TV May Die Soon | Hacker News Reader

TV May Die Soon

shellypalmer.com

70 points__xjb__74 comments

> FANG is delivering actionable data to advertisers in ways that traditional broadcasters simply can’t.

The "N" in that weird acronym stands for Netflix. The day they start selling my data to advertisers is the day I'm back to torrenting. I feel like the author is so ad-focused that she doesn't even see this: the whole article is about ads.

Netflix is showing that you can make fantastic, super expensive content, even niche content, without advertising. To me that feels much more profound than "Youtube has more data about you than ABC so advertisers will prefer that".

Data about you is valuable. Netflix can sell it without displaying the ads itself. I'd be surprised if they aren't tracking users and monetizing that information, like seemingly every other business in the world.

But maybe someone knows ...

I can't provide an official response (I'm an engineer at Netflix), but I noticed to answer the question "How much data does Netflix sell to Third-Party Advertisers?", did have the response[1]:

"Hey there, Cliff Edwards, director of corporate communications at Netflix. Wanted to point out that we don't sell ANY data to third-party advertisers. And we provide pretty good support for anyone who wants to learn about our tracking and how to opt out: https://www.netflix.com/cookies"

That's in line with what I expect too.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2uffl9/how_much_da...

I thought Netflix had a whole bunch of product placement deals?

There can be advertising without breaking out of the content.

Watched Sense8 (over here in Germany) for the last couple of days on NF. Every episode has a disclaimer at the beginning „This show contains product placements“.

From first view: Ben & Jerrys, Pepsi (?), Sennheiser

>The "N" in that weird acronym stands for Netflix. The day they start selling my data to advertisers is the day I'm back to torrenting.

They might already be selling it for all we know ("privacy statement" aside).

Also, it doesn't matter at all, if many other people don't also do the same move.

But what if Netflix can be a role model for other companies? Doing the right thing, and being successful.

Before I joined, I was a little cynical about big business and the shady moves you hear about to make a profit. It's been refreshing to join Netflix and find it to be an honest company with a simple business model: build a product that people want to buy.

>But what if Netflix can be a role model for other companies? Doing the right thing, and being successful.

Unless privately owned, or run by a very strong CEO with very specific opinions and total control over the board, that's just not what companies do. As soon as profit is to be made, they'll sell melamine as baby milk.

So, not sure about how Netflix plays it, but there's another case I hand't covered: making enough money elsewhere to not be interested in such things.

> that's just not what companies do

Spreading the belief that malicious practice is necessary for success and is inevitable, empowers that behavior. So please stop it, since (given examples like Netflix) it isn't true. :)

I think it makes sense in that Ads are the business model for broadcast TV, so any possibility of "TV Dying" in that the major broadcast networks go out of business or are forced to drastically scale back operations would be based on their real lifeblood, the advertisers, cutting back ad spending for TV.

We keep getting "TV is dead/dying/will live forever" stories on HN.

tl;dr of all of them is essentially: TV, as a non-time-shifted non-live broadcast medium, is dead: Netflix et al, Youtube, Torrent, and at the very least, DVRs, killed it; people watch non-live content how they want, when they want, frequently choosing to just "Netflix binge" it.

TV, as a live broadcast medium (eg, emergency news), will never die in that sense: I can watch Presidential addresses via the White House's Youtube channel via Youtube's Live feature as well as many local OTA broadcast channels.

TV is both dead and will live forever depending on what you call TV.

> TV, as a live broadcast medium (eg, emergency news), will never die in that sense: I can watch Presidential addresses via the White House's Youtube channel via Youtube's Live feature as well as many local OTA broadcast channels.

I think that misses the point a little. Live events will always be a thing, and we're seeing a huge push for that on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. But many of these events are not available on those platforms yet, and that's the problem.

TV networks hold onto these events as a reason for people to buy a cable subscription, but I would rather watch it on the Internet, and I'd happily pay a fee for it. That's the missing piece that hasn't been figured out yet.

>will never die in that sense: I can watch Presidential addresses via the White House's Youtube channel via Youtube's Live feature as well as many local OTA broadcast channels.

If "presidential addresses" are what's supposed to keep a medium afloat, it's doomed already.

Millenials don't even watch as much sports as older generations anymore...

They might not watch as much traditional sports. But there is a rapidly rising amount of viewers watching esports and other streaming games. While a game isn't a sport; a sport is a game.

This audience is growing rapidly and is already quite large too.

I wonder if YouTube Live and other similar services could scale up to serve in a time of true crises. Back in 2001 the web's bandwidth limitations were laid bare on 9/11 and that was with static text & pictures. CNN had to go to a "bare bones" text site and even that had trouble.

