in some sense, but I don't think it's fair to characterize the content as stolen in this case. The third party (VPN/proxy provider) is paid for network access just like you pay an ISP, not for the content itself.
"On the other hand, they could easily provide paid service internationally but choose not to."
I doubt it's easy, but they've been working on it for a while now and it should be available fairly soon.
I agree that it may not be fair to characterise the content as 'stolen'; I chose to use that term out of laziness. However, it's definitely not fair to consume the content without paying, either. It increases the financial burden on the UK license payer. Many of the BBC's shows are available to a US audience - you just have to buy them on Amazon, or stream them on Netflix.
This highlights some oddities of the UK TV licensing system. I can listen to BBC radio all day every day; I can use the BBC websites all day every day; I can watch BBC TV programmes on their iPlayer service (so long as the programmes are "catch-up" and not streamed live) and I do not need a licence.
I only need a licence if I watch tv broadcast live. Everything is defined in law; the devices used to receive (which include smart phones and computers) and the signals (which weirdly include for example French telly received via satellite). A person could hate the BBC and all its output and never watch it but still need to pay the licence fee.
Personally, I welcome the BBC but the enforcement of the licence has been sub-optimal in the past.
According to most people who follow TV closely, it's lead to a TV renaissance. Most people agree that, post-Sopranos, we've been living in a golden age of television with shows like The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, Community & Louie all being an order of magnitude better than what's gone before it. We're currently suffering from a glut of amazing television and if you haven't been paying attention, that's your fault, not TVs.
The tv shows are great, but the networks and broadcast model are broken. The whole argument about content is missing the point of the original article, which uses a clever slightly askew title to draw in readers.
I have a TV but I am not using it to watch cable broadcast. I have cable but just because it came in a stupid bundle with the internet. So the TV is there but it is used to watch Netflix, Youtube, Amazon and Hulu videos. It is used for games, skype (there is a camera attached to it), also used to browse pictures (since it has a better resolution and color profile than my laptop).
And I have noticed the same effect in respect to commercials. I cannot stand watching them and refuse to watch anything that suddenly interrupts and starts showing commercials (so I stopped using Hulu eventually as well because of it). Extended family members think I am crazy for being so "fussy" and I think they are crazy for putting up with annoying commercials.
Well in terms of economics what you're talking about is more specialization and niche audiences being served. HBO made itself into the network to watch smart television during the last decade. Right now that's less true as other networks figured out that people like smart things.
I'd say if you were not watching "The Wire" or "Six Feet Under" that you're missing out on something rather interesting. "The Wire" was unique partially because it was like a very long, very good movie in terms of quality and respect for the audience.
There's so much good television now that I don't have patience for the argument that TV is worthless. I don't turn on the television except to watch something specific but when I do I find the quality seems to get better year after year even with my favorite shows ending. More shows are willing to experiment and try to reach new audiences.
I won't speak to the shows on Discovery or whatever since they sound dumb to me but the shows with actual plot and characters are better than ever.
Going from 3 to 300 channels did not help. What really cut into their budget was a steady drop in viewership over time as new toys simply become more compelling than TV. Reality TV is simply what happened when keep cutting the budget.
PS: Seinfeld reportedly turned down a $5 million per-episode offer to continue the show for a 10th year. You can put on a full season of a reality TV show for that.
> Ten times as many channels, and now I wasn't sure if there were even twice as many as in the old days.
I dislike the fact that they make such a big deal about the number of channels available. DirectTV, for example, offers between 140 and 285 channels! Who would want to flip through that many channels?!
My dad has DirectTV. Sure, it has loads of channels. But once you subtract out all the PPV channels, the really narrow special interest channels (the marlin fishing channel) and the holy rollers there's only twenty or so you'd want to watch, depending on your interests.
You know TiVos are still around, right? I'm pretty happy with my Series 3 (lifetime subscription.) Just cloned and upgraded the hard drive in it so it should last many more years to come. Works fine with Comcast or any other cable provider--you just have to pay for them to provision cable cards. As a bonus, it also works fine with an antenna.
And this is why I groan when Samsung easily dismisses rumors that Apple is about to enter the TV space.
The UX around TVs is horrific right now, and people put up with it because that's how it is. There's enormous room for a dramatic UX improvement and it doesn't seem like the incumbents realize this.
IMO there is a strong correlation between the mobile phone landscape circa 2007 iPhone release and the television landscape today. Pretty much the same players, mostly vying for market share based on kitsch features... No true innovation.
Without having read the article I'm guessing Apple will introduce something along the lines of 'Siri TV' dispensing with the remote control as they did with the stylus but instead of substituting it with fingers we'll use another built in human control device that you don't have to lug around or keep track of, your voice. It gets around the issue of needing a keyboard where a TV is web-enabled in so far as you can easily search YouTube or Google for content by voice and it solves the dilemma of the lost or sitting on the other side of the room remote.
Siri is a game changer, but Apple's current implementation on the 4S isn't adequate. Whether it's bandwidth problems (due to bad coverage) or misunderstood commands due to noise, my experience with Siri has been mixed - it's a tough problem, but the results aren't there yet, at least for basics such as "(find|what is the|call) number of $mycityname water department". Strangely, the "speak text" feature seems to work pretty well almost anywhere... I have no problems editing contacts in the car.
I know what you are referring to, but I would say no. Not like that at all.
The ideal climate control interface should never even have to be looked at. It should just know what to do with your heating/cooling equipment to make your house comfortable.
A ideal TV interface should help you do a lot of things, and ideally be fast in the process.
(The article was down while I was writing this comment, but cable equipment and TVs drive me nuts.)
>A ideal TV interface should help you do a lot of things,
That's kind of a judgement call - there's nothing wrong with a minimal interface that does what you want it to and nothing more.
Kind of like Chrome as a browser - Google's big thing with its design was minimal and out of your way, so you can focus on the web page (the reason you're running the browser in the first place).
It's not just the UX that's broken for TVs, it's the pricing as well. Apple has strong success stories in pricing as well as UX - witness the original iPhone data plan ($20/mo for unlimited data + 200 texts from one of the top-4 providers? very good) or the iPad (both the device and initial data plan).
This is generally not an issue with your TV (unless you using an internal OTA HD tuner) but rather a poorly made cable box. Generally the cable box is responsible for channel changing, buffering for decode and other things. The stream is sent, uncompressed, to the TV over HDMI. Now your TV may be trying to do some processing on the HDMI signal but that should not effect channel changing at all as the TV isn't changing channels, its just processing a stream. If the cable box borks the stream in the process of changing channels, that is the cable box's fault.
This really stems from relative non-existent competition in the cable box industry. The consumer doesn't usually get to choose, its just whoever got the deal with Comcast or whoever.
The solution to this, which has been and will continue to be fought adamantly by cable providers, is allowing CableCARD/M-CARD support. It lets you plug in a little card that will allow any device to decode the cable stream.
Its not a full solution though, most people just don't care and the cablebox is usually 'free', why pay for something better?
I'm guessing that most of the lag is in decrypting the broadcast stream on the fly from nagra 3 or whatever the current version is. For sure in Ireland there was a big business in selling 'dodgy' boxes which could decrypt all channels when you had paid for only a basic subscription to cable. The encryption upgrade a few years ago killed all of them but made the cable boxes run as slowly as treacle when it came to epg or channel switching
Well, encryption is certainly part of the story. DVB encryption uses messages called ECMs to distribute the key that is used from the receipt of the ECM through to the receipt of the next ECM. The time between two ECMs is called the crypto period and is generally in the order of a few seconds. The average wait time to get an ECM on changing channels is of course half a crypto period.
