FX chief: Even peak TV can be a 'sideshow' to internet
apnewsarchive.com
apnewsarchive.com
The internet is frequently better than TV, because merit is free to boil to the surface without being stifled. It’s not that the internet is free of bland tripe. But merely that it’s costly to force bland tripe to the front, and when the state-sponsored tripe gets upstaged by something better, it’s harder to bury the higher quality content.
The problem with the internet is the firehose of The Long Tail ultimately does bury absolutlely everything (good and bad), so once again, over time everything is obscured by default, leading to micro-generation gaps (maybe spanning as little as two years) and reasonably large subcultures that never see the light of day.
On some level though, the movie industry has proven that profits don’t matter, since we see that for the last decade, profitable movies are mostly unwatchable garbage.
So, even if TV manages to be profitable, it can surely deserve the same sideshow status as movies. The only thing the internet paradoxically lacks right now (despite massive unicorn companies with nigh unlimited resources) is the unrestrained budget movies enjoy. And this is because the most captivating things on the internet are authentic in real time, and cannot be “budgeted” in a traditional sense.
I would actually argue that FX has produced a lot of notable content which has been novel and high quality. Examples would include The Shield, Fargo, Louie, The Americans, Sons of Anarchy, and Atlanta. HBO and AMC have also made outstanding content.
Where you tend to see groupthink yielding safe, predictable crap is the major networks like CBS, FOX, and NBC.
Consider the idea of paying for cable, and still watching commercials. It’s sort of like paying for the internet connection and still paying for the content. No thanks.
Advertisers used to be in the dark about which half of their money they were wasting.
That let the media guys (journos, etc.) get away with some stuff.
No more. Delivery is the word.
Every streaming service works this way.
You pay for TV to watch TV, you can't do anything else with it other than view it.
Sadly, this looks like it is going to be in future, see Netflix. It will even get worse when more content distribution companies start to argue you should not have to pay for the connection, as long as you only use their service, see "Free Basics".
They had a separate subscription and being a premium channel allowed them to experiment with content that would not be valid or even allowed on basic cable yet alone broadcast TV.
I agree with your sentiment but I think there is a move to turn the internet into "TV and movie". There is a big movement by certain groups to push more censorship on the internet.
The raw, real and genuine internet is slowly giving way to corporate censored content.
The main issue with this is that it dictates the flow similarly as the TV does - you are forcefully interrupted.
It also completely eradicates your data allocation on a capped/throttled mobile connection, since high quality video is capable of sucking down 25GB in as little as 2 hours. The worst case scenario being that 25GB is the standard capacity of an HD blu-ray disk. Maybe at lower NTSC quality, some video ads only eat up the amount a DVD consumes, clocking in at ~2GB per one hour.
Put another way, if you completely buffer the same 30 second full motion video ad, 240 times, that advertisement has completely abused the data cap for your mobile plan.