Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

"More people are giving up television, magazines & newspapers than ever before"

In many of the discussions about people giving up "TV," it turned out that many just turned off their cable and consumed video through Hulu, Netflix and other online sources.

So, put another way, do you think even people who have given up TV, etc. have, on average, actually reduced their total amount of time consuming content of one form or another, when Facebook and everything else on the Internet is included?

View on HN

Well, in going from cable to Netflix, I probably reduced my time spent watching moving pictures by 75% (not that it was very high to begin with). In addition to the rationing involved (at least at the beginning, before the proliferation of Instant Watch), there was perhaps the decreased sense of "must get my money's worth." Paying $60/month for cable to watch two hours a week feels more wasteful than paying $10/month for the same.

On one hand, TiVo, Hulu, and Netflix have replaced casual channel-surfing (which can consume unlimited time) with purposeful TV watching where you only watch the shows that you want to watch. OTOH, the amount of TV available these days is enormous (cable now has four-digit channel numbers) and there are recommendation engines that can always find more for you to watch.

I think that people tend to watch more TV with less enjoyment when it's just a cable stream into your house. I think that people don't end up tending to things like channel-surfing. It's hard to plop down on the couch and watch whatever happens to be the 'best thing on' when the video is on-demand and you have a choice in the matter. This is the same reason that so many people felt liberated by things like TiVo. It allowed them to just tell TiVo what they liked to watch, and they didn't have to worry about gathering around the TV set at a time specified by a channel's scheduling selections.

Just another day it dawned on me that an important part of the overwhelming success of television (specially cable television) is that it's another unpredictable-rewards skinner box. There are the good shows you know and expect (and their fixed schedule induces lots of tradeoffs, like "why get up now if X is in half an hour") and the possibility of finding something nice zapping is akin to a slot machine.

Video on demand makes it easier to watch a specific content, but harder to just zone out in front of the tv, which is the most addictive and destructive activity.

In answer to your question, possibly not, but it boils down to a shift from passively absorbing a primetime broadcast & actively consuming either:

i) The same thing, but at a time of your own choosing, or:

ii) Only niche programmes of interest to you.

Or some combination of the two. Either way, mediocre programmes are less likely to occupy your time.

>In many of the discussions about people giving up "TV," it turned out that many just turned off their cable and consumed video through Hulu, Netflix and other online sources.

So you mean they've been superseded by more addictive technologies? :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com