The other major source of delay is video compression, as defined by MPEG. MPEG uses bi-directional compression in the time domain, which means that frames are sent out of order, which in turn means that they have to be buffered. Furthermore, a complete frame, known as an I frame, is only sent every 10 or so frames (it depends on the profile of the transmission channel - is it lossy or not for example). As the P and B frames are basically diffs from the base I frame, you can't decode an image until you have received an I frame. This too introduces a delay of typically 0.25 seconds, and is the reason why even unencrypted digital is slower for changing channels than analog.
>We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.
This drives me crazy. I have a computer hooked up to my TV (for the same reason as the OP, we basically watch just streaming or my digitized DVD collection) and every time I upgrade the display drivers, and sometimes just randomly, the display goes wonky and I have to fix it by hand. I don't have to do that with my computer monitor...
I think you're right, and it makes me sad. Who would prefer a distorted image over a non-distorted one, black bars or not?
The only explanation I have for this is sense of entitlement: "I paid dearly for each of these pixels so you better use all of them, no matter how bad the picture looks like!"
For the latter issue (and possibly slightly helping the first issue as well), switch your TV to 'game' mode. This is a low-latency mode that eliminates certain image processing in order to reduce the lag between signal and display. That should allow you to change channels faster.
No, it won't. Game mode reduces latency on the order of 2-3 frames, so a 0.1sec or less. The issue is that the tuner has to consume a complete data frame before it can start displaying, since it needs to get a keyframe for the codec to start working.
Hmm, I think I may have noticed that issue switching between HD channels at times, but SD channels maybe don't have the same issue?
I guess the time before a key frame appears can vary from up to a second to as low as 0, depending on when you happen to switch. It could be that a few frames, or 0.1 seconds becomes significant at that point, though you're right that it's likely to make little difference. I was not aware of the key frame issue until now, though; thanks for enlightening.
Basically the way modern video codecs work is that they only fully encode every Nth frame, where N is some smallish integer - 15 or 30 is common. From one keyframe to the next, they essentially encode a diff from the prior frame. The idea is that most of the regions of the frame have very little change over short timescales.
It's a tradeoff. More keyframes means faster seeking (when you seek in a video, it has to start from a keyframe too, for the same reasons), but larger data rates for the same image quality.
>have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.
For HDMI connections, this isn't the TV's fault (actually I think my TV doesn't even let you change the aspect ratio for HDMI inputs.) For SD component/composite, there is no aspect ratio information in the signal so the TV cannot determine it correctly and generally defaults to assuming 16:9 because most people stupidly prefer 4:3 content to be stretched to 16:9.
I'm not really sure what your trying to say but the stream is decompressed at the cable box or at the the over the air HD receiver.
HDMI 1.3 and 1.4 support up to 10.2Gb/sec bandwidth. The video is not compressed, the audio may or may not be. So why would you think that there isn't 720p x 60fps being sent to the tv?
The max video you can get through HDMI is 4096×2160p24 @ 24bit color completely uncompressed which is several times the bandwidth needed for 1280x720p60 @ 24bit color.
So your argument is that compression doesn't exist? Do you also listen to 128kb WAV files and argue that they are equivalent to 128kb MP3s?
> Why people think they can see full 720p worth of information is beyond me.
From a distance of about 8 feet on a TV about 50 inches in size, the difference between 720p and 1080p is visible to a person with 20/20 vision. The eye cannot perceive 720p worth of pixels at once, but in the small spot the center of a person's vision is on, pixel density matters a lot.
I would observe that in some sense this isn't just a "kid growing up with different tech gets it better than the adults" story. My wife and I both feel the exact same way about TV, in our mid-30s. We just have the historical perspective such that we don't have to ask "why". Also it's less cute when we ask why. But otherwise the same.
There's no age limit her. We're in our 40's, we watch a lot of series and movies, but we've rarely seen commercials in the past 10 or so years. Sometimes we start watching a show or movie more or less by accident, but that usually ends at the first commercial break.
Both of us find it hard to imagine people can actually tolerate watching TV that way, even though we've done the same for a long time.
But imho it's not so much TV that is broken. It's advertising. In today's world of on-demand personalized information, advertising has zero value. It's just noise. In SF movies we often see a world full of advertising everywhere, with lots of sound and motion. I like to believe the (near) future will be exactly the opposite: the advertising industry, no longer adding any value or generating any ROI, will collapse. Taking old school "broken" TV with it.
Agreed. It's simply a bad business model; you're the product, not the customer, etc. It also has a hugely distorted effect on content production, incentivizing shows to shoot for safe returns and broad appeal instead of monetizing hardcore fans of innovative niche programming. Put simply, I want businesses to care whether they have my money, not my eyeballs.
I cut most forms of advertising out of my life 7-8 years ago: no radio, no broadcast TV, and FlashBlock+AdBlock. Once you do so, it's hard to go back. (Although YouTube's trend towards more and more video ads is getting frustrating; I wish I could throw $20/month at YouTube Pro or something to make it go away.)
There's definitely quality non-profit radio stations (NPR affiliates, for example) depending on where you live. At worst you get the fund drives that are annoying (but understandable) for a week.
I listen mostly to NPR. Occasionally (pledge drives, reruns, shows I don't care for) I will turn to traditional radio to fill the void while driving (older car with no MP3 interface). It's amazing to me how many commercials they have! They feel interminable and it feels like at least half the channels have commercials playing at any given time. It really makes me appreciate KQED (local NPR station) and is the reason I support them.
Fortunately, I'm seeing more and more cars support USB interfaces. Now I can just load up a USB stick (they are so cheap) with my music and old episodes of This American Life and I'm good to go for hundreds of miles.
I've been listening to a commercial rock station on HD (KSAN fm on HD2), and it doesn't have any ads or announcements. There are silly "you're listening to station X and it's awesome" announcements every now and then, but that's about it. Everything else is just music.
I have no idea why they don't have any talking or ads, but i don't mind. I suspect it's because this is an offshoot station--there is the normal station, with more mainstream classic rock, talking and ads and then there is this "HD2" station with no ads and different music.
I really don't know why they run this station or even how it makes any money, but it's there and it's nice. So, for whatever reason, not all commercial stations have ads.
I listen to NPR occasionally, but I'm also not one of those people that wants my media chosen randomly. I usually consume NPR-type content in podcast form. (Although more and more podcasts are becoming advertising-driven... grrr.)
I feel like using AdBlock is unethical. You are using a sites resource, while depriving them of the revenue they need to provide you that resource. I vote with my feet so to speak, and stick mostly to sites with subdued advertising.
I disagree. No site has a right to force me to look at ads. And I don't have a right to force them to provide a service. Their offer is "come here for free, and we're hoping you'll look at these ads." They could change their offer. They could require payment. Maybe their service is something people will pay for and maybe not. If I don't pay and I don't look at ads, I have no right to expect the site to keep existing. But that's OK with me.
It's like a casino that sells cheap dinners. Clearly, they want you to eat the cheap dinner and lose much more money gambling. But you're allowed to eat it and leave. If they wanted to prohibit that, they could make the dinner available only to those who gamble. But if they haven't set that condition, you don't have to obey it.
All that said, I don't mind tasteful ads. I don't block ads on StackOverflow because they're interesting. I do block ads on Yahoo Mail (on the rare occasions that I log into my throwaway account there) because they're annoying and often offensive. If Yahoo says to me, "we're closing your account because you block our ads", I will say "that's fine."
There are services I'm willing to pay for and services I'll only use if they're free. Looking at ads is a form of payment. Some sites are worth it, and others aren't.
I found that turning off AdBlock has dramatically reduced my browsing of time-waster sites. It's also a sobering reminder of what the web looks like to most people, and it's not pretty.
