Why TV Lost (2009)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
TV is still around and will be for a while yet, but it continues to fade.
^^^This.
I basically can't tolerate watching anything on ITV, Sky, or other commercial TV in the UK nowadays, nor for well over a decade, due to the frequency and quantity of ads. I also strongly object to what I presume is audio compression applied to ads to make them louder than surrounding scheduled programming.
And counter programming is an obnoxious practice.
Let's face it: lots of people have always wanted to watch what they want when they want to. Lots of people don't want to arrange their lives around the TV schedule. Good riddance to it.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/cable...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2vwgk9/tbs_spee...
I don’t remember where but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard show runners talking about it on DVD commentaries.
I wonder how many minutes of advertising or signups will be involved after 60 years of internet.
I can imagine a 20 years from now - to continue watching Netflix Original Series "Idiocracy Now: Season 2 Episode 7 - Jim invents plastic soil mulch" sign up for this exclusive opportunity to get a new AI robot dog....
Prime returns things you cannot watch without paying in its search
It forces you to watch ads before it starts the show
They've all barely gotten started, I assure you
Weird how this supposed lack of normalization never seems to result in overly quiet commercials...
Movie sound-engineers seem to have started doing the same.
I really don't understand why annoying ads have't become extinct, in accordance with the Darwin principle.
[Edit] And advertisers hire loud, shouty actors to present their ads; it's almost as if they were challenging us to change channel or stick in a DVD.
Congress mandated a very specific method for controlling loudness by incorporating an ATSC standards document. As long as broadcasters stick to the standard what is the FCC to do? See https://www.fcc.gov/media/policy/loud-commercials, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-111publ311/pdf/PLAW..., and https://www.atsc.org/atsc-documents/a85-techniques-for-estab...
The problem is less worse now than before circa 2011. Although most people have switched to streaming so they wouldn't realize.
Unfortunately it's because of the Darwin principle. While I hate them to death annoying stuff is more memorable than pleasant stuff - you can sit on a beach all day and get bitten by a mosquito at one point, you're definitely going to remember the mosquito more than hours of pleasant relaxation. Annoying loud crap gets our attention, I think, in part, because things that are annoying and loud are dangerous (both in the modern and historically) so we're trained to pay more attention to them. I wish it wasn't true but Advertising gains effectiveness from obnoxiousness - like if a marketing company could make your house smell like rotten fish every time they were blasting information about their insurance you'd sure as hell remember their name.
At some point in your childhood, you should desperately want something from an advertisement and get hopelessly let down with it, just so you can learn the lesson that advertisements lie.
“A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience.”
The biggest problem, IMO, with copyright in the current age is that the copyright holders want to adopt business models premised on controlling me and my experience. I’m not reluctant to paying for content, but if you make the experience suck I will work around you.
The ease of access is a key point for me. I am morally opposed to piracy under normal circumstances - but if you're levying a price that I need to pay with my time or sanity I'm going to table flip and go back to the dark side (or, more likely in the modern day, just not watch your crap since there's plenty of stuff out there).
Lost on the other hand was a mainstream viral popular show. Shows like Heroes for a small period of time had related hype. Or a film like Inception. South Park did a good take on Inception before they even watched it themselves. It may be dressed as intellectual, nerdy fodder. The hype of making them seem nerdier than they are is my anal geeky issue.
This entire comment is silly. I’m trying to rationalize my anal elitism with what really good media is. As if I or any one should be the arbiter for such things.
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Thanks for the Nebula name drop. The price is really cheap with coupon codes. I’m surprised Dropout is doing well enough. I thought it was effectively dead as the rest of College Humor is. Luckily CH’s big impact on my life, Jake & Amir web seriess, was sold back to the namesakes.
On the other hand, the last series was garbage.
Stop making buying your content so hard, impossible, or generally shit that it's easier to get illegally.
It's a feedback loop. Audiences increasingly switch to streaming, so companies are willing to pay less per a second of advertising. TV stations increase the amount of time dedicated to advertising to compensate, which drives more of the audience into streaming.
Consider that your feedback loop implies a kind of symmetry by which TV stations could presumably also increase revenue by decreasing ads and attracting viewers in the process.
If TV stations have good reason to believe that increasing the amount of time dedicated to ads would increase revenue, they would have already done so a long time ago regardless of streaming.
