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Comment by thirdsun | Hacker News Reader

> My son will soon be a teenager. He has little interest in watching TV. His default is to go to YouTube and check what's new.

Of course. I'm 30 and if it wasn't for live sport I'd never watch TV and even that is going away: Sky Germany lost the right to the british premier league and before that the spanish La Liga. Both, as well as the italian and french football leagues, are legally available at DAZN for 10 bucks a month. It's a great deal.

However besides sports the program just isn't there. It can't be since its priority is to find the lowest common denominator and please everyone. Which results in nobody getting what they actually want. YouTube doesn't have those limitations - you'll find in-depth content for any kind of niche interest and I welcome it.

I can only assume that traditional TV is even less interesting to today's teenagers than it is to me, someone who grew up with it.

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> However besides sports the program just isn't there. It can't be since its priority is to find the lowest common denominator and please everyone. Which results in nobody getting what they actually want.

This isn't remotely true. I don't watch that much television but if you look at what TV critics are writing, there has never been a better time for scripted television ever. Now that networks like AMC, HBO, Netflix, Amazon, etc. can produce cost-effective original programming, it has allowed them to hit smaller audiences are still be profitable. That allows for far more creativity that the old network model where you had to appeal to such a mass audience.

I'm curious to what all this great YouTube content that keeps people entertained for hours on end is. I personally find some of the instruction content pretty incredible, as well as some of the music content, but I couldn't occupy that much time with it. Especially with instructional content, I need to actually apply what I was watching to what I'm trying to accomplish!

It seems like with music content, I'm constantly fighting off recommendations of low brow content.

most sitcoms on tv worth viewing have adult themes / content, not available to large networks.

I believe very very few of the shows the parent post is talking about are sitcoms.

I suspect a significant portion of viewers are using the internet to see the programming (via torrents or streaming otherwise), without having a subscription to any of these channels.

I just can't imagine anyone but professional critics to subscribe to all these channels.

Oh, absolutely - don't get me wrong. The quality of the content has never been higher (if we exclude The Wire and The Sopranos). It's the format that's the issue here - there's no way I'll sit in front of the TV at a specific, network-dictated time, so unless your content is available as stream (in non-US countries), I will find other ways to get it.

Concerning YouTube content: For me it's a lot of about in-depth reviews of niche products. In my free time I work in audio and music production and being able to see a compressor, synth or DAW techniques explained in a series of long, well produced videos is something that simply wasn't available some years ago.

I love that the internet has enabled this.

Watching TV in India, where I grew up, was an absolute, unmitigated motherfucking abomination that I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy. Bland, unidimensional characters whose only purpose was to act as a loudspeaker for what the scriptwriters wanted to convey. Idiotic moralising basically throughout (obedient daughter in law: Goooood, rebellious kid who wants to live life his own way: baaaaad). A story that you could predict from start to end after just Scene 1.

Fuck that. Out with the old, in with the new.

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