I've been happy with Fastmail.fm, which has ad-free plans with reasonable storage for $20/yr, or decent storage and bring-your-own-domain for $40/yr. They also have business plans starting at $90/yr for 5 accounts, which is significantly less than what G charges.
disclosure: I have no affiliation with Fastmail.fm other than being a longtime customer.
This is my least favorite argument when talking about removing advertising from my life. Facebook and Google will simply do something else. Why is "ad supported" always considered the only business model?
What business model do you see for Google that doesn't involve advertising but would allow them to continue providing Gmail and search? Yes, they might conceivably charge $15/mo for a while. But then Comcast will come along and say, "Hey, here's a (mediocre) search and email service that we will bundle for 'free'!" and just like that, Google basically stops providing search and email (or provides it only to bundling partners).
>>>But then Comcast will come along and say, "Hey, here's a (mediocre) search and email service that we will bundle for 'free'!"<<<
I don't know about you, but I would pay for Gmail in a heartbeat. It's a great service. I can guarantee that Comcast would make something 1,000 times crappier and that I'd waste hundreds of hours of my life fighting with it.
In fact, I'd rather be paying for Gmail so that I'd be their customer and not their product. I'm happy that I pay for Pinboard because I know that it motivates them to please me and not someone else to whom they can sell my data. And I'm happy because my payment is an investment in the continued existence of a service I value.
You're asserting that Gmail and Google search aren't valuable enough for people to pay for them. If that's true, they shouldn't exist in a free market. But I don't think it's true.
The question is not what you or I would do, but what the general population would do. How many people consider gmail to be critical enough that they will pay for it?
> You're asserting that Gmail and Google search aren't valuable enough for people to pay for them. If that's true, they shouldn't exist in a free market.
The free market involves advertising. How much entertainment in paid for with advertising? Should none of that exist? Should, e.g., "How I Met Your Mother" be cancelled? I seriously doubt it would exist in an advertisement-free market.
I don't think advertising will go away, but will change. Companies will still want to attract new customers, i.e. advertise their wares/services. People who have other people's attention will probably still sell it. However advertising will change to cope with the new system.
Yup. I've been cable-free for about 2 years now, and I'd never go back. Since Comcast "discounts" cable internet (which, by the way, is my /only/ high-speed option besides 768kbit/sec DSL -- I have the 20mbit package or whatever they're selling it as these days) if you bundle it with basic cable, it only ends up being about $1.50 cheaper to NOT have basic cable. That said, basic cable is seriously not worth $1.50/month to me; it is worth literally less than nothing IMO. In fact, they should be paying me to watch their tripe. I'll take my payments in discounts to my cable internet, TYVM.
In some cases and at some times in the past it was actually cheaper to get the internet service when bundled with Cable TV service. In effect, some are or were somewhat paid to get it.
The cable company pays a per-subscriber charge for come channels (most notably ESPN). For others (like HSN), the broadcaster pays the cable company. If they can get you to sign up for basic cable they're still making a bit of money, since all the ones they pay for are in higher tiers.
If you have internet through your cable provider they already have to make sure the signal gets to your house and you're already in the computer, so adding you as a TV subscriber costs them nothing at all.
I never watch broadcast TV, but when my internet connection goes down it's a handy troubleshooting tool - when I flip the TV on and see car commercials it means there's no cable break.
Same here. I actually just participated in a Nielsen tv ratings survey, which asked about DVD players, VCRs and DVRs connected to the tv. No spot for Roku, Apple tv or Netflix enabled sets.
They did, and I did. I also talked to one of their support people, they said I could record the station/channel as netflix/apple tv. Who knows how that will be processed though...
Early 30's here, and 3 years without cable service. I get exceptionally aggravated when I'm at a a bar or a friends house watching something because I can't stand the interruption of commercials anymore. It's amazing how fast you get used to just watching something straight through and how annoyed you get when you can't. It blows my mind that in the age of Netflix other people can still tolerate commercial broadcasts.
The real issue with TV is that the audience is aging and eventually dying off.
TV viewership in hours per week is pretty stable because as boomers retire and become disabled and unable to do anything else, they watch more TV. Young people, like under 50, are turning away from TV.
Generation X and younger people have been falling out of love with TV for a long time. In my case I remember sharply losing interest in TV around the 1990s. Even around 2000 I felt insulted by advertising that is aimed at people who don't have money -- only medicare benefits they can spend and the hope that they can hire a ambulance chasing lawyer to make a big killing.
TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it.
Some day the last television viewer will die and the cable companies and networks will turn off the lights. Much like the music industry, the TV industry has been losing it's audience for a long time, and one day they will wake up and realize that their frog has been boiled -- and find somebody else to blame.
>TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it.
I am curious about what you mean by 'TV for kids'.
It seems to me that 'kid shows' have been pretty good since the early nineties (Ducktales, Animaniacs, Gargoyles, the DC Animated universe cartoons). More recently: Kim Possible, Spectacular Spider-Man, Samurai Jack, Sym-Bionic Titan, Transformers Animated, the Avengers and Young Justice have been phenomenal with respect to writing, voice acting and animation. This is one area where I'm a little envious of kids these days.
I grew up with cartoons made to sell toys. They get shows made to tell (good) stories.
And I would give credit to Disney and Viacom/Nickelodeon for trying to create entertaining sitcoms for kids. It can't be Spongebob and Phineas and Ferb 24 hours a day (although it sure seems like it).
You may think it's crap, but go back and watch the sitcoms you watched as a kid (Brady Bunch for me). It's even worse than you remember.
I certainly never see them on cable when I visit friends and family. I saw Kim Possible once a long time ago, and I also was really impressed with Teen Titans, enough to get the box set.
Are these on a channel they don't get? On AMZN or Netflix? Or do you just have to get them through BitTorrent?
There might be some good stuff, but it's never on. Spongebob Squarepants is always on... I wonder if there's a connection.
Kim Possible: Disney Channel
Sponguebob Square Pants: I think Nickelodeon
Teen Titans: I forget, probably Cartoon Network.
Honestly, the only way I'd ever go back to cable is if I had an a la carte system; and then I'd take Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, G4, Discovery Channel and their affiliates. I don't want/need the rest...
(also, haven't paid for cable in > 2 years. Netflix, Redbox, Vudu are my friends)
Oh I forgot about Teen Titans. If you liked that you'll definitely enjoy Spectacular Spider-Man, Young Justice, and The Avengers (they were all available on YouTube recently).
Also check out Sym-Bionic Titan, it's the Firefly of animated TV shows.
Which is extremely entertaining, by the way. Also, oddly enough, it has formed quite the internet cult following. I think it's quite the cute show.
It's annoying that my kids and I can only watch it in letterboxed SD. I've torrented HD versions (from an HD stream of the same channel, no less), and it looks great.
The lady in charge worked on the Power Puff Girls, and Foster's home for imaginary friends. I am not to surprised that she went on to other quality projects(especially since it wasn't just her but a number of people on MLP are veterans of those shows.)
Those are good, yes! But there's also a lot of survivor bias there. Sturgeon's Law still holds: for every individual Freakazoid! there's a posse of Dumb & Dumber (yes, real: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_and_Dumber_(TV_series) ).
You are clearly not watching excellent kids shows like Dinosaur Train, Sesame Street, or Word Girl. Of course, these are all PBS show... interesting. We don't get cable and only sometimes catch an episode of something else on Netflix, so maybe you're right, but PBS is still putting out top notch stuff.
>Back when he was young (three) I could never get him to sit still in front of that stuff.
Have you considered that it may not be the quality of the TV, it may be him? Some kids don't want to consume, they want to do. It's not bad, but trying to get a kid like that to watch TV will be hard no matter how good it is.