My suspicion is that TV is increasing ads because people are moving to streaming without any kind of feedback loop involved. Those who are left willing to watch TV will do so regardless of increased advertisements. It's not that ads are pushing people to streaming creating some kind of feedback loop, it's that people are simply moving to streaming because it's a better product across a multitude of factors and those who are stuck with TV will continue to be stuck with it, ads or no ads.
FM radio is dead; it just doesn't know it yet.
TV and FM ads are innocent children compared to the shameless promotions in youtube videos, for example, so I've learned to tolerate them, laugh at some of the worst ones, or just ignore/change station when I am not in the mood. TV is not dying in my house nor the radio in my car.
Radio used to mint money. I think what you’re seeing is the decline in the business led to consolidation, and now they are milking whatever they can get until they can sell the spectrum to someone.
So I decide to sit on one that I'll just wait through... but then I realize I've sat there for what feels like 5+ minutes (longer than one average song) still being bombarded with ads and justifyingly so decide that radio is no longer for me, and so off it goes for another year.
Why wouldnt TV companies do this in the past when TV was in the prime? Just increase number of ads and get more money. Clearly there is some limit as to how many ads to show because I dont believe they want to decrease the viewership numbers
How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining?
I'd say the more likely explanation is that there is a lag between audience loss and advertiser realisation of audience loss. TV stations manage to meet market growth expectations by exploiting this and pumping out overvalued ads to non-existent people. Over time, they've become increasingly reliant on this strategy to keep their heads above water as advertisers catch up to reality.
It can't go on forever, so they've now belatedly started their own streaming services to try and keep up.
It seems possible to me that folks who are still watching tv are more accepting of ads, whereas the folks who aren't/weren't moved to something else.
I could work real hard and try to provide more value to consumers and attract more customers, but as I said that's hard work and I'm not very creative so it may not even pan out.
I could also say, "Increase advertising by 5%!" and in the short term gain the same rewards as the other option, maybe even more. Then put that success story on my resume and move on.
At some point shareholders decided they wanted the second option. They all move on quickly as well.
That was past. Now that viewership is declining and alternative mass advertising opportunities are available what we're seeing is the death spiral. There's no natural scarcity making TV ad spots more valuable. Viewership is in decline. The only way to even maintain income levels is to increase the number of ads. If there is a formula on the perfect amount of ads, the inputs to that formula have changed.
And as such, they couldn't just run 25 minutes of ads and 5 minutes of show, because people wouldn't watch.
There are more ads now because the people who are left on linear TV are the people who are most die hard about watching it and will take more abuse, or simply don't have any idea what to do with their free time instead.
One reasonable answer to your question: TV companies didn't increase the number of ads because consumers would switch to a channel with fewer ads. In fact, they showed just enough ads to break even, as the marginal ad revenue per hour tended towards the cost of producing an hour of television (because of the perfectly competitive TV market you posit). Now the cost has stayed the same, but the number of eyeballs has dropped, so TV networks need to show more ads or go out of business.
The amount of time Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. try to keep their customers away from the content they came for is astonishing.
I recently deleted Twitter because they were spamming me with notifications in the app that they were not able to spam me with notifications outside the app for live streams I never showed the slightest interest in and half the posts were topics I never chose to follow.
Reddit is neatly as bad with their random top streamer stuffed into unrelated subs, daily requests to add more interests, and a popular and news tab that are toxic.
I don’t mind the occasional sponsored item but I am pretty sure Facebook is nearing a 1:1 ratio for junk to content. There most of the content is junk too. I just check my notifications at this point because I can’t make heads or tails of what they show and what they hide or the sort order of what they do choose to present.
It is like they learned nothing from why tv and radio dying and are competing to see who becomes irrelevant the fastest.
I accidentally went to TVguide.co.uk today, on a different PC to usual, not equipped with ad blocking, it was barely usable due to ads.
“You can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.”
My n=1 anecdote: Soon thereafter, I was typing the name of a song into iTunes, buying it for CAD 1.29, and listening to it right away. I spent hundreds of dollars a year on the iTunes Music Store.
It wasn’t peer-to-peer that some of us liked, it was making the experience as frictionless as possible. Rightsholders hate that, but they lose this argument every damn time. The winners in content are always those who make it easy.
p.s. In the 1950s, TV was the disruptive low-friction experience. You could turn on the set and watch Lucy and Desi right away, without buying tickets, getting dressed, and going to a theatre!
