Traditional TV Is in Trouble
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The strategy being to first introduce some artificial scarcity on internet bandwidth through data caps, and then offer exceptions. Either the cost to the business to be on the exception list will be high, or the cost to the user will be high to override the data caps, with the cost of service increasing as oligopoly in a region allows.
They can use this to steer people to the services that they back, like Hulu, or at least to make their own cable-box video on demand services seem more reasonable.
If one were truly pessimistic, the categorization of content wouldn't stop at simply high bandwidth services like video. A separate limit could be applied to things like html, with websites indexed as to their type and views counted. Which could result in an online equivalent of Sinclair media's control of local television news as certain channels of information are more accessible because they don't count towards a cap. And anything untrackable like VPN use goes into a more expensive version of the existing bandwidth-based quotas.
I believe it will not come to that last part, but less because I don't believe the telcos would attempt it than that I think it would incite people to legislative action. If it's introduced in slow increments, though, we might get closer to this worst-case scenario than many believe.
Look at us here in Australia - look up "NBN". we had a plan (that was already 10% complete and working great) to install gigabit fibre in 93% of homes. Then Rupert Murdoch handed the election to the Coalition, in exchange for them:
- Immediately stopping work on the fibre network
- Replacing the bulk of the remaining rollout with a VDSL system (ancient technology, my parents got it and instead of gigabit fibre their internet went from 13 Mbps to 19 Mbps - and this costs 2400$ per house to install)
- Using loans and taxpayer money to expand the Fox cable TV\internet network to double the number of homes, and paying Foxtel hundreds of millions of dollars for the privilege, while continuing to grant them exclusive rights to broadcast on it on all frequencies they want, including the ones that are optimal for internet
- Purchasing and decommissioning the Optus cable TV network which competes with it, replacing it with VDSL service
It's a national tragedy, wasting fifty billion dollars and a decade, just for the sake of protecting a conservative TV monopoly.
I didn't post what you're replying to, but I'm also an Aussie who's been reading articles about the NBN disaster for its entire duration.
Sources are difficult because the NBN has been on on-going project for over a decade now, so there's an absolute haystack to search through, and all the hay and most of the needles are strongly coloured by political ideologies.
Whirlpool has what looks like a comprehensive timeline / article here: https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn
I always found http://delimiter.com.au/ to be the best source of information around the progress (or otherwise) of the NBN. Here are a couple of semi-targeted articles that demonstrate the depth and density of this political quagmire:
http://delimiter.com.au/2013/01/17/fact-check-the-nbn-wasnt-...
http://delimiter.com.au/2013/07/19/breaking-the-rules-how-nb...
http://delimiter.com.au/2016/03/29/qa-panellists-agree-polit...
The whole issue goes back before NBNCo was created, however, to when Telstra, the government-owned monopoly infrastructure owner, was sold without being broken up into wholesale and retail arms, thus meaning their retail plans directly competed with those of their wholesale customers. The Australian Government at the time didn't see that as being a potential problem in the future, and yet here we are...
“Broadband” was 256kbps ADSL at best, insanely expensive, with punitive data caps, and the monopoly telco had no interest in investing to increase service or drop prices. There were other ISPs but they had a hard time competing due to underhanded tactics by the monopolist as well as having to build out their own infrastructure entirely whereas the monopoly had inherited all its infrastructure from the taxpayer built state owned company that was privatised for a song.
Around 2007, the government removed this monopoly power and broke up the company into infrastructure and service companies, with the infrastructure company having to provide equal access to any ISPs.
Then the initiative to build fibre to the home started in 2008. Luckily, the government of the day did not compromise on the technical approach and it remained fibre to the home, not the node.
Roll forward to today, and I have gigabit fibre to my home, with no data caps, for a decent price.
There’s still a fair bit of build out to happen but the option now exists for people in most urban areas.
It really pushes the point home about how much politics and special-interests (as opposed to real things like technical limitations) got in the way.