You're right though, that is a tough age. Part of the problem is that kids in the 9-12 range don't want educational. You can grab DVDs of the old Batman animated series or similar, but if you want educational you are stretching. Most local stations have to purchase e/i programming themselves to meet their requirements, so the production qualities tend to reflect "local budgets". There is some good stuff out there (Aqua Kids used to be pretty good, but it's been a couple of years) but it's so hit and miss. If you think what you've got is bad, look through the catalog sometime and see what your station rejected...
That's one of the reasons I like PBS so much. He could still do Arthur, WordGirl, Cyberchase, The Electric Company or Fetch! (which is not my favorite show, but I bet a nine year old would like it). If he's not digging those, have you tried Nova ScienceNow? That one has the added benefit of Neil Degrass Tyson.
> Generation X and younger people have been falling out of love with TV for a long time.
This is definitely not the case. People still like watching television and consume those programs, but now people are finding other options besides cable to fill that role, such as streaming and digital purchase (and piracy).
I don't think it is fair to make the comparison between TV and music industries. While they are both being slow and TV is getting outmoded by the internet listening to music is not dying. They are both media industries and we are just seeing the shift from monolithic distribution channels to a more federated internet distribution model. The audience is still there, they just aren't facing the TV set anymore. Their eyes are glued to a monitor instead. :)
It's not fair to compare TV 2012 or Movies 2012 with Music 2012, but a comparison with Music 1983 might be fair... And of course, the future trajectory may be quite different.
The movie industry, for one thing, is intelligent about pricing. In particular, if you want to see a movie you've got a choices that range between a 3D theatre ticket, $40 collectors editions, usually several Blu-Ray and DVD editions with different features, $5 bargain disks as well as movie channels, Vudu, Netflix, Redbox and other things.
Now, in the long term it's an interesting question if "TV" is the same medium if you watch it going by on a set or if you watch it prerecorded on your own schedule. There are certainly forms of "TV" like cable news and the weather channel that will dry up and blow away in the digital transition.
> TV viewership in hours per week is pretty stable because as boomers retire and become disabled and unable to do anything else, they watch more TV. Young people, like under 50, are turning away from TV.
Proof?
>Generation X and younger people have been falling out of love with TV for a long time
Proof?
>TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it.
Proof?
>Much like the music industry, the TV industry has been losing it's audience for a long time, and one day they will wake up and realize that their frog has been boiled -- and find somebody else to blame.
I don't enjoy feeding trolls often, but I've to ask: would you ask a US WWII veteran for `Proof?' if he were to exclaim, as a matter of fact, that "[his] generation hated the Axis powers before 1941"?
Asking for citations is a poor attempt to discredit another's claims. Why don't you form your own counterargument instead?
It's not really TV, it's TV networks that are broken. Hulu (and other online archives) may be even more irritating than broadcast TV. It's difficult to find what you want; you are hit by download limits in the middle of a program; there are still commercials, and it's the same ones over and over and over, and the repetition can drive you nuts; browser crash means starting over sometimes, or if you can go to where you left off, you have to endure skipped commercials.
I have an expensive cable package. But I am also a frequent Bittorrent user because the process of finding and watching is far preferable to the online services, and sometimes the cable on-demand service. As a result, I often "steal" via Bittorrent, content I've already paid for. Not sure whether I'll keep that expensive cable package much longer.
My kids are older and know what commercials are, but they are growing up knowing that TV networks (via cable or online) are just not usable. They have now, and will expect in the future, a large selection of content, and instant delivery with no interruptions.
Hold on ... Hulu has download limits in the middle of watching a program? I've watched Hulu from 5 AM till 5 PM almost uninterrupted, the only interruption is between shows they will say "You've been watching for 3 hours, are you sure you don't want to take a break?". That repeats every two hours or so.
Yes, the commercials can be grating, and are still annoying but I think that is a small price to pay for streaming my content when I want. Also they are not NEARLY as long as the commercials on TV and if a TV commercial is really loud (I'm looking at you eHarmony commercial) and you complain they will actually do something about it.
Hulu may have its limitations because of stupid studio rules, but overall the experience of watching content online with Hulu is pretty straightforward and easy.
I really wanted to like Hulu. I even paid for Hulu Plus so I could watch it on my PS3 and get access to the larger library. But on my PS3, Hulu streaming was flakey. And then the commercials. The commercials ended it. After watching on Netflix, I just couldn't deal with Hulu's commercials. They're nearly as grating as cable TV, and for some strange reason they always seemed to be inserted 5 seconds away from where the content was written for them to be inserted: music, COMMERCIAL, finish music, fade through black.
I would happily pay for Hulu Plus Plus, where the extra plus means I pay more and they turn off the commercials. But I'm unwilling to pay for Hulu Plus at all.
I was looking at using Hulu Plus to augment my Netflix subscription, but when I found out that even the paid version had commercials I changed my mind.
At one point they were experimenting with a "Watch one long commercial at the beginning then no interruptions" thing, which was fantastic, but I guess they nixed that, because I haven't seen it the last few times I've been on Hulu.
I've had almost identical conversations with my child in the past, which is not surprising since we do not have cable or an antenna. Who would easily accept the broadcast model who was not brought up with it?
Perhaps more interesting is my older brother (approaching retirement age), who doesn't stream content but consumes through cable. Even when watching currently playing shows he records to DVR and delays watching long enough that he can skip commercials.
It seems to me that the old broadcast model was always awful, but it used to be the only thing going. The first hints of its eventual demise really first appeared with easy access to movie rentals and home video recorders.
The behaviour of your brother is one I see amongst my friends & I. We routinely watch sports on tape-delay (particularly NFL which has an amazing ability to take commercials right when things are getting exciting) just so we can skip through commercials.
My wife and I try to do the same. We like to try to time things just right so that we could still watch the ending in real-time. Starting a football game at halftime usually works pretty well.
This year, I watched all NFL through the RedZone channel. It increased the amount of games that I could follow, but eliminated all the commercials. It does take some of the suspense out of it though, since you don't really get a good flow for a single game. It also helped that I recently moved to CA from Indy and got DirecTV Sunday Ticket to watch Colts games. That was before we knew how bad their season was going to be, so I wasn't too invested in following particular games.
I have given up on most TV - especially cable TV. Almost 3 years ago my wife and I moved and decided to not startup cable TV. I setup an antenna and run MythTV, Boxee and anything else that will run on a browser + flash. I run a virtual machine for Netflix. When we started this experiment, I thought we might go running back to cable. What we discovered is that there is a ton of content available. The Mythbox nicely removes commercials.
When people hear that I don't have cable, many are confused that I can receive HD programming over the air. The cable companies have done a brilliant job confusing the public into believing that you must have cable to watch TV and/or access HD content.
We couldn't be happier. I challenge anyone to give up paying for cable tv. Good luck!
Good on you! Having spent some time in hospitals with loved ones recently, I think broadcast TV (like cable) will continue to thrive until someone does a fantastic job of making a "channel lineup" application for on-demand media.
I tried to set up Netflix for someone who was bed-ridden and the fact that the nurse has to keep going in and selecting the next movie after the previous one is done is just agonizing. I love Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo but at least for people with accessibility issues, "what's on" is still more convenient than "what do I want to watch".
Almost all my big screen watching is through Roku of mainly Netflix streaming. I cut cable over a year ago and very rarely watch network TV (NFL football games are main thing I watch over the air).
