If advertising ever intrudes on streaming the way it did on cable, I'll just transition out of watching TV altogether.
I don't care near as much about keeping up with the zeitgeist as I used to. Maybe I'm just getting old.
I don't care near as much about keeping up with the zeitgeist as I used to. Maybe I'm just getting old.
People used to all watch the same shows at the same time.That made it the thing everyone had in common.
Now TV is more like reading books. Everyone does it n their own time. It's still a big things, but it doesn't create a nationwide community.
On top of this, you're also getting old :)
Weekly shows of certain types have massive speculation and plot discussion crowds with podcasts and analysis channels. Then there's a second viewership wave created by all the memes.
Netflix's just drop the whole season model has cost them a lot in public discussion and hence hype, some of their shows are now released in a weekly format to better capture the hype cycle.
Now, though? I don't care about "tha memes." I don't care if I'm current in my analogies. I want to take care of the people I care about, and experience things that enrich my life.
Other people can care about memes and such, and I don't think any less of them for it. Not that they need my validation. But my own world revolves around different suns now.
This isn't the same thing.
In the 1990s, everybody watched The Simpsons. Even the people who hated it still watched it so they could complain about it. It was on broadcast TV so everybody had access to it. And Friends, and Cheers, and so on.
Game of Thrones is on HBO. If you have Netflix and not HBO, it's not there. Stranger Things is on Netflix. If you have HBO and not Netflix, it's not there. A lot more people watched Friends than Game of Thrones, because Game of Thrones was less available and had much more competition.
You can find a website full of fandom about Game of Thrones, but you can find a website full of fandom about Battlestar Galactica. Passion and popularity are not the same.
Popularity is what matters to the zeitgeist. It's not a matter of being able to find a place where all the Game of Thrones fans hang out and whinge about the last season, it's about being able to go into a room full of normies and make a reference to last night's episode and expect nearly everybody to get it. Which isn't really a thing anymore.
The numbers don’t even compare. With Seinfeld that’s literally 1 in 5 people in the US. GoT is what, maybe 1 in 100?
Game of Thrones’ season 8 premiere was pirated almost 55 million times in the first 24 hours [2].
And this is when people have 100 times more choices every day.
[1] https://observer.com/2019/05/game-of-thrones-finale-ratings-...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/17/18412159/game-of-thrones-...
> Data from piracy monitoring firm MUSO indicates the show was pirated 54 million times in the first 24 hours. That’s a steep increase from the season seven premiere, which set piracy records of its own, with 90 million illegal viewings in 72 hours.
> Sunday's episode of "Game of Thrones" notched a series record of 17.8 million viewers, according to HBO. "The Long Night" broke the record set by the season premiere just two weeks ago when 17.4 million viewers tuned in.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/02/2...
> 106 million people watched ‘M.A.S.H.’ finale 35 years ago. No scripted show since has come close.
Note that these are raw numbers, not percentage of population. There are more people now than there were when "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen" aired, but the broadcast TV episode still got more human beings to watch it.
Maybe almost 100 million watched Game of Thrones illegally.
I think you hit the nail on the head. I live in a country where you can't, to my knowledge, get HBO legally at all, and yet a huge number of people kept up with it, to the point of having a weekly watching party when the series was live. It only takes one tech-savvy person and a USB stick.
There are a lot of good shows on Netflix. Enough that people don't have time to watch even them -- especially now that the Internet is a thing and a lot of the time people used to spend watching TV is now spent watching YouTube or hanging out on Reddit or whatever.
So if you have Netflix and not HBO then you're several times more likely to have watched Stranger Things than Game of Thrones because it was easier to do it. And for the same reason, people don't subscribe to twelve different streaming services, because they don't even have time to watch all the shows on one of them. Which means there's now a lot more fragmentation in what people have watched.
No, it's so radically different that while there is still zeitgeist related to TV, it's not wrong to say the "tv zeitgeist" is dead.
Following a TV show used to be even more in the moment than following sports are today. Either someone saw last night's game, or they didn't and you can't have a meaningful conversation with them. They might catch up watching the highlight reel but conversations will be shallower, and talking about one game becomes near-irrelevant by the time the next game airs. These days TV shows have the zeitgeist pattern of a recent video game release. Everyone works through the release at different paces, conversations are bounded by seeing how caught-up everyone is before getting into details, and the material has long enough shelf life that conversations can happen with months - or years - between different conversation participants seeing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_shifting
Incidentally, the practice of time shifting is a reason VHS caught on and other home video formats didn't:
LaserDisc didn't offer time shifting at all, so it wasn't even in the running here; as a result, its pitch wasn't as compelling.
Betamax did, but its tapes only held one hour to begin with, which isn't enough for a sports game or a TV movie. It was only arguably of higher quality on the TVs of the era, and the fact its time shifting capability was half of what VHS could offer in the same time period made it a less attractive option.
(Both Betamax and VHS increased recording times as the format war wore on. However, after a certain point, merely being the entrenched winner has an impact on how the competition goes.)
I don’t think these other series you listed are anywhere close to the level GoT captured. They win awards and have big budgets and fans spread the word, but still nowhere near.
A lot of parents I know would not be at all comfortable allowing children under the age of 14 to watch this show (and for older kids only on a case-by-case basis) due to its incredibly violent & sexual content, horrific rapes depicted in detail, and extremely graphic sadism across the board.
Many adults wouldn't begin to consider watching it for these reasons. Sometimes I wish I hadn't.
But it's very far from how things were, say 20 years ago.
An interesting question is what the zeitgeist is now? I have two potential answers:
1. Nothing. The worlds has diversified on the net, and most people focus on their own smaller interests.
2. In terms of what everyone is talking and thinking about, my best answer is, unfortunately, Donald J Trump.
Later disks like M-disc type DVDs and Blu-ray don't use living components and don't really age
Also remember organic != living. Organic is basically hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen and carbon chains in molecules. They vary greatly in their durability and may or may not be useful to carbon-based life.
On the other hand, apparently there is a way for the YouTube creators to dictate where ad breaks will happen. I've seen at least two videos in which the person speaking said "and then YouTube will show you an ad right about... NOW"; lo and behold, an ad shows perfectly timed to when the speaker announces it.