TV is broken
minimalmac.com
minimalmac.com
Young children have a tenancy to think that the rest of the world is exactly like their home, because that home is their world. Then when they experience the outside world things seem strange.
Like the above anecdote, I remember thinking it was weird when a neighbor made Taco Salad with Frito's instead of Doritos.
I remember how weird my grandmaa's house seemed all around when visiting. The food was different, the board games were different, it was all strange.
I think this anecdote is the same. Its not so much a case of the wisdom of the children, but just another example of a child not understanding that the entire world isn't like their sheltered existence. [I don't intend sheltered as a pejorative here.]
I'm sure there were plenty of other things on the trip that seemed broken, but none happened to be as evil as commercial TV.
Thanks to BBC iPlayer, we've had near-universal internet video on demand in the UK for some years now - and the other broadcasters had to copy to catch up. I largely stopped bothering with TV schedules; I just watch the programs at my convenience, from a menu of content - it's a far superior user experience in almost every way. In browsing UK profiles on dating sites, I've noted huge numbers of people saying they don't have TVs and just use iPlayer.
When I was young I used to react with incredulity to the idea that homes didn't have TVs and cars in the past. I remember the incredulity to which some children reacted when I took a photo on my film SLR and they couldn't see it on the back. Landline phones are already dying - children will react with horror that we used to ring a building and hope a person was in it.
And, within the next ten years, scheduled network broadcast TV will, to all intents and purposes, die. Rolling news and live sports have a reason to be live and I suspect will stay. Otherwise, I expect in 20 years time to be getting baffled looks from children to the idea that we used to have to wait to all watch a program at the exact same time and if we couldn't see it then we didn't see it. They'll all be have grown up with streaming VoD to tablets and TVs and anything else will feel as antiquated as a horse and cart.
There's thinking something is bad because it's different, and then there's thinking it's bad because it SUCKS. I grew up on commercial TV. Now I can't stand commercials, and I think HULU is absolutely insane for not having a "no commercial" tier -- and for charging you and STILL running the commercials.
I would SO rather pay for my media than have commercials interrupt it. It's not a kid being uncomfortable with an unfamiliar situation; it IS annoying to have your program interrupted.
And I'm not even militant about advertising -- I don't run ad blockers, and I even click on ads from time to time. What I can't forgive is people wasting my TIME. I have a finite amount of that (and why am I posting on Hacker News..? sigh...), and people showing me ads for things that I have ABSOLUTELY no interest in is nothing but a waste of my time AND their advertising money. HULU has a little button where you can tell them an ad isn't relevant to you, but it seems as if they ignore it. What a waste...
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
Weirdo.
My fancy expensive name-brand digital TV takes a full minute to boot up from a cold start, longer than it took my tube based TV from the 1950s to warm up.
Once on, it takes almost a full second to change channels while it rebuffers the stream of the channel being changed to. This prevents quickly flipping through channels to see what is on.
As a result I just don't bother most of the time. Which is fine, I watch much less TV.
We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.
I used to watch TV, like most people. Then, in the 1990's, the number of channels started increasing. More options, great. Twice as many channels did allow for more specialization, so maybe there were twice as many things I wanted to watch. When it reached four times as many channels, though, there were still only twice as many things I wanted to watch. Ten times as many channels, and now I wasn't sure if there were even twice as many as in the old days, because the budgets for the good shows were being spread among more shows to provide vehicles for more ads in all those new broadcast channel-hours.
Then, along came TiVo. Ah, TV was fun again. I could skim the cream. Couldn't imagine life without it. But as the years passed, the things I grabbed with TiVo were losing quality, too, seemingly bleeding budget to the shows "out there" that my TiVo and I ignored.
Then, my TV set broke. I assumed I'd have to get a new one quickly because, of course, everyone had to have a TV, right? I was sure I'd go crazy without it.
But I didn't. As time passed, I found I grew less motivated to get a new one, not more.
Well, after years of no TV, we finally got one a few weeks ago, so we wouldn't have to gather 'round the laptop for Netflix and slide shows of family vacations. The image is spectacular. But I can't believe what I'm so clearly seeing. They may call themselves The Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, History Channel, Food Network, Science Channel, or whatever, but they're all "Paid Programming", reality for rednecks, and pseudoscience for suckers, punctuated by screaming ads.
Even the islands of quality have clearly suffered extreme beach erosion.
But at least DVR technology has improved. Sorry, JUST KIDDING. You'd think that after years of Moore's Law, Comcast could make a cable box that didn't act as though I was waking it from a nap with each key press. You'd think that a product called an "HD DVR" would have an HD interface (wouldn't you?), instead of one with the display resolution of the lower half of a Nintendo DS. You'd think with so few needles hidden in the haystack of broadcasting, their interface would help you navigate the guide and find shows to watch, but apparently nobody at Comcast HQ has ever used Amazon to find a book.
Either that or they never watch TV.
They also managed to build a free streaming service superior to Hulu, and a bunch of great websites.
It costs $230 per year ($19 per month). And there will never be any ads.
The BBC still does produce a large amount of quality progamming, but budgets and purposes have been affected. Top Gear for example used to be about cars but is now an entertainment show - a wildly successful entertainment show, but no longer something you'd seriously watch to get an idea of what cars to buy and what to avoid. The BBC is also responsible for the One Show, which one day will be recognised by the UN as a crime against humanity. There's also been considerable dumbing down of shows like the Apprentice and Dragon's Den over time, eschewing quality in favour of personalities and entertainment. The natural history unit still put out good documentaries, but even they're not entirely untarnished[2].