I feel like the young girl every time I'm at a friends house and trying to navigate whatever cable/sat guide they have. Seriously, it's 2012 and I'm paging through this endless list of "channels" labeled by NUMBER and a CALLSIGN? 1006 WKOW-HD. 12.1 ABC. Try to watch Jeopardy and get assaulted with denture paste, hearing aides, and adult diaper commercials! What the heck is going on? It is truly astonishing how bad the UI for these set-top boxes is, combined with the process of finding out what and where the correct ESPNx channel (HD or not HD) is to watch the game.
Huge potential for serious changes in this industry. I don't like to throw such a vague word like "app" around, but that is the future. ESPN will have an app that will deliver their content in the best way. The closest thing I've seen to this is the work Major League Baseball is doing on mobile and TV. They're able to provide the video/audio, but augment it with other datastream. For sports this makes so much sense.
The best app I've seen for this is HBO Go. It has a huge back catalog of HBO content and a revolving set of movies. It pairs great with an iPad. But, in order to get it, you still need a cable or satellite subscription (and HBO).
Absolutely agreed - phenomenal. I also have enjoyed the additional content they sometimes add for HBO Go users.
Showtime has started doing this thing where you logon to their website while the show is premiering to do/see something but I've never done it because I DVR Showtime shows. Showtime had a press release that they were going to launch their own version of HBO Go but I've not see anything.
I'm excited. I think premium channels like this are going to be the change.
I could imagine a similar and opposite article, "Netflix is broken", written from the perpective from an older person instead of a younger one: Why do I need to sign in? Why do I have to choose something to watch – why doesn't it just let me start watching immediately? Why is it so hard to change channels? Why do I have to watch things on my small computer screen instead of my large television screen?
Why do I need sign a cable TV contract? On a paper? Requesting some people to make a draft and fetch me it with a decoder, 3 day before I can actually watch anything? What's a decoder anyway? Why do I need to BUY it? Even though I already have a brand new TV? What do you mean a GOOD decoder is 2-3 times more expensive? And it is forever bound to a certain cable provider? Why, it's just some generic hardware? Why is it SD? Do you aware that we have FullHD stuff for a decade already? Oh, you do have HD? 2-4 channels out of 130? And my decoder doesn't apply? What, even GOOD decoder doesn't apply? So I need this card which is more expensive than GOOD decoder? And card only fits about 20% TVs on the market?
Beatrix isn't the customer. She's the product being sold. TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things.
Hopefully young Beatrix is an outlier like her parents and she'll never get hooked. But it could be that, like most adults, she'll get used to sitting there through the commercials, wasting 8 minutes of her life to get 22 minutes of entertainment. Plus, of course, whatever she wastes on buying things that she doesn't need.
>TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things.
That's exactly what's happening, though. Most adults don't sit through commercials any more. The percentage of people who don't get their shows through the internet and don't skip over commercials with a DVR is something like 33%. I'd bet my last dollar that demographic skews elderly in a major way, too.
When visiting DVR-using friends, I see them watching some commercials (especially, if it's interesting, the first one of a group). And I know that some people who get their TV over the Internet end up seeing ads (e.g., Hulu, YouTube, network sites).
So I suspect that a fair number of ads still get watched, but I can't quickly find any data on how many versus past years.
The problem with tv for the past 50 years or so is that it has encouraged a passive relationship between culture and its consumers. It kills conversation, discourages activity, its one-sidedness is bad for people. The internet has come to the rescue, allowing people young and old to be more active participants in their own culture. Hopefully this unidirectional mode of content delivery will die off completely within in the next 50 years.
I think everyone agrees that commercials are annoying but I don't think TV is broken at all. After all, most of the content we stream with other means originated as TV shows or Hollywood movies.
So the real question is, once the current younger generation gets older and everyone switched off their cable, how will the production of quality content be financed, other than per-view fees?
When I was a kid in Germany there were three channels, all publicly financed, to a large extent via a per-household radio/TV fee. TV was only broadcasting for a few hours a day. The overall quality was very high and commercials were in a block between shows. I'd love to go back to that model but I doubt the general public would agree.
>So the real question is, once the current younger generation gets older and everyone switched off their cable, how will the production of quality content be financed, other than per-view fees?
This is it. The same as music has been doing for years. It's not like there's not an existing model for this, direct to video movies have existed for a long time (though they were generally considered "low quality" and thus didn't get theater time). Netflix is already in the original content business and I think we'll see more of that. The problem then becomes the translation of content silos to the Internet. I have a Netflix subscription because it has the most stuff. I have no intention of getting a subscription to Hulu Plus or the myriad of content producers individual plans (the future HBO.com, AMC.com, etc.) Hopefully they can find a way to aggregate pay-per-view into a consistent online platform.
My nine year old has never been entertained by cable or broadcast TV.
On broadcast TV there is nothing but the e|i junk that is so unwatchable that the category must have been invented by the author of "four arguments for the elimination of television".
On cable there's an amazing number of channels, but the only sure things are Spongebob Squarepants (yuck!) and those live action dramas by Disney about impossibly rich teenagers who have no discernable problems.
At least kids in Japan get to watch animated shows about cute girls who beat up the bad guys that are formulaic but have a level of art, writing, and voice acting that make American TV programming look like the stuff I make with a cheap camcorder.
It would make me a proud parent to know that my kid doesn't know what a cable commercial is.
Slightly off topic, but the messages, subliminal messages, and methods of targeting these commercials do are sickening. I think some of them and their authors should be tried for criminals.
How is it okay that, for example, jewellery commercials basically attempt to trick female minds into defining love and levels of love by the metals and rocks their loved one purchases for them? How is a 5 year old supposed to know better?
Advertising needs to be turned upside in the DVR/Digital streaming era. Imagine if the show you watched ran ad-free, and instead simply had a 'Sponsored By' section on the shows start page (basically a newly designed 'landing page' for each tv show). Then we viewers would simply choose to watch the ad's when we/if we wanted. And even if we didn't watch an ad, just seeing a Tide logo on that page would cause some to buy their product ('cool they sponsor Family Guy...' for example).
The thing that advertisers don't seem to understand is that we consumers are actually interested in the right ad's. I would choose to watch the new trailer for Game of Thrones - Season Two for example. Or an add for the new Honda Element, if I were shopping or just curious what the new model looked like.
All the sponsored by ads could be google-style customized to the viewer, and the view-rate would likely be higher than it is now where I DVR skip pretty much all ad's since there is no easy way for me to know what is being shown.
On top of all that, advertisers would be able to know exactly how many people were actually watching their ads. They could even add in interactive 'like/dislike' voting to further determine the effectiveness of the ad.
I thought of all this 5-6 years ago when DVR's really got popular. It seemed to me an obvious way to 'evolve' TV, and I'm pretty surprised something like this hasn't already happend. I guess it's expecting too much from an industry that is used to just shoveling ads at us from all angles, the idea of 'choice' is probably pretty scary/imposible for them.
I'm baffled every time I'm watching broadcast TV and see an ad for something I would never in a million years purchase...and if the advertiser just had a couple pieces of info about me would never bother showing me that ad. I guess this will eventually come with IPTV and ad platforms for broadcast that more closely resemble targeted advertising online. The sheer inefficiency of shotgun approach broadcast advertising is crazy to me.
For all the folks that still watch broadcast television (I do): starting in December 2012, the "CALM Act" takes effect, restricting the use of louder than normal commercials.
I act just like that four year old now when I'm around a "normal" tv. It had been long enough that I decided to simply go in assuming that tv must be fixed by now, and I can pick a show from a menu, netflix/hulu style, and get what I want immediately.
I went through the motions, and had an entertaining exchange with my sister. Something like:
Me: "I just selected 'Modern Family'. Why is 'Modern Family' not playing now? I just see a short description and no 'play' button."