Now I'm angry all over again.
It's the decline of TV, news and traditional media in general. Look at what the news industry has been able to do against social media/tech companies. Brow beat them into serving as spammers for their own news content so that news companies can make more money. The same thing is happening with TV. Youtube is now spamming traditional tv content at the expense of regular youtube content. I used to get variety of recommendations from programming to sports to "trending comedy". Now I get recommendations for things I've never watched on youtube - John Oliver, Late Night Shows, Saturday Night Live, CNN, etc.
They couldn't compete in the new internet/social media environment, so traditional media is forcing the environment to change for them. It's been working for them in the short term, but will it work in the long term? I hope not, but who knows.
The changes have been incremental, but people truly don't understand how much google search, youtube, reddit, facebook, etc has changed in the last 4 years.
The internet/social media has gone from local/non-traditional media content to predominantly corporate content. And it's a trend that's going to accelerate as tech/social media is pushed to favor corporate content over ordinary user content.
- Easily the best sci-fi show in 10 years(1)
- Latest season has a 100% score on rotten-tomatos
- The visual effects are absolute top of the art (2)
- The fanbase is franticly close to the show (look at twitter how much they interact w/ the cast etc)
- Season 3 and we are about to start the big turn of the story arch
BUT… Canceled by Syfy because not enough people catch it at the time they happen to transmit it into the air.
If this show would be on Netflix it could become on of the defining sci-fi shows of our generation. Now we have to hope Netflix or Amazon happen to pick it up before the team disperses. (3)
(1) seriously watch it… the first few episodes are a bit slowish worldbuilding but it gets really good
(2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yKn_EqA0ik (shitty rip unfortunately)
(3) Please sign: https://www.change.org/p/netflix-or-amazon-please-buy-the-ri...
Edit: Wow, those are some fast downvotes. Here are sources if you don't believe me
Amazon Prime acquires US rights in 2016: http://archive.li/yc23D
Netflix acquires international rights in 2016: http://archive.li/Ww3Z0
I agree with what I think your broader point is though that a second tier cable channel like SYFY is probably not in the position to produce expensive fairly niche programming any longer.
- Almost all seasons of Supernatural
- Seasons 3 & 4 of Veep
- Seasons 4, 5 & 7 of New Girl
- Season 2 of The Flash
- Season 2-4 of Arrow
Now I'm not saying that those shows are all shit (tho they are certainly not in my ballpark), but I doubt anyone thinks of them as 100% shows, in the same sense that Moonlight is a 98% movie.
The problem comes with few reviews (which is also a thing with more niche-y movies), which is probably amplified in later seasons, where reviewers who don't like it stopped watching.
Among the series you listed, I see several that, for me, were basically meh superhero shows I might have watched an episode of and then tuned out. There’s too much good TV for me to bother with stuff that I suspect I’ll be indifferent to in the 5 hours or so if TV I watch in a week.
The Expanse was entirely conceived, financed and produced by Alcon, an independent film production company. Outside the US, Netflix has the exclusive distribution rights, and in the US, the show is also carried by Amazon. Alcon also produced Blade Runner 2049 and Villeneuve's earlier film Prisoners.
No doubt Alcon needs someone else to pay for the distribution rights now, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up on Netflix or Amazon, both of which are pushing sci-fi pretty hard. Amazon would be a good fit: The Expanse was co-produced with the Sean Daniel Company, who are also working on the new adaptation of The Witcher, and whose new production startup Mythos recently signed with Amazon Studios.
Public response to creative works is random. Truly random. Maximum entropy. There are no patterns to discern. So humans do what they always do when they face randomness.. they invent myths and replace reason with bullshit. If you control distribution, you can still force a win by leaning hard on your successes and kicking out your losses as fast as possible. But once the audience has extremely broad choice... you are screwed.
The future for media distributors is death. The future for media production companies is probably either working for Netflix, Amazon, or similar services or being supported by viewers who want their content directly via Patreon or a similar avenue. The creatives will be fine. The suits will be jumping off ledges.