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* For sufficiently next-day values of “right away.”
Hmmm. That would be nice.
I watched a one-hour show last night (with a 6-minute ad-break) that rolled titles at the 40-minute point. There followed a 10-minute ad-break, and 10 minutes of trailers. All of the ads were low-grade - hearing aids, wills and equity-release, and charity donation pitches.
Why?
In the 80s there wasn't much choice, but today you can watch pretty much whatever you want when you want with no adverts, no catering for the lowest common denominator, and at least in the UK TV viewing has dropped so much that it's no longer needed to be social at work the next day (in the 80s everyone cared who shot dirty den or whatever in eastenders, as pretty much half the country watched it. Not so now)
* I was in the mood for a Twilight Zone episode
* I wasn't in the mood for that when I scheduled my recordings.
I normally only watch news bulletins live. I don't have a feed of $EVERYTHING; I have Freesat and a bunch of basic Sky channels, with catchup services such as iPlayer. I cancelled Netflix.
I'd subscribe to a service that offered $EVERYTHING, but it doesn't exist.
Apparently £276 a year, more than I pay for netflix, amazon, disney and spend on "other" things (like discovery on apple). And for that price you still get adverts forced down your throat.
Amazing.
I think sports on TV are the last remnant of that "who shot dirty den" business.
Then the girlfriend left, and I retired. No more TV sports for me.
Don't get me wrong I don't want to watch ads, but it's a strange and noticeable problem.
And now Instagram shows 1 ad every 3 posts/stories, which is getting closer to the ratio on TV.
Is it a broadcast medium with a fairly small number of networks?
Is it a non-broadcast medium with only 1 or 2 service providers in a given neighborhood/area?
Is it a particular format for story-telling, and if so, what is that format?
I am guessing there are other fundamental "what is it?" style questions that I'm not thinking of here.
From where I sit, it's way easier today than 5 years ago to find something new to watch, but way harder to find something great.
And I can't help thinking that this energy is gone. It's done, known, technology made everything available so there's no real drive needed to try setting up a show and broadcasting (an few iphones could do).
Look at the top 50 anime on MyAnimeList, probably the most used anime site. (https://myanimelist.net/topanime.php). This would be the equivalent of IMDb top 250.
- pre 2005 - 8
- 2006-10 - 5
- 2011-15 - 10
- 2016 to date - 27
You’d expect some recency bias but not to this extent unless recent anime was really good. I’ve seen most of these and they certainly deserve to be up there.
Look, I don’t doubt that you enjoyed shows from when you were a kid. I was obsessed with dragon ball z as a kid. But try watching it now, it’s just not that good. Nostalgia makes them better in our memories than they actually were.
I admit having next to no knowledge of today, beside a few returns from people watching animes (less positive than you). And in any case I don't think SS OST is bound to relativity, it's really instrumentally and harmonically extraordinary. I'd place it near or even above John Williams...
#1 all time on MyAnimeList and #19 all time on IMDb.
By the way I know you didn’t mention DBZ. It was an example of a show that I thought was incredible as a child and simply doesn’t hold up today. I speculate that some of your favourites could be the same.
Here's IMDb top 50 broken down by decade. There's no bias towards recent films. If anything, the 90s are overrepresented.
- 1950s and earlier - 7
- 60s 4
- 70s 4
- 80s 3
- 90s 17
- 00s 10
- 10s 5
The golden age was caused by cable networks venturing hard into original programing and it started right around the Sopranos. But the golden age ended 5-7 years ago as talent got spread too thin, the number of shows exploded, and the streaming services started pivoting to mass entertainment rather than critical acclaim.
But prior to the golden age, TV was very lowest common denominator. Almost everything aimed for the middle. Of course, there were great shows in all eras, but TV is much best post-2000 than pre-2000.
That doesn't mean they aren't good but I think it says something about where the money is more likely to go these days
DATA: Is there something wrong?
SONNY: Wrong? Only that your computer here fixed about the best martini I have ever had. I just might get to like this place. Let's see if the Braves are on. How do you turn on this teevee?
RIKER: TV?
