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Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

It's hilarious that the author is citing television. Is there anyone on the Earth who believes, e.g., British television is better as a whole than US television? They must really like slow-to-never-developing low budget, single camera angle crime dramas.

[Edit: Apparently so! Quite the controversial statement. However, when voting, do consider what percentage of television consumed outside of the US was produced IN the US and vice versa.]

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The endless interruptions of adverts every 5 minutes does tend to encourage me that the experience of US television is worse.

Some of the actual content is much better, but the experience of watching television in the US is drastically worse.

If you are seeing commercials, you are doing it wrong.

I'm confused by this, how do you avoid commercials. From watching the off NFL game there's even like pre-commercial commercials. "Brought to you by <some american car company> and <drink> the official drink of <whatever> and McDonalds - I'm loving it".

tivo, netflix, amazon prime, hulu, etc.

I don't watch network tv anymore. Well, I don't actually watch TV at all, but you get the picture.

I don't know about Tivo, but are all of the rest of these not available in Europe...?

Well, I'm using Tivo just to refer to any timeshifting device, there are plenty. I thought the others were available in some form in EU, but I could be wrong.

According to demographics, the market share of people watching broadcast television vs people watching "alternative media" (read streaming) was less than 50% as of the end of last year, I believe, according to some studies (though they were surveys, so it's hard to say exactly how accurate they are, but the pendulum is definitely swinging)

EDIT:

In an American survey, but this did include YouTube as a form of streaming media

I think they have us beat on the reality cooking show front- British Bakeoff is an oddly positive show while the judges are still providing a valuable critique of the contestants skills. Compare this to to Chopped, which just feels rushed and intensely competitive and cutthroat.

This is fair. However, note the "as a whole" above.

One, the sentence you’re responding to doesn’t say anything explicit about TV being better there, and two, I haven’t lived lived in Europe for over 15 years now, but yes when I did, the television was incredibly different and yes of course that ends up having a cultural impact. Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine[1] does a brief analysis of this between the US and Canada.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_for_Columbine

Michael Moore's impression of Canada is ridiculous, and he's convinced Americans that the U.S. has an exceptionally high rate of massacres committed with guns, when this is not the case, even among highly developed countries.

I just know one person in my peer group who watches "classic" television.

Most people just switched to online on-demand streaming services.

> Is there anyone on the Earth who believes, e.g., British television is better as a whole than US television?

Well, I do. Although my interest is more in science/nature TV than dramas. In the past Discovery Channel would be about.. discovery. Science. Nature. Then it became a reality show. Just as one example. I don't find anything to watch. British television has always been, and still is way above anything anywhere when it comes to science and nature. And to be honest I prefer the British crime dramas over the US ones too.

as a Brit who moved to the US, yeh, I love my VPN service so I can watch British TV, very few US programs I watch. And never ever live TV with the endless commercials

Yea but muh Sunday Tatort!

Hell yeah, I'm neither american nor british and I much prefer british shows. I do also like Netflix originals though...

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