My own experience with my parents bears this out; the TV is always on and they're also on their phones as much or more than teens. But it looks like if habits don't change, there will be fewer hours overall spent on "consuming content" as the population ages.
In Australia we have a popular TV show called Gruen Transfer which does nothing but breakdown ads and explains how they do what they do.
Finally, a biased anecdote from a millenial: Myself and many of my friends avoid ads by using ad-blockers and subscription services and not leaving the TV on when there is nothing to watch. Whereas my parents (about 60) watched far more television and didn't use ad-blockers... although recently they have been turning the TV off and using their ipads instead.
Because of this, the candidate pool is smaller, filled with weaker options and the ones that do land in the field are mostly mediocre and surrounded by the mediocre examples of the old guard that can’t (or won’t) retire.
After that, the rest is deterministic. Bad decisions compound, nothing is good any more, and the shit that really sucks isn’t even laughable, it’s either confusing, tragic or repellant.
I made the mistake of watching cable in a hotel room, and it was like grazing my eyes with a red-hot shrimp fork, while running an angle grinder right next to my ears, and telling me my parents were killed in a horrible accident.
The things happening on that TV were decisions so awful, that I questioned whether those responsible even understood their own motivations for operating what doesn’t even seem to be a business anymore. Everything was a chum bucket. Everything was clickbait. Everything was dark patterns. To watch TV and feel that way, for every channel I tried, means that almost all of TV has been reduced to the lowest internet tabloid trash by default.
I remember what it used to feel like when nothing was on, but this seemed beyond nothing being on. I don’t know how the story ends though. The only thing I do know, is that TV is still a different enough game, such that no tech company really represents a credible DIRECT threat to TV at large, except Netflix, and only Netflix distinguishes itself from other tech companies by producing original shows that people actually talk about.
Contrast this with what used to be the 20th century version of the tech industry’s unicorn narrative: becoming a super star on old media, appearing on TV, in movies, on the cover of magazines, or maybe making it big in music, or being a mogul thereof.
These things still happen, but it’s obvious that fluffy celebrity stardom, or becoming the star maker, is shakier ground than it used to be, and technology-oriented success is an alternate path to fame and wealth. Because of the new things that have emerged over the past 20 years, the brain drain began some time ago, when alternate paths to success became evident, and old media suffered for it.
I don't think advertising companies are worried about millennials; they can target them and measure results far more effectively with online advertising than they ever could via television, and thanks to smartphone addiction, screen time/ad exposure time is the highest it's ever been.
Myself and many of my friends avoid ads by using ad-blockers and subscription services
That may be true of sophisticated users like yourself and your peers, but I'm fairly sure you're in a small minority. Most people just use Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and read news articles unfiltered, and outside of that, brands can insert their message directly into the content via sponsorships and product placements with online celebrities.
Broadcast TV may be declining as millennials spend their time and dollars elsewhere, but the advertising industry has never been stronger.
My dad was a TV+book+newspaper person but now he's always online. He'll watch news clips online and read online. It's not that big of a change for him though, when he watched TV he used to watch these channels that would show text of the news along with news clips, very much line the news websites he checks out now.
If my mom is moving towards cable cutting, TV is in trouble now.
That depends on whether you think the problem with streaming over-the-air is that you have to watch it at a certain time, or that you won't be able to watch it again once it's over.
Have you seen how content rotates in and out of every streaming platform? If you record it, you'll have it.
My teen years were in the early 80s and TV was simply the prime source of media at that time. My family religiously watched the national news at/before dinner. My parents still have that habit - but they’ve learned to record it and zip thru ‘crap’. Sometimes they now zip thru 30 minutes in a couple of minutes.
It also seems that the quality of the content has massively declined. On the rare occasion I am waiting somewhere and there is a TV on, I’ve been stunned by how low quality some of the advertising is - poorly produced voice overs that would have been inconceivable in the 80s.