Things have improved dramatically since then of course but delivering live video to billions of users simultaneously?

They held up fine during the Boston Bombing.

The article doesn't say that; it says TV is at risk because it lacks data about its viewers.

And people say that like it's a bad thing. Cable can tell a lot about it's viewers. So can your TV hardware itself. The issue is how and whether they use that data in a way that is consumer-friendly. I'd say anything that takes the control away from the consumer is bad. I would prefer my curation, aggregation and recommendation tools be isolated and give me control over who knows what about me and exactly how it's used. I have no problem opting in for advertising and marketing from specific companies I support, but unfortunately no one gives me that option. I block ads because I have no control over how the third party ad networks use and distribute my data. I don't use paid services for that same reason.

And the article says as much:

>"Traditional (linear) TV audiences are declining at a significant rate, and they are practically aged out of key demographics. Cable customers are also declining."

Note its qualifying the statement with the word "linear."

So in other words, more and more people are using DVRs and subscription services?

News papers and radio stations still survive in their own niches, TV will be just fine.

You can even claim that the same stuff was available via PPV at exorbitant prices, as in movies not the live stuff. Now it's available for nearly free. Yay capitalism!

Blah, capitalism.

"TV" has been undergoing changes for its entire history. Cable brought major changes. The ability to play movies at home changed things. Streaming did, too. And regulatory changes along the way had their impact. I also have to take anyone who talk about "4 networks" a bit less seriously because for a long time there were only 3, and Fox actually making a 4th was also a big deal when it came along.

So, sure, if what you mean by "TV" is the original networks, yeah, that may be concluding at some point. But "TV" itself just continues its ongoing evolution.

It would be interesting to see some data on recent prices for TV station license transfers. The market value of AM radio station licenses has plummeted in recent years. I suspect the same is happening to TV stations, in particular the little independents that live off of syndicated feeds and Star Trek re-runs. (I've seen TV control rooms far, far, less luxurious than the station in Weird Al's movie "UHF"...)

One thing that the article gets wrong is the difference between brand advertising and direct response. Consumer products goods will always be about brand awareness and not direct targeting. It's the difference between what Snapchat is trying to do and what FB is trying to do. Coca Cola advertising is never going to be about running an ad an expecting someone to go on a website and buy a Coke right then. Neither is anything sold by companies like P&G.

Brand advertising is not about the level of targeting that FB is doing.

AM radio hasn't died yet. Heck, books haven't died yet. New media doesn't always kill old media.

AM is dead.

Listen to the ads, not the god awful programming sometime. There's only so many prostate pills to be sold... I don't think it's a real business anymore, IMO there are a few ultra conservative types supporting the whole thing.

If I'm in my shop working on a Saturday afternoon, AM radio is still the best, if not only way to receive college football games from the local state university. Even when they play on tv, the games are often not actually accessible.

If there are ads at all, somebody sold those & got paid.

True, but prostate pills are the equivalent of a strip-mall with a karate studio and dollar store -- usually dying.

Had to laugh at the image. Yeah it's a market but probably not the juicy part of the market.

Isn't AM where Sports radio lives?

In the Boston area, we basically have 93.7 WEEI and 98.5 the Sportshub, two FM stations. I don't even know what the AM stations are, or if they exist.

The following is NOT about USA:

Some lobbying very hard in various countries to introduce digital radio. When you look up the implementation details, it would be pretty bad idea to stop analog radio. Now some countries already mandate that radio in new cars and also try to mandate that all new sold radio in those countries are digital radio.

It's absurde as people listen less and less radio, and analog radio has a lot better coverage - even in bad signal quality you can actually hear something - something vital in emergency situations. Of course you cannot censor analog radio at all, pirate radio stations were common back then when things went wrong. And we already had a time when certin countries allowed just one type of radio device with just one radio channel.

The biggest issue is, even when you have clear signal conditions, even if you're dialed into a channel that is broadcasting HE-AACv2 (aka HE-ACC+ or eACC+) and your radio decodes it natively as HE-ACCv2... it's still a goddamned 128kbit or less stream.

Arguably, this is worse quality than ye olde FM on average. I mean, I could get behind a transition if they were using Opus instead of a nearly decade old hack of an even older codec... but they're not.

Thank God we're not making this mistake in the US, and digital radio in this form has been rejected: people instead are either adopting SiriusXM or phones+BT playing mixed online/offline content.

TBH I'd rather knock down all the US radio towers, reclaim all of the AM and FM radio space, and deploy 802.16? 802.11ah? something and provide low bandwidth but freeish Internet.

> ... it's still a goddamned 128kbit or less stream. Arguably, this is worse quality than ye olde FM on average.