Her: "Don't you remember how tv works? It's not on right now, this is just a tv guide"
Me: "I guess tv is worthless. I hope nobody paid any money for this"
I wasn't being deliberately obtuse. I was genuinely surprised at how much it sucked, and I really do not understand why so many people pay so much money for it.
Until a few years ago I didn't really mind ads - I would happily sit through them until my show came back.
Then in mid-2009 gocompare.com launched their ad campaign (with Wynne Evans singing.) They pushed it really hard - it was on nearly every show on every channel. The song was so irritating that I got into the habit of muting the TV during the commercial breaks.
If I had been a TV network executive, I would have refused to run those ads. They are so awful that they encourage viewers to avoid ads, and I'll bet it has decreased revenue from other advertisers.
Broken as if the internet has no commercials? TV exists cause it's simple: streams of stories at the press of a button. No hours of effort to find good content among the trash. I don't think the commercials are the issue.
It really does take hours to find something worth watching if you don't already know what you want to watch.
I do not watch much TV to begin with, but when I do, I will load up Netflix and see if anything catches my eye. Most times I'll spend 30 minutes looking for something and then simply give up and move on to something more interesting. Having access to even more content just makes the problem worse, not better.
Sometimes I'll catch wind of good programming recommendations from others, but those sources are easily exhausted. The internet does a much better job. I can just turn up here and I'll probably find at least 50% of the links interesting at any given time. TV needs something like that.
Seriously. Someone make a hacknews/reddit-style discovery system for TV. Channels become subreddits. If you finish item one, item two starts automatically.
I still think traditional TV is capitalizing on the lack of good (or overabudance of bad) recommendation engines online. Social recommendations are blurry, popularity is, well, a popularity contest and movie reviews are so subjective. Even with well-intented efforts like boxee you have (a) an anavoidable pile of juvenile nonsense and (b) too many options (and that's a problem). TV offers a simple, dumb stream of mediocre-but-curated programming. Maybe we should have that for online video too.
(btw that illegal torrent u suggest is still going to take hours to download)
> (btw that illegal torrent u suggest is still going to take hours to download)
I think you need to double-check your math. I just found a Bluray rip of the Hurt Locker on a torrent site that is 3.78 GB. Using my 24 Mbps fiber connection ($55/month, in America), it would take:
Hardly the "hours" that you suggested. And considering that the ads for a typical movie will run for much longer than 21.5 mins, I'd say it's not that long at all.
Torrents are typically the fastest things on the web because you're pulling from so many sources; in effect, a peer to peer CDN cluster :)
Also, there are plenty of fly-by-night sites that have full episodes of most shows that people care about. I won't link to any here, but just Google "watch full episode" and you'll see what I mean.
>"Also, what about the illegal factor?"
As long as gullible sheep continue to finance shows by paying to watch ads on cable, I'll continue to not waste my life watching ads or waiting for them to play what I want to watch. To hell with imaginary property.
Then i suppose you also give your work away and your house doesnt have windows or doors, and your life is not really yours alone (all property is imaginary, it's just a convention).
What else would ownership be but a convention? We’re just monkeys in shoes. Our arbitrary territorial and food rituals are certainly complex, but that makes them no less arbitrary. And a lock, as they say, only stops an honest man—one who plays by convention.
> out of curiosity are you getting the full 24Mbps when downloading torrents?
Yes, I use a private torrent site that I've been a member of for more than 5 years. Speed is never an issue.
> Also, what about the illegal factor?
As I said, I use a private torrent site. The risk is minimal when most anti-piracy organizations will be focusing on low-hanging fruit like public torrents and file hosting services (such as Rapidshare and the now-defunct Megaupload).
Nobody's mentioned tiling? And then also tiling. And then tiling and more tiling, and then the good part is coming up and--tiling. And here's the big play and it looks like they might just make a touchdow--tiling.
TV might be broken, but the inability of a child to focus on something for more than a few minutes at a time isn't the best evidence. It definitely brings up some interesting things to think about, though.
First, while the attention span of adults is normally quite a bit better than that of kids, the digital age is eroding our ability to focus on one thing http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312119/Faceb.... While this may be a temporary trend as we adapt to the information overload the internet can provide, I think it's fairly safe to say that people 10 years from now will be far less likely to sit patiently watching TV than people 20 years ago.
The most obvious implication from this may be that commercial advertising, rather than TV in general, is going to need to adapt. I imagine part of the reason why people under 30 are cutting the cable in increasing numbers is because they aren't willing to sit through loud, irrelevant commercials in order to watch something they don't actually want to watch. The tolerance of the consumer for TV style advertising is shrinking proportionally to the consumer's attention span. This should be good for subscription services like Netflix, and would be good for HBO/Showtime if they didn't for customers to pay for cable/sat in addition to their services.
I paid for Directivo for 10+ years, long before HDTV. $100+/month.
Now, I have a Samsung 55" LED with a beautiful picture that I bought online for cheap. I plugged an older Macbook Pro into it via hdmi. Couch Potato, Sick Beard, $7/month lifetime unlimited usenet account from a thanksgiving special, mplayer extended to play it all. I haven't seen a commercial in years. As the author says, if it isn't online, I don't watch it.
It's unfortunate that windows media center hasn't caught on in a bigger way. I use it on my casual home theater and my larger more serious home theater. I have a channel master 4221 antenna that feeds into 2 HD Homerun tuners and clearQAM feeding into a couple more. This gives me the ability to record/watch 4 channels at once from any networked media center in the house. Media center has a fantastic interface that aggregates all the channels available across all tuners and hides the complexity. It allows you to easily record series and find shows across any of the tuners, all while looking beautiful. In addition to the great tv viewing experience, there is the wonderful media browser addon that beautifully indexes your digital movie collection and plugins like showanalyzer to automatically skip commercials in recordings. With TMT 5, I get a blu-ray player built right into media center too.
I honestly could not imagine a better setup. The only issue is that the initial setup is way too hard and time consuming. But the result can't be beat right now.
That channel master 4221 is an AWESOME antenna. I didn't have a car when I bought mine, so I had to walk with it for 2 miles to my apartment. I set it up in the closet (which is completely not recommended... multipath, etc., etc.) and still got unreal picture quality on my computer.
And this is why this form of media is losing. Because it's worse, and any 4-year old will notice. Especially a 4-year –old. More and louder commercial won't fix the problem, it will just keep the next generation even further away. Like black-and-white silent films, it lacks basic features that the new generation is taking for granted, around user control, choice and interactivity.
Very interesting anecdotes, but I don't see how it shows that TV is "broken", other than OP's daughter thinking it was broken when first exposed to commercials. Additionally, Hulu / Hulu+ and streaming shows directly from a network's exposes you to as many commercial breaks (albeit shorter) as watching a show on cable.
In these contexts "broken" is referring to the general collapse of assumptions and desires underpinning a business model as new forms of communication become prevalent.
Think of newspapers and how their business model broke when Craigslist wiped out their classified ads market.
Tomorrow, Hacker News will be discussing a story about a 14 year old boy who discovered that some rats prefer raspberries.
If you'd like to discuss something else, try using a different web site, that will also be discussing one and only one story.
TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed.
People buy devices to mask these problems, but they really don't solve them.
Hulu is slightly less broken. Netflix Instant Watch is even LESS broken.
> TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed.
And that is why we have a DVR. It lets you pause, rewind, watch something you missed, and the networked one in my bedroom has every episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse ever broadcast for my son to choose which one he wants.
The only "live" TV that we ever watch are sports.
The problem isn't that TV is broken. There are still good shows being made that audiences want to see.
The problem is that some people still think of TV as something that has to be watched in the moment. With DVRs the subscription is less about delivering live TV and more like a fire-hose of media. The DVR captures what you want, and you can ignore the rest. Hell, I have satellite service, and because I can get east-coast feeds, I often am able to record and watch shows much earlier than people with cable.