I’ve met a few people who have their TV on all the time. I have never formed a positive opinion of people who have that habit.
I also don't have a data plan on my phone.
In my experience, people of this age don't seem to get into streaming TV because it's just such a jarring experience from what they're used to. They'd much rather flip through the channels on a guide, or leave the TV on and watch the news, compared to going to Netflix for A, Amazon Prime for B, and some proprietary streaming app for C. Even if it means less ads.
(And then once you have a TV screen you might as well pay another $10 for an HD antenna, which gives you completely free access to unlimited content, most of which is admittedly total garbage. But even if you use it once a year to watch the Super Bowl, Olympics, or live coverage of some local emergency, the tiny cost is easily justified. The existence and free-ness of HD antennas seems more or less unknown to most millennials, who have a "mind blown" reaction when they come over to my apartment to watch the Super Bowl or NBA finals or whatever and find out I'm paying nothing for it.)
I understand a lot of people want the convenience of wireless / push to screen functionality, but it always makes me laugh when friends sit there for several minutes trying to get content on a screen, and I just bung a cable into my laptop and it's up and running.
Completely abandoning TVs but still watching videos of one kind or another seems weird.
Anyway, i painted a wall silver-grey and bought a projector.
I've got a 75" 4k about 10 feet from me right now. Plus it has the added advantage of being only about 15-18 feet from our dining room table, which means if we throw a game or the news on it during dinner, we don't have to squint to see the scores.
Most of the use of the TV is OTA (we don't have cable TV) but plenty of Netflix/Amazon/Apple/HBOGo type stuff. That said, we use it like old people; leave the news on as we do other things in other rooms. We don't have any shows we religiously watch.
I live in the UK, and here, houses have antennas on the roof, with a coax cable running down to a socket the living room. TVs have a corresponding coax socket, connected to an internal tuner, so you just plug a simple coax cable into the wall and the TV.
How does it work in the US?
Depending on where you live and the transmission power, all you may need is a meter or two of a cable with a coax connector at the end, and you can watch DVB-T with that.
The switch to digital pretty much just killed free tv for a way bigger chunk of the population that people seem to imagine.
A tv is a worthless investment unless its paired with a $50-120 a month cable tv and a decent tv still costs 200-300. You are talking about an investment of 800 in the first year and 600 per year thereafter.
If we look at the 5 year outlook you are talking about 3200.
Honestly a tv is generally just a bad computer monitor with good multimedia connections, garbage speakers, a tuner to hook up to worthless free tv, and hardware to display cable tv and cable tv is just bad netflix where you don't get to pick whats on.
I see no reason for tv or cable tv to continue to exist as they do other than inertia.
When I had a 50" plasma (this was a long time ago) all my furniture was pointed at it.
Now I watch the occasional movie or show on a macbook pro sitting on a coffee table (great screen and not much difference in relative size due to proximity) and my furniture, and the people seated on it, face each other at all other times. I find the room more inviting and conductive to conversation now.
I'd argue that there are still a large majority of millennials who are aware of antennae broadcasts. The oldest of this group is in their late-30's.
I've seen just as much shock and awe by older Gen X'ers and Boomers when they switched to HD broadcasts over the air and I showed them what's coming in now. "No more fuzzies!" was the generic response.
It probably is voodoo to my children's generation (Z). However, technology doesn't surprise them at all. They'd view the antennae as another app that just plugs straight into the TV. They're quite used to "there's an app for that"; even if they interact with a voice assistant to find it.
TVs are big, stationary, and designed ad meatspace social gathering centers. Plus, people these days are used to always being engaged with personal portable gadgets, so using them for personal video consumption is natural.
> But even if you use it once a year to watch the Super Bowl, Olympics, or live coverage of some local emergency, the tiny cost is easily justified.