I don't claim to be a "golden ears" or anything, but I find 64 kbps HE-AAC to offer better-than-FM quality. (HE-AACv2 benefits really only make sense at 48 kbps or lower.)

Hydrogenaudio tests showed that a good HE-AAC encoder does just slightly (imperceptibly) worse than Opus at 64 kbps[1].

[1] http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm

The problem with those listening tests is the playback medium is not controlled: ie, what were they using (what headphones, what headphone amp, what DAC, etc; or what speakers, what speaker amp, what DAC, was the room properly treated, etc); and what is their level of hearing damage (ie, their age)?

If everyone is taking their test on their phone with low grade earbuds plugged in, or exceptionally bad car audio systems, everything sounds bad, ergo, the same.

I own a pair of Stax, among other higher end headphones, with the proper gear to drive them. I can tell the difference between modern-LAME-encoded 320kbps MP3 and lossless, albeit just barely, in an ABX test. Everything 64kbps sounds bad unless it's something like Opus doing conventional speech.

I know I'm setting the bar high, but I don't think I even have "golden ears", I think anyone can reasonably hear the difference, they just need to quit bothering with low end gear.

I mean, people just on HN buy Tesla Model Ses for $100k+ without even thinking twice, I find it hard to believe they won't also drop $1k on headphones and headphone gear at the very minimum if they care about audio.

I have never spent over $100 on headphones. $50 is usually enough. I have plenty of things to geek out on in life, audio quality is not one of them. Seems like many many many tech people are like me.

Audiophile products are always a scam. People who talk about owning them are not to be trusted.

Well, I wouldn't say always. But there is no need to spend a thousand dollars on headphone 'gear'. There is also no need for a dedicated DAC unless your source is audibly noisy. MacBook pros for instance have perfectly good audio circuitry capable of driving normal impedance headphones to ear damaging volume w/o distortion. If you want to buy a DAC and amp for your 32ohm headphones that's cool, but you're just buying an exceptionally expensive volume control.

That's the way I feel about broadcast television. At some point there are just better uses for the spectrum.

One problem with the TV discourse is that it mixes together different meanings of "TV". One is the actual technology to broadcast video, second is the act of broadcasting video to consumers, and the third is the actual receiver, e.g. physical a television screen.

The first one will surely die, and has already died for most(?) young people where I live. But that doesn't really matter much as content can be streamed using the internet.

Anecdote time: I'm nearly the only one in my group of friends who still has a TV, and it's become a tradition for us to gather once a week to watch the "heute-show" (a German copy of The Daily Show, but only broadcasted weekly) at my place, and maybe have some political discussions afterwards. So in this particular case, timeslotted broadcasting actually brings us together.

There's a huge opportunity for the attentive. Rock and roll got started largely because the major broadcasters moved away from radio and into television, and as a result operating an FM radio station got crazy cheap, leaving lots of room for experimentation. I have had my fingers crossed for years that the same thing is going to happen to terrestrial TV.

Hasn't that effectively already occurred in the form of YouTube? A bit of curation is really all it would take to form a virtual TV station.

Have you seen Me TV? WGN?

I think the physical costs are manageable already. I doubt good content will get dramatically cheaper any time soon.

Unlikely. The telcos will pounce to get the spectrum.

Sorry to ruin your hopes: any free spectrum will be consumed by wireless data transmission systems.

As one example, but a big one, that's the plan in the European Union.

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-207_en.htm

Here are the SF Bay Area's current TV broadcast stations: [1] High power stations get a channel for the entire area, while low-power stations share channels. The FCC has a computerized model that takes into consideration antenna height, power, frequency, and terrain to figure out what won't interfere.

(There are a large number of low-power religious stations. For people thinking about repurposing "white space" in the TV bands, they're going to have to get rid of some of those Voice of God stations. One God Ministries alone has 17 stations licensed in the Bay Area.)

There's more space available now for TV stations because the tuners for digital TV have much better adjacent channel rejection than analog TV tuners did. There used to be restrictions to prevent harmonic interference and such. That's mostly gone, and all the channel slots can be used. If you wanted to set up a broadcast TV station in San Francisco, you probably could.

[1] http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/tvq?list=1&dist=100.000%20...

It's taken as a given that more targetability is always better for ads but lately, I've come to believe that lack of targeting ability can, in and of itself, be an asset.

The more coarse the targeting, the more humans are able to reason about ad placement. If I see an tv ad on a program, I know that all the people in my region watching the same program are also guaranteed to see the ad. Whereas if I get an ad on Facebook, I have no idea who else might have seen the same ad.