The upcoming "Hopper" DVR from Dish Network solves this problem in an ingenious way.
They have a feature called "Primetime Anytime" that records the entirety of primetime (8-11pm) programming on the 4 major broadcast networks (NBC, Fox, ABC, CBS) for the last 8 days.
That means you can turn on your DVR and watch anything that aired in primetime in the last week.
The way they achieve this is by silently recording the networks in the background. The DVR has a 2TB hard drive, of which about 500GB is allocated to this feature, I believe.
(Note that doing it this way also absolves Dish of having to negotiate with the networks a la Hulu.)
Right, if you miss it, you miss it. It has other flaws too - I have shows recorded on my DVR from last summer that I thought I would watch. They've sat at the bottom of the list since then.
But, when you take the subscription for what it is - the best delivery vehicle a wide variety of HD content - then it isn't bad. You just have to live with the limitation. It's not like streaming content online isn't without it's limitations.
If I missed an episode of "Top Shot" for example on History, I still couldn't see it on Hulu until the next day.
TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed.
Not sure your market or cable company. But in Berkeley (and SF) with Comcast under on-demand I have a section called "TV Shows", the "All Shows" section lists about 300 TV shows.Each with about 8-20 episodes. All On-Demand all with rewind, pause etc. The exception is it won't let me FF through the limited ads embedded in the streams.
Assume this was all current content. How much would you pay for this service? With Ads? Without? Because its not anywhere near the $10 price you're paying now for Netflix or Hulu.
I've got no problem paying $40 for a season pass of a show I like on iTunes. I think I'd be happy to pay that via Comcast too, if they had a decent interface. (I am however _not_ willing to pay $9.99 to watch a 5-year old movie "on demand". Not worth it)
The part that the cable companies don't get is that customers don't want a buffet. They want a la carte.
And they want pricing that is related to the value of a movie or a show. I don't mind paying premium price for something that's still out in theaters. But once that's gone, drop the price, will ya?
Really? I think the 40 dollar pass is outrageously expensive. If I subscribe to just 2 shows, I've already gone over what I pay for cable. Sure, it's really nice to be able to watch it whenever I want, but 40 dollars is nuts.
It's not ideal that you have to use a mishmash of services to get what you want when you want it. But there are multiple delivery mechanisms for a lot of popular content.
How does this mean that TV is broken? Because you can't get instant access to every show ever created? That's not a TV problem, that's a you problem. That says nothing about TV. It does point to a weakness in distribution, but there are a variety of ways to get legally content these days: over the air, cable, satellite, online streaming (Hulu, Netflix), online purchase (Amazon, iTunes), buy or rent a DVD of a season of a show, etc... all of which can be played on a traditional TV.
If you want to make an argument, argue that distribution is broken. TV as a content production industry is still doing okay.
BTW - that was a good episode of the West Wing. While it was all done in flashbacks, you get to see the history of how people came to work in the West Wing. Donna's character particularly got more interesting after that episode. But you probably don't want to watch just that episode, it was the second half of a two-parter.
...the content production industry is not doing okay, because it's working "for hire" for people who are almost exclusively interested in advertising revenue.
If the people who produce TV shows had good contracts, they could also sell me their content directly - with no middle men. Or at least, different middle men. There's no technological reason they couldn't.
I agree that you're right that it's a distribution problem.
But there's a supply of video, and a demand for video, and people standing in the way of that market. The people standing in the way are eventually going to go away.
...that's my belief, anyway. Until then, when I have money and want to watch a show, but can't, TV is broken.
Agreed. In a world where the average American watches over 4 hours of TV a day I find it hard to infer a broken system from an article by someone who doesn't even have basic over-the-air stations hooked up.
Now that's not to say that the cable industry has it all figured out, or that there isn't room for improvement. But they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves if you assume their job is "get people to watch more tv."
Yes it is. The problem with TV is that advertisers have a lot more money than you do, so advertisers get to dictate how TV works.
I'm looking forward to a world where people produce content and I give them money to watch it. It works for the porn industry, so why not everything else? (Probably the same reason why our cell phones don't treat voice and data as the bits they are. There is more money to be made for the middlemen by offering "value add" instead of a "dumb pipe". And there's one thing middlemen do well: keeping themselves alive at the expense of everyone else.)
In the mean time, I'll just pirate everything. That cuts out the middleman!
So what happens when a kid who is used to TV goes to watch Netflix and the stream gets interrupted (like we all know it would on a typical hotel wi-fi network). If you've watched videos online before, you know it's just buffering, but the tv-oriented kid would do the same thing as this guy's kid did: ask if it's broken, or why we stopped it.
I'm not saying that there are no problems with the way TV is presented, but to raise a child in a relatively TV-less environment, marvel at their confusion over how it works, and then come to the conclusion that TV is broken... that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.
My 5 year old had a much easier time understanding that Netflix needs to buffer or downgrade sometimes than why there are advertisements on television.
I think that's because Netflix buffering has an explanation that directly relates to the activity itself, whereas the explanation for advertisements is a lot more abstract.
In the last week or so, it's become clear that Google is planning to offer some sort of IPTV service over its fiber network in Kansas City when it comes online later this year. [0] It will be interesting to see how disruptive their offering will be. Even just selling programming a la carte would be a huge improvement over what the cable companies offer, but I have a feeling Google will (eventually) do more than just that.
This sounds stupid but I always thought there weren't commercials for channels that you actually pay for? That the advertisements were to compensate for channels that didn't cost anything?
I haven't really watched tv since the mid 90's and never in the USA so I might miss something obvious here. But where I lived, regular channels were broadcast nationally over the air and they had commercials. I always thought the popularity of cable/satellite subscription was based on you getting rid of the commercials, not paying for seeing more commercials on more channels?
Unfortunately, that's incorrect. The cable channels, as mentioned upthread, early on promised "since we can restrict access, unlike broadcast, we can just charge people and we won't show ads." That's not true in 2012. It is extremely, extremely rare to find television without frequent and intrusive advertising. HBO has less toxic advertising practices and better content, which is why you see them mentioned so often in this context.
My 3 yr old kids had exactly the same reaction to a nearly identical scenario. Though, we subscribed to cable TV after my father in law threatened to not come visit any more if he couldn't watch his live sports with the clicker...
Publishers/networks are broken. The industry needs something to happen to it like Steam, then Facebook, and finally Apple did to video game publishers. Take the (old) middle men out of the loop. Let content producers "sell" directly to consumers.
Some people have mentioned the cable boxes are the issues but no one has mentioned Scientific Atlanta by name. If I'm not mistaken they have been producing horrible boxes for multiple carriers for years!
As a Cablevision/Optonline subscriber, I find that using their iOS app is way ahead of using the actual cable box interface.
Is it IR that just makes the interface slow or is there some other hardware constraint that?
Most cable set tops have dedicated decryption, video/audio decoding chips so the main CPU available for running the UI is very weak by design. Cisco & Motorola make these set tops pretty much by spec of what the big cable providers want. They don't want a general purpose platform and truly just don't understand why they might want a better user interface. Only in the last year or so have these set tops started to get faster but they are still gimped by the guide software the cable providers use. They usually opt for consistency over quality. The same guide that runs on a 2012 set top needs to work on a 1997 set top.
Older people might think Netflix is broken, but the fact is they'll be dead soon and with them goes their opinion that the old way of television was better. That being said, most of us probably know both sides of the argument pretty well, and I've got to say that I like the newer, streaming versions of television better.