Is it? You can watch all of those (including live local TV channels) on a laptop, tablet, or phone screen, which has zero device cost for the purpose (because you have it anyway for lots of other purposes) low service cost, and you can do it nearly anywhere, and at typical use distances (except for the phone, unless you use an HMD, though that is an option) at least as much visual size and better resolution than a TV that is actually inexpensive.
Now, I’m a late Gen Xer and watch a lot of stuff on my TV (mostly through streaming services, but also satellite service) but I can totally understand Millennials not seeing a TV fitting into their life even with lots of video consumption.
It's nice to pick it up and take with me to the bedroom, my desk, my dining room table, the bathroom, etc. Wherever I want to go, it follows.
Also, movies in particular have terrible audio mixing for in home usage. The dialogue is way too quiet and the effects are way too loud. I end up adjusting the volume on the TV the whole time I'm watching it. This is less of a problem on the iPad because I'm a lot closer to it.
16:9 TV's are also bad for watching movies. If I want the movie to be a reasonable size on my TV, I need a much larger TV than I actually want to have. Again the iPad fixes this issue by being close to my face.
edit: Also, watching 90's TV on Netflix is fantastic on the iPad because it lets you zoom in to the center of the 16:9, remastered show for a full screen, 4:3 viewing experience. It's great for Friends, the West Wing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which is not on netflix anymore), etc.
Just last night, Golf on NBC pushed their primetime schedule back by 10 minutes, causing me to loose the last 10 minutes of the series finale of something that I was binge watching. This is ... disappointing.
Similarly, a previous episode of the same show was been 100% interrupted by overzealous local news/weather folks covering phantom "severe weather" which was basically some high wind and lighting.
Except for sports, I'm now planning to just ignore linear TV, and wait for the shows to appear on streaming services, which actually deliver the content..
News going long? Spawn a temporary, new channel and the coverage can continue there for those interested while the scheduled content continues on the main channel.
I know why things are the way they are, but we have computers now: we can do anything.
That's the title of my upcoming self-help book for millennials dealing with their aging baby-boomer parents' technology issues.
I don't see the difference here. If you need instant gratification, you will have trouble with episodic content no matter what the medium.
After all, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon posts entire seasons at a time for (some) new shows. Perhaps more importantly, they do so for older shows and for movies.
Even waiting for a YouTuber upload isn't the same as waiting for an exclusive time-slot on a channel, which cannot actually be relied on.
It's very hard to keep up with streaming services and knowing what's where too. It's a big mess since the streaming services seem to provide control on what to watch, when and where, but that turns out to be a kind of illusion when one can't figure out how to achieve that with content either moving around services or being produced and restricted to one service. While BitTorrent traffic may have reduced over the years because of streaming services, it still reigns supreme if you want to choose what to watch, when and where.
> Both NBCUniversal and the Fox Networks Group have said they will trim the total time of commercials shown during some of their shows; Fox has announced a goal of reducing ad time to two minutes an hour by 2020.
This is one of the worst aspects of traditional TV once you become accustomed to streaming services, especially ones with no ads. Traditional TV literally puts ads for about one third of the air time in many cases, and that's a huge waste of time for those who just want content (and there are many; how many times can one watch the same ad even if it's the best ad ever?).
The writing has been on the wall for a long time coming. Better user experience, with lower prices, will eat into traditional modes of content distribution.
Here I am, willing to pay for cable and watch it, and they ruin it by trying to milk every last cent out of it.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/10/14/44...
Same applies to your phone too though :)
There's a long list of television shows I haven't started yet and wish I had. Game of Thrones, Sopranos, The Wire, Mr Robot, and lots of others. It's surprising how often conversations with friends and strangers revolve around our common culture.
I think a lot of people my age credit their love of sci fi while growing up in the 70's and 80's with putting them on their career path.
My advice would be to watch the TV you want to watch, then take your dog out for a walk after. Best of all worlds.