I've been mulling this over because Podcasts, by some weird quirk of technological path dependence, got locked early on into a state of extreme ad unsophistication. Despite, or maybe because of this, podcasts have some of the highest ad rates in the business. Take Mailchimp's sponsorship of Serial for example, that sponsorship itself became somewhat of a mild media sensation surrounding the discussion of the story. But that could only happen because of the impossibility of ad targeting in podcasts. Because of that, you knew everyone else listening to serial was hearing the exact same ad as you.

TV is declining, just like newspaper empires. Streaming is expanding as it's own empire even though it smells and tastes like TV it's different. Google and Facebook kill with ads so they'll continue to drive "innovation" for eyeballs as again traditional TV attempts to stop the bleeding. Innovation is where newspapers failed.

I'm streaming mlb right now and reading HN, TV can't offer that experience easily.

As some have already stated. TV is the wrong word here.

"Television or TV is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome (black-and-white), or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. "

This sounds like everything from traditional broadcast TV to YouTube to twitch to snapchat. You are remotely seeing something on a display. It's technically TV is it not?

This is just an idea, not really even opinion piece, but has some good insight.

I was interested that she coined the term FANG and not FANTA (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, youTube, Apple). I am a big fan of Apple but continue to be dumfounded by how tone-deaf they are about the Internet. It's as if they have Jim Sensenbrenner on their board.

I've been hearing this targeted audience and advertising for several years. However for as long as I've been watching Hulu, YouTube etc I rarely see ads that interest me. I wish they used that data better.

If Net Neutrality goes away TV will thrive. This battle is far from over.

I think you are absolutely right, and it has a lot to do with what is classified as television. Increasingly, television broadcasts are packet based digital content that is carried like other tcp/ip traffic. With adoption of DOCSIS 3.1, which will increase bandwidth for internet communications by dropping spectrum on coaxial cable devoted exclusively to streaming digital video, the definition of television will be further muddied.

Conceptually, why should I have to choose a television package from Comcast or Cox based on which one is operating the cable? It makes some sense if my cablebox is parsing a stream available to everyone on the line, but it doesn't make sense if the box is requesting a stream that has not been multicast.

I suspect that this threat to their television business has a lot to do with attacks on net neutrality, and that there is a belief that it is a slippery slope from net neutrality to deciding that they shouldn't have something like a favored provider status for anything that is packet-based.

You are dead on. The fight over net neutrality was always about video. Some of the early legislation proposed when the Democrats were running Congress was scarily (for the cable companies at least) close to forcing just the kind of "television unbundling" you describe. As you say, they're all packets in the end.

TV may thrive again if they improve the content. The biggest hurdle network TV has right now is that people are leaving because there is nothing to watch.

It's the classic death spiral. Fewer viewers means less money from advertisers, which in turn means less money for content.

i kind of feel the same way about Netflix and Amazon too. I've watched most of what I want to watch. Neflix has never been as good as when they had the Starz deal.

I agree. I may even suggest that mainstream-geared media is fundamentally flawed, as it has to attract a wide audience, providing great appeal to nobody. We accepted it in the past due to not knowing better, but now that we have a taste of video content tailored to our very specific interests, where producers are happy to have an audience of 1,000 people, it's hard to go back.

As an optimist, I hope the NN disappears as a policy and creates the catalyst to enforce it technologically instead. It's a hard problem to solve but I think the pieces are there.

Television isn't dying. Over the air TV though is on life support. Just like gas stations someday soon local TV stations will be ancient history.

What's the story with gas stations in the US? Are they dying out / being replaced by something else as well?

They're doing fine for now. Electric-car optimists think they'll be replaced by charging stations. Apocalyptic doomsters think they'll be replaced by a place to feed & water your horse (or by nothing at all). Both camps seem to agree petroleum fuels are a temporary thing.

The number of gas stations declined 25% from 1994 to 2013. I'd hardly call that doing fine.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/06/why...

Observationally: No. If parent was referring to less vehicles due to advances in transportation technology and pattern optimizations...I think broadcast TV dies much sooner than gas stations.

In big cities, I think that between higher fuel efficiency and the small margins that stations make, it's not surprising to see the smaller stations close. (Anecdotally, in my neighbourhood, a few stations closed, our tiny neighbourhood/borough of 60k people had a dozen gas stations, now down to 5)

The networks take away FANG's bite with live sports, which are about the only thing I care to watch anymore.

I searched the article for "Hulu" and got zero hits. I assume the author simply didn't do any research at all.

That's interesting, since Hulu runs Nielsen tracking software. I'm not sure if it's included in DVR+3/+7 ratings, though.

I'm not sure either, but I do know it's included in the top four networks' and their advertisers' future plans for TV and that an article discussing said companies future without discussing Hulu is incomplete.

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