SONNY: Yeah, the boob tube. I'd like to see how the Braves are doing after all this time. Probably still finding ways to lose.
DATA: I believe he means television, sir. That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year two thousand forty.
Yet here we are, 24 years on, with just 18 years to go to that 2040 date, and it looks like it may well work out about right - as in TV as a passive viewing habit (rather than actively seeking out an episode of the Mandalorian or Tom Scott or what-have-you)
Look what was predicted for 2024 from DS9 in 1995:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp...
"Sanctuary Districts" sounds like "Sanctuary City" - very bizarre naming. Not to mention the homelessness situation has started exploding lately.
As a side note, it seems very unlikely that a baseball team named the "Braves" will exist in the far future, even if baseball itself is still played in some form.
Not sure how GenZ engages, I hear more twitch/youtube/tiktok, but I think they still view a lot of TV shows too.
How could it possibly be more passive than "I just leave my TV on Fox News/MSNBC/CNN until I'm outraged about the right things"?
I wonder at what point will it become unprofitable to operate a TV station. In my location at least half of the OTA channels are religious broadcasting stations. Will non-profits take them over completely at some point?
There are so many choices and it's so fractured that there are no "big winners" anymore. But that's also a good thing, because the big winners weren't winners because they were good, they were winners because a network executive decided they would be winners.
Shows are still part of popular culture, it's just streaming instead of timed TV.
I don't know how the situation is in other countries, but down here in Brazil, 2/3 of OTA channels have become religious channels in the last 10-15 years.
And those channels are DEFINITELY FOR PROFIT. It's a disgusting scam, ripping off the elderly, the poor and the overall dumbest segments of the population. I have nothing against religion, I'm not religious myself but I can see how it can be beneficial for a lot of people. Having said that, the religious channels as they exist in Brazil should just disappear, and the world would be a better place. TV must die, it serves no useful purpose anymore.
Really the blackout exclusions that leagues have that allow them get higher cable revenue deals are the problem. But if that dynamic shifts and the deals are exclusive, I would expect the league-direct streaming services to become competitive.
No the broadcast frequency is too valuable. Right now TV stations are just holding on to their spectrum until they get a chance to sell it to cell phone companies and cash out.
Can a given market really support multiple PBS-like stations?
Why TV Lost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696 - March 2009 (183 comments)
Why TV Lost (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010956 - Dec 2010 (24 comments)
The replacement I bought this year will probably never have anything connected to its coax jack.
It’s the same reason the TV money start pouring into college football contracts around that time.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/30/squid-g...
True, it took them about a decade for legacy TV networks to finally start offering first-party streaming apps (Peacock, CBS All Access, etc.)
That's an odd assertion to make when you're talking about Reddit, where anyone can fork a subreddit at any time, or even the web where anyone can launch a website for free or without much expense that can be seen by almost anyone on Earth, or even Donald Trump whose every word and deed still makes headline news and who is currently launching his own multimedia platform.
Speaking of which, Trump and his followers have to be the least censored "censored" political group in history. They're constantly shouting from every social media platform and every comment section about how censored they are. It's ridiculous.
And what has been the impact been of Trump's ban? He's still perfectly capable of getting his message out. His followers are perfectly willing to move to non-mainstream sites like Parler and Gab, and they're still all over the mainstream sites to boot. He's still the overwhelming favorite for the GOP in 2024, and he's starting a social media platform and possibly a streaming TV deal. Trump simply not being President anymore has had a bigger chilling effect than being deplatformed.
As always, the right's hatred of the left has led them to overplay their hand. It's obvious to everyone that neither Trump nor his supporters are oppressed, suppressed or censored in any meaningful way, and certainly not to the degree that they claim.
Well, I'm not a Trump supporter, and have no horses in the left/right race- however, it seems obvious to me that there is censorship involved, given Trump is literally banned from those platforms. Anecdata- the only time I ever saw anything Trump had to say was on Twitter, and since his banning, he might as well not exist in my own infosphere. It's amazing to watch the pretzels people tie themselves in trying to justify their ideology.
I really hope you’re not going to complain “I tried commenting on HN but I got downvoted”
https://old.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/ is surely better then the one you mentioned (but it gets a lot less exposure).
I do use Yandex and other websites when what I'm looking for is hidden (but the list of websites that aren't censoring (or are censoring different stuff) is shrinking).