The quality of news has also suffered, particularly thanks to spin doctors in previous administrations, the simon gilligan dodgy dossier affair and other stresses on the BBC. When was the last time you saw a proper debate? The other week I saw Alastair Campbell jogging around forests, talking up the end of civilisation through alcoholic poisoning brought on by drinking at home, demanding minimum pricing as the only way out but completely ignoring the impact of the smoking ban as a factor in home drinking increases. It was a terrible attempt at a documentary and a case study in what's wrong with the BBC at the moment.
I do apologise for getting on my soap box about this, you didn't deserve it for pointing out the good stuff. Still, the BBC is not a perfect organisation and the amount of media it has to produce combined with political interference has meant that quality has dropped, perhaps not as much considering the volume of material it puts out, but it isn't immune.
[1] - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/08/today-pr...
[2] - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8950070/Fr...
I'd certainly take commentary from the commercial UK press with a pinch of salt, though. They have a tremendous amount to gain from the BBC's demise.
But I don't think your second reference is really a fair criticism, and I think this was blown completely out of proportion in the UK. I certainly didn't feel that the series was "tarnished". After all, getting a camera inside an actual polar bear den in the arctic? I think that'd be somewhat invasive. Still a beautifully shot, enjoyable and educational series.
The BBC has also been responsible for all of Adam Curtis's documentaries, which are often excellent, and still get made (although the most recent one was perhaps not so good, but I digress).
Proper debate occasionally happens on Newsnight, although I think Jeremy Paxman's role has developed into some sort of entertainer of late.
They did spend a lot of time paying vast amounts to... Jonathan Ross.
It's disingenuous enough when the word 'stealing' is re-purposed in discussions about copyright infringement, since it is very doubtful that every copy of a shared file resulted in an actual loss.
In this case, though, it seems easy enough to establish that the BBC has provided no way to compensate them for viewing their content from the United States. You might be "stealing" bandwidth in some sense, but I don't think it's fair to characterize the content as stolen in this case. The third party (VPN/proxy provider) is paid for network access just like you pay an ISP, not for the content itself.
I doubt it's easy, but they've been working on it for a while now and it should be available fairly soon.
I agree that it may not be fair to characterise the content as 'stolen'; I chose to use that term out of laziness. However, it's definitely not fair to consume the content without paying, either. It increases the financial burden on the UK license payer. Many of the BBC's shows are available to a US audience - you just have to buy them on Amazon, or stream them on Netflix.
I only need a licence if I watch tv broadcast live. Everything is defined in law; the devices used to receive (which include smart phones and computers) and the signals (which weirdly include for example French telly received via satellite). A person could hate the BBC and all its output and never watch it but still need to pay the licence fee.
Personally, I welcome the BBC but the enforcement of the licence has been sub-optimal in the past.
The licence fee made perfect sense when it was created, it arguably has been unfair to consumers since VHS became popular.
And I have noticed the same effect in respect to commercials. I cannot stand watching them and refuse to watch anything that suddenly interrupts and starts showing commercials (so I stopped using Hulu eventually as well because of it). Extended family members think I am crazy for being so "fussy" and I think they are crazy for putting up with annoying commercials.
I'd say if you were not watching "The Wire" or "Six Feet Under" that you're missing out on something rather interesting. "The Wire" was unique partially because it was like a very long, very good movie in terms of quality and respect for the audience.
There's so much good television now that I don't have patience for the argument that TV is worthless. I don't turn on the television except to watch something specific but when I do I find the quality seems to get better year after year even with my favorite shows ending. More shows are willing to experiment and try to reach new audiences.
I won't speak to the shows on Discovery or whatever since they sound dumb to me but the shows with actual plot and characters are better than ever.
Going from 3 to 300 channels did not help. What really cut into their budget was a steady drop in viewership over time as new toys simply become more compelling than TV. Reality TV is simply what happened when keep cutting the budget.
PS: Seinfeld reportedly turned down a $5 million per-episode offer to continue the show for a 10th year. You can put on a full season of a reality TV show for that.
I dislike the fact that they make such a big deal about the number of channels available. DirectTV, for example, offers between 140 and 285 channels! Who would want to flip through that many channels?!
The UX around TVs is horrific right now, and people put up with it because that's how it is. There's enormous room for a dramatic UX improvement and it doesn't seem like the incumbents realize this.
Without having read the article I'm guessing Apple will introduce something along the lines of 'Siri TV' dispensing with the remote control as they did with the stylus but instead of substituting it with fingers we'll use another built in human control device that you don't have to lug around or keep track of, your voice. It gets around the issue of needing a keyboard where a TV is web-enabled in so far as you can easily search YouTube or Google for content by voice and it solves the dilemma of the lost or sitting on the other side of the room remote.
First off, iTV or whatever it's going to be called, doesn't need Siri yet - see this: http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2671593...
Siri is a game changer, but Apple's current implementation on the 4S isn't adequate. Whether it's bandwidth problems (due to bad coverage) or misunderstood commands due to noise, my experience with Siri has been mixed - it's a tough problem, but the results aren't there yet, at least for basics such as "(find|what is the|call) number of $mycityname water department". Strangely, the "speak text" feature seems to work pretty well almost anywhere... I have no problems editing contacts in the car.