Thanks for posting this, and thanks everyone for upvoting it. It's even better the 4th time it's made it to #1 on hacker news. I gained some new insight into how TV sucks and the Internet is awesome.
i can completely relate. it is a legit challenge to describe advertising-funded media. there was once a concept of an editorial firewall, which seems cute in an antique sense of the word, possibly believable circa 1971. advertising, for one reason or another, seems to have the effect of shaping whatever it funds towards a decreased intellectual stimulus, ie lower curiosity. there's something to think about with respect to Super Bowl ads being the most valuable on TV.
TV is outdated, but so are a lot of more important things: cars/transportation, government, "economics", agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure, humans, natural language.
You’re a human, typing in a natural language, on a computer powered by the electrical infrastructure provided by his government. That computer only exists because of the manufacturing capabilities we gained during the industrial revolution 200 years ago, which, in addition to being the source of the modern economy, could not have happened if it weren’t for the rise of totalitarian agriculturalism 10,000 years ago. That 10,000 years is a pittance compared to the millions of years of human history spent focused more on hunting, gathering, and herding than on cultivating crops. The origin of language in humans is hazy, but we’ve only been around in our various forms for a few million out of the billions of years of Earth’s history.
How could all of these brand new things possibly be outdated? ;)
once upon a time i visited my father's house. when he started watching TV my 3 year old ran to the televisionscreen, tried to swipe it, pushed on some things on the screen, even did a two arm multi arm gesture to minimize the current screen - nothing happened - he turned away quite bored, i was very proud.
I then do what I should have simply done in the first place. I hook up the iPad to the free hotel wifi and hand it to her. She fires up the Netflix app, chooses a show, and she is happy.
No. You shouldn't have. Thanks for making the free hotel wifi choked for everyone by pulling down a long-term video. What you should have done was bring along some videos of your own.
Folks are already paying the amount that commercial-free TV would cost, but the money is eaten up by ESPN's multi-channel presence in basic-cable packages. Yes, your cable dollars subsidize ESPN.
> Folks are already paying the amount that commercial-free TV would cost
Not even close. Take the entire amount of advertising $$ spent on TV ($100B+) and divide by the folks watching. That is the money that people would have to shell out one way or another.
Another question is what percentage of that $60B actually funds TV content and how much is spent on producing ads and other advertising-specific overhead that would presumably vanish if we payed for completely ad-free TV.
tvbythenumbers had a link to an analysis somewhere about a year ago (sorry for no source, I was interested but not interested enough to bookmark it or email it to anyone--I think it was adweek) that concluded that in aggregate advertisers pay something like $25/month per viewer.
this story seems a bit manufactured. i get that the kid makes the whole thing more endearing and maybe more poignant, but the writing seems inauthentic and intentionally crafted to drive home the obvious point (a point that every tech-savvy person in our modern world already agrees with)
This is akin to saying that the internet is broken because some videos are prefaced by a commercial. Or HN is broken because some of the front-page are hiring ads for YC companies.
I use a PVR for all of my "TV" needs (I have two large wall-mounted screens. They are great entertainment devices. I only mention that for consistency with those proudly informing that they only old some small CRT in the corner somewhere). When I get around to watching it has all of the episodes of the shows I care about. Many of them come from ShowTime, HBO, PBS or the Movie Network, having no commercials. Of course I explicitly pay for those channels individually, well outside of PBS.
Other channels have a different business model, but strangely neither my children, my wife or I have any mental issue with it -- it's just the way it is. Nor do I have an issue when a play has an intermission, even though really I'd just like them to keep playing through.
The article is saying that for a child raised (mostly) on commercial-free media (Netflix), advertisements are so intrusive and annoying that the child rejects watching TV outright because of the commercials.
I wonder if this is the kind of stuff that keeps advertising executives up at night. What would happen if everyone under the age of 20 thought like this (assuming that ad-free media sources still exist)?
I don't doubt that within a couple years, all licensed streaming media will have completely unskippable commercials. It's what's happened on DVD and Blu-Ray. At least with TV I have the option to change the channel or if I use a DVR, I can just skip through.
The title "TV" refers to a physical medium. If it meant "the commercial-supported major networks", then perhaps it should have said that.
Nonetheless, it is understood that children notice change. If you give your child maple syrup when they're accustomed to Aunt Jemima, they will ask you what it is. They will probably ask for their Aunt Jemima back. Children are not savants supplying higher information (and I say that as a very proud parent of four of them): They are creatures of routine and habit. A day later they would happily enjoy maple syrup, rejecting their old standby.
There just isn't anything profound or particularly insightful about that observation. It doesn't merit the "TV is broken" bit.
> "Nonetheless, it is understood that children notice change."
My own niece certainly notices that records are different than music from my Boxee. But records don't really bother her. She thinks they're weird because they're so big, and you have to find them and put them on the player and be careful with the needle.
But she happily drags out the player, shuffles through the handful of records I have and listens to them from time to time.
Yet she had a very similar reaction to what's described in the article, when she (briefly) saw Shrek on Cable. Her grandmother (the only one in her family who watches broadcast anymore) flipped through the channels and passed Shrek, whereupon my niece convinced her that they should watch it. After the first commercial break she asked if we could just watch it on the Boxee.
So it's not "child notices change". Not entirely. It's mostly "child dismisses interstitial advertising entirely".
> This is akin to saying that the internet is broken because some videos are prefaced by a commercial.
Youtube showing mandatory, non-skippable video commercials before the video you want to watch is the single most annoying thing that happened on the Internet in the last few years. I still haven't figured out how to get rid of them, but if I ever find out, I won't hesitate to do so.
Commercial television is a horrible user experience. Public service broadcasting in the UK is slightly less horrible. It's quality is declining as the BBC has tried to spread itself across a multitude of markets at the same time as trying to keep the license fee under control.
The bias of the BBC has always been in dispute. The right wing think the BBC is left leaning (because by their simple ratonale anything state funded is). The left wing want to keep the BBC out of the hands of the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The Scots, Welsh and Irish see the BBC as a propaganda machine for Westminster.
However, regardless of it's flaws, the BBC is probably the premier broadcaster of quality television on the planet; though I fear too many changes from idealogical government intervention will change this for the worse.
No it is tv that is broken. I have some channels that don't have ads at all (not even between shows) but I don't watch them, because you have to watch at a particular time, can't really pause them and the movies are years old.
I actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the pretty girl once he is done blowing things up. And recently the explosions have become more awesome, so I prefer the never movies.
> I actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the pretty girl once he is done blowing things up.
Die Hard is "years old" (24 of them, actually) and is an awesome movie in this genre. In fact I am going to preemptively declare you to be an action movie hipster if you like them but not Die Hard.
Being old doesn't make a movie bad. Being bad makes a movie bad. Sometimes that's because the times have changed and the plots are hard to relate to, but usually it's got nothing to do with the age.
Absolutely true. For example Ronin (1998) has much more awesome special effects than the average 201x CGI infested equivalent. I was surprised by the perceptiveness of a youngster who pointed this syndrome out to me, he recognises the superiority of movies half a generation older than the movies made for his generation.
Young children have a tenancy to think that the rest of the world is exactly like their home, because that home is their world. Then when they experience the outside world things seem strange.
Like the above anecdote, I remember thinking it was weird when a neighbor made Taco Salad with Frito's instead of Doritos.
I remember how weird my grandmaa's house seemed all around when visiting. The food was different, the board games were different, it was all strange.
I think this anecdote is the same. Its not so much a case of the wisdom of the children, but just another example of a child not understanding that the entire world isn't like their sheltered existence. [I don't intend sheltered as a pejorative here.]
I'm sure there were plenty of other things on the trip that seemed broken, but none happened to be as evil as commercial TV.