Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>>According to data from Nielsen, the TV metrics company, 88 percent of Americans "use a second digital device while watching TV." Seventy-one percent of Americans "look up content related to content they are watching," while 41 percent of Americans are busy messaging "friends/family about content they are watching."

Has anyone here actually watched Nielsen TV recently? This is the oldschool stuff. Comcast. Not netflix/hulu/Disney. The commercials are INSANE. I stopped watching sitcoms a few years ago when they switched to 21 minute shows. A third of primetime content is now ads. For reruns, thanks to compression tech/editing, ads are on the screen almost half the time. And those ads are ALL for old people. Diabetic testing supplies. Laxatives. Investment consulting. Erectile dysfunction. Medicare part B. Incontinence products. That's what the second screen is for: To distract one's self until the animated colon commercial goes away.

View on HN

I'm not sure of the exact year, but sometime in the early 2000's I stopped paying for cable and went 100% online or purchased DVD's (netflix was just starting to stream).

Every once in a while I experience regular television at someone's house and it always blows me away that people are ok watching something and being interrupted constantly while doing it.

I've been told cable now has commercials, which cracks me up since the advantage of cable used to be not having commercials because you paid for it.

I feel the same way when I browse the web with ads...

When I install a new OS what I do goes in this order.

1. start OS updates

2. install FF if it's not installed (aka if its windows)

3. install ublock origin

I'm grateful there are people who take the hit and keep the internet free for people like me, but I could never deal with those ads.

>now has commercials

Commercials had invaded Cable TV thoroughly, well before the 2000s. I know it was 20 years ago, but I'd be surprised for someone to forget about the existence of commercials.

Today's are much more intrusive, however.

My daughters only experience with linear television programming is in lobbies and my families houses for the holidays/visiting grandpa. It’s interesting to watch a generation grow up that literally doesn’t know what traditional TV looks like, and I’m fucking glad because it sucked.

Too bad new issues of content fragmentation are developing in its place - I’m at least thankful Apple is starting to tackle it with “channels” in the Apple TV app and hardware, I still have to juggle subscriptions but at least I have a consistent interface to all of them.

What do you mean, content fragmentation? You just search for what you want to watch on Telegram and pick your preferred resolution for your device and bandwidth. As an added bonus, there's usually better localization available, too!

could be an area thing, but I certainly never had a show or movie interrupted in order to play a commercial. They would do the small commercials in between programs to let you know some show or movie was available to watch, but that's not my understanding of commercials as they exist today on cable.

Cable always had commercials, not sure what special cable you recall having, but Comcast was full of commercials 20 years ago.

> Has anyone here actually watched Nielsen TV recently? This is the oldschool stuff. Comcast. Not netflix/hulu/Disney.

Netflix, Hulu, YouTube TV, and Amazon Prime are all tracked by Nielsen, which deployed tracking of streaming platforms starting in 2017.

The content itself took a nosedive after the writer's strike too. It feels like 2/3 of broadcast television these days is some kind of low effort singing/dancing contest.

Considering it's basically a live music video, there's no reason why you wouldn't browse the internet at the same time.

> The content itself took a nosedive after the writer's strike too

I find this a weird take because we're in a renaissance of quality story telling TV right now. Keeping in mind Sturgeon's Law, only 66% of tv being crap is a win.

> renaissance of quality story telling TV right now

Not on broadcast television, which is what OP was referring to. It’s all monster of the week procedurals, low effort sitcoms, and reality garbage.

“The Good Place”

This isn't something I hear too much, but maybe content restrictions are actually starting to become a disadvantage to broadcast TV.

You could once tell a thrilling serial (whether it's crime drama, or sci-fi) within TV-14 guidelines that many people will watch, but now people expect more grit I guess. They want more gut-wrenching violence or adult language that feels more real and doesn't hold back.

Yes but that is for "prestige" shows, of which you get 6-12 episodes for a season. Used to be you would get an average of 22 episodes a season of any show. Also season breaks are getting longer used to be 6-4 monthes between season now you get 8 months to two years in some cases.So now a network as to fill a lot more time with a lot of inexpensive content so we get tons of crap tv shows.

There is no middle ground any more. it is either cheap simi-scripted reality series, music/tallent shows, and game shows or high budget prestige dramas.

And what happened with the ending of game of thrones? Shouldn’t professional writers be smarter than the average viewer? I didn’t seem like that was the case.

I think they realized around season five that they weren't going to be able to hold onto the whole cast for long enough to finish the show properly so they sped things up a lot. they also caught up with the books around here so they had to start making stuff up themselves.

this is a classic problem with long running tv shows. it's hard to get the pacing right when you don't know in advance how many seasons you're going to make.

That would be new to me. What I have heard is grrm wasn't involved after season 4. Also HBO offered more seasons to do what ever they needed. The two writers decided to make the last season short.

My understanding is the show runners were trying to jump ship onto a Star wars project, so they rushed out crap, and then star wars fell through.

I feel this way about everything.

