Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

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When we lived in an apartment, we were required to pay $99 for an Internet + cable bundle with Comcast. It sucked so badly that one of the deciding factors when we bought a house was that AT&T Fiber was available. We also had every bedroom, the office, and the living room wired for gigabit Ethernet with the expectation that we would be using only internet based video services.

Now, we have three Roku TVs and two 4K AppleTV boxes (thanks to DirecTVNow). We subscribe to Netflix (free with T-mobile), DirecTVNow, and Hulu.

My dad came up and he loved our RokuTV so I bought him one. He likes it, but he would never go cable free.

With cable, you just turn it on and start watching. With the Roku TV, you have to sign up for an account, add channels, login to all of your subscriptions. If you have cable, you have to login to all of the different channels with your cable subscription. WiFi is also more flakey then cable. Then on top of that, they have to worry about going over thier 400Gb cap.

Can you imagine most 70+ year olds having to go through all of the hassle with five TVs? Heck, except for the RokuTV, all of thier TVs are CRTs, including one that I bought for myself when I moved out in the mid 90s.

Maybe that's one of the reasons cable networks can get away with all that crap: you Americans love your TVs (five TVs in a house? That's just crazy to my European taste) so the demand is inelastic. It's not like you're going to substitute TV with books, games, hiking, or going to cinema, so they can squeeze as much as they want.

How large are the houses? The average size of a house in the US is 2500 square feet. The average number of TVs is 2.3 (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30132).

But then again, it would be normal for everyone in the house over a certain age to have their own “screen” - a phone, a cheap tablet for young kids, etc. What’s the difference between the accessibility of screen that’s stationary and people being on their phone all of the time?

In my own house, we are a bit extreme with six - our room, son’s room, gym, game room, living room and guest bedroom.

Sitting down and reading bores me. I’d rather listen to an audiobook while I’m commuting or working out. Since I workout at home, I seldom just sit down and watch TV by myself. I catch up on TV while I’m working out.

I guess the difference between "being on a phone" and watching a TV is the passive consumption of content owned by huge oligopolies that directly influence the laws to control its distribution. In that sense it's completely unlike chatting with friends on WhatsApp or playing CS, at least while there is some modicum of net neutrality. The type of content, the culture around it and the laws intertwine and create the perception that one has to have multiple TVs around home, all hooked up to some monopolistic content distributor, so they can "catch up on TV" and avoid FOMO.

I know plenty of people around who don't have a single TV in their 2br flats. A few have TVs that they use solely to play PS. That's why I suspect the culture is a big reason why American cable can be so user-hostile.

I guess the difference between "being on a phone" and watching a TV is the passive consumption of content owned by huge oligopolies that directly influence the laws to control its distribution

How many hours per day does the average kid spend watching YouTube (controlled by Google)? Of course FB is for old people but people spend hours a day on and off FB. For a lot of people FB is the internet. (https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...)

And my son has a Playstation. Guess what he spends a lot of time doing? Using it to watch YouTube videos of other people playing video games. Yeah that’s a thing.

> substitute TV with books [etc.]

Not to be snarky, but it's "replace TV with books"; to use substitute, it'd be "substitute books for TV."

(Yeah, I know language evolves, but Humpty Dumpty had his head, such as it was, in a warm dark place — '"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."' [0])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty#In_Through_the_L...

On further thought: "Substitute X with Y" should be accepted as OK, because:

1) If a new use of language is clear, that's what really matters. And if the new use makes it easier for writers / speakers to use the language with confidence — especially when it's not their first language — then so much the better.

2) To paraphrase a well-known saying: Language was made for man, not man for language.

Cheers! I'll keep that in mind. As a non-native speaker I sometimes miss the finer quirks of English, especially when it's subtly different from my mother tongue.

> substitute TV with books

Books are so boring. Like snooze.

That's a great point. I find having to decide what I want to watch to be a feature as I want to be deliberate about how I spend my time and attention. I know plenty of 70+ year olds that are way too influenced by whatever cable news is constantly playing in the background.

This is most of the the difference between McLuhan’s definitions of hot mediums vs. cold mediums. More power to you.

I just looked that up. The idea of hot and cold media's a useful way to think about this. The only thing knew about McLuhan before looking this up was that his most famous quote, "the medium is the message" which is worth pondering.

>worry about going over thier 400Gb cap

Internet third world.

At the time we were forced to have Comcast by our apartment complex - and by “forced”, I mean it was part of the lease agreement - they implemented a 300Gb cap. They hadn’t introduced the $50 Fee that allowed “unlimited” internet. Even if you decided to pay for business internet, you still had to pay the $99 on top of the cost for business. Of course since everyone had the same package;, everyone also had the same WiFi router. We ended up stringing three 100 foot Ethernet cords from the router.

My parents live in a smaller town where their only choice is crappy cable. AT&T discontinued DSL but my mom kept her DSL service when they went for cable internet (long story but it made some sense for them).

Spectrum has "cable box in a browser" these days, so no need to fuss around with individual channels to watch on a computer.

It's flash, not sure it would run on a Roku.

The AppleTV experience is better. You sign in to your provider once, and other apps - with your permission - can use your cable login. The App Store will also suggest apps you are elibke for based on your cable package and which nes you can get if you upgrade your package.

But, that’s a separate box and remote he would have to deal with.

I think most 70+ year olds do not have five TVs.

The living room, their bedroom, my dad’s entertainment room, my mom’s office and the guest bedroom. Those CRT TVs last forever. My dads entertainment room use to be my bedroom.

Most 70+ YO don’t have 5 TVs

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