Some shows like House I have edited personally to create 'binge versions,' with the intro and outro cut out, with only special episodes that have special endings or intros included. Saves a good chunk of time with House and The Wire when I rewatch them. I wish a lot of other people did this as well. Instead groups stick to following scene rules that leave us with ugly formats, poor management and naming schemes and more. They were created for a different era.
Maybe I'll try to put it out there.
Fairly common (because, I suppose, birds of a feather...) but none the less not quite the same as the previous shared experience. That is, you saw Program X when I saw it. Same date and time. And not all that many years previous, everyone was in the same room watching the same TV.
I'm no Luddite, but I often wonder about the effects of personalization and the loss of the shared experience. If you remove live sports, how many (media) experiences now are common / shared?
I suppose that's not the same as Facebook.
The majority of time on my phone is for a hotspot or to read an article while waiting somewhere. Now to apply it to my PC, couldn't do it.
I do occasionally watch what might be considered "TV" but it's all through on-demand apps (Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and reluctantly Comcast's streaming app).
Broadcast television was a staple of my childhood and it's something that I miss (e.g., schoolyard discussions about last-nights episode of such-and-such tv show), but streaming television is so much better.
Going all the way back to 2000, it's pretty clear that the top rated tv shows have always skewed towards older demographics. ER, CSI whatever, Lawyer drama #25.
There just isn’t a modern day equivalent to ER, and THAT is why TV is dying (along with absurd price hikes).
Modern shows aren't just competing to win their timeslot; they're competing against the choice to stream whatever you feel like.
I think the era of strictly scheduled programming may be coming to an end, though there’s still people who like to channel surf - but I think the networks could find something in the middle if they tried (especially as somebody who doesn’t like the binge model that Netflix operates on).
Is this correct? Two minutes of adverts per hour? Or is this a typo from NYT and 'by two minutes'. Two minutes of ads would be 4 slots an hour, they'd have to increase prices by ~7x per slot to make the same amount of money.
Sometimes I try to watch TV when I visit home, and it is infuriating in every possible way. An ad break every five minutes, sometimes twice in a row. The thirty minutes of ad space is populated by a grand total of two different ads that scream at the top of their lungs to get your attention. Sure the ads may have seemed funny or insightful or unique the once or twice the marketing department for a company viewed it, but I promise you after the tenth time seeing it it in one hour.
TV content used to enrich my mind, at least on certain specific and enjoyable channels. Now I view it as actively being cancerous, and am disgusted every time it's on in my mother's house. I worry for her mental health.
I mean for christ's sake, just look at "The Learning Channel"!
No such channel has existed for 20 years. TLC is not, and does not pretend to be, The Learning Channel, any more than the Paramount Network pretends to be The Nashville Network.
All this really means in practice is that prime time dramas are in decline and will become more and more marginal. Stuff like sporting events and news is the future of advertising supported real time streaming. The medium is not important. Some of this will still come from TV transmitters.
That has not been true for a long time now.
Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well-done. -- Ernie Kovacs [0]
I'm not the only person like this I imagine.
[0] This is mostly due to the inconvenience of a TV antenna, maybe partially related to where we position TV antennas in older homes and apartments before the TV became so big.
Why they chose that over an interrogative form ("Why is traditional TV in trouble?"), I don't know. Maybe the NYT has a style manual that prefers the first formation.
Two restaurants:
One serves random food at random times. It's $80/plate and each plate is going to be 30-50% diarrhea. The bill has at least 20% unexplained markup.
The other serves whatever is on the menu all the time. It's $10/plate and each plate is diarrhea free.
One restaurant that serves only one dish a day and there's always a 30 minute line. You have to purchase a monthly pass to eat there.
The other has no wait and a menu that rotates slowly over the year. You have to purchase a monthly pass to eat there.
Each is comparable in quality of food.
I used to watch CNN, but don't anymore because it doesn't have news anymore. Tune in at any moment 24/7, and it's an editorial on the topic of "we hate Trump".
Can we just ban this trash website from HN?