GoT took a nose dive when they stopped having source material to work off of. It became stupid, mindless drama. People talk about the ending as if that's where the problems started. No, the writing was crap for the last several seasons.

The latest season of The Expanse was disappointing. It went from a slow burning, character driven series to an action packed run-of-the-mill drama laden mess, like most of the television shows you see nowadays. I'm happy Amazon picked it up, but they basically butchered the show, it will never live up to its potential.

Everything just kind of becomes samey because they're all learning how to do it from the same sources, and the lessons they're learning is unnecessary drama pulls people in and keeps them there. Except it drives me nuts when an entire season's worth of plot points could literally evaporate if character A articulated why they were angry at character B, who would then explain it was a misunderstanding.

The Expanse S4 was going off the fourth book, I believe. I didn’t like it as much as the last two seasons, but it’s supposed to be a setup season for what comes in the next couple books.

Also, Chernobyl was fantastic and Watchmen was delightful, for the most part. And Evil is an interesting supernatural/cutting edge Tech mix. Then there’s the final season of Mr. Robot.

I'm a little surprised that you would say this about the recent season of the expanse. I found it to be quite the opposite: mostly character development with not nearly as much plot movement as I had hoped for. I didn't like it as much as the third season, but that's a pretty high bar to meet. the main conflict with murtry was pretty contrived, I'll give you that. holden has been sent personally by chrisjen, literally has a warship parked outside of town, and the guy is going to push his buttons over a single person he wants to kill?

I don't feel the same about expanse. Maybe it's just me, but I felt the show is progressing just liked in the books.

Expanse Book 4 was absolutely terrible. The TV show is actually much better than the fourth book.

Actually I am thinking that the Expanse in general is a series where the screenwriters are outperforming the original authors.

The source material for Season 4 was not really a Space Opera anymore. There's a bit of similar material in book 5, and then it's back to Space Opera for the remainder of the series.

Season 4 was always gonna be trouble, and I suspect that contributed to SyFy cancelling it.

fair enough, I haven't read the books. I purchased them as ebooks, but for whatever reason I can't seem to get into the first book. Love the series though.

What's been the biggest factor do you think is the decline of broadcast TV? Writer's strike made a dent to be sure but that should affect all of TV. Television shows in general had underwent a big boom recently, but it's just not happening through the rabbit ear antennas. But there's still some good stuff there if you know where to look (mostly in form of comedy, Brooklyn 99 for example).

Is it that major media conglomerates allocating less budget on their broadcast TV business and more into their movies and subscription based business models?

My other guess is that content restrictions of broadcast TV are now really holding it back.

It was that way before the writer's strike.

The slow decline that started with The Real World had picked up pace, and the airwaves were slowly filling with reality show after reality show.

Then Lost went on the air, and nobody noticed at first, but by Season 2 it had competition from story-driven shows again. And I dunno who rushed out Lost Season 1 on DVD a few months before the second season aired, but that was an inspired decision. Tons of new viewers for Season 2, and probably for the first time ever people were binge-watching a TV show.

It ended with a whimper, but boy did it start with a bang.

> but boy did it start with a bang.

Lost got some crazy publicity (for the time) as well: Lots of people thought the shot of the plane from the inside being torn in two was real, not from a TV show.

I’ve gotten to the point with ads where I absolutely refuse to be subjected to a single ad. I don’t care whatsoever about any websites or companies making a single cent on forcing advertising on my precious mental resources. I will block all ads and steal all content and torrent everything. It’s amazing never having seen a television commercial the past 5+ years. Plus, I make strong efforts to even avoid buying anything at all from an ad once I’ve been subjected to their marketing. I hope it continues to spiral this way.

Be sure to keep complaining about quality content not being targeted to you!

> I stopped watching sitcoms a few years ago when they switched to 21 minute shows. A third of primetime content is now ads.

That is not a new thing. 21 min has been the norm for decades.

I'm getting the feeling people in this thread have actually forgotten what video content was like before the internet.

21-23 minute shows is the standard run time for a half hour block.

"Ads have become a tax on the technically illiterate." -- Scott Galloway

Unrelated to this comment, thread or OP in any way, you mentioned to me the concept of Complexity Catastrophe ~4 months ago from the book Design Rules by Baldwin and Clark. I’ve finally gotten around to reading it and I feel compelled to thank you. I haven’t yet finished, but it’s an absolutely fascinating read that is providing me with a lot of food for thought. I find it both well written and easy to understand. I honestly can’t remember the last time I was so fascinated by the contents of a book. I’m trying to find a new career right now, and this book may single handedly have changed the direction of that journey. So again, thank you.

I haven't paid for cable or similar in a decade. Every time I visit friends or family and they have a TV playing ads 50% of the time at 200% the volume of the show (exaggerated, but not by much), I start to get restless and agitated. TV ads have gotten to the point where they have become mentally painful to tolerate and are so bad that even with a phone I can't escape them.

Not watched that stuff for years. There's always youtube if you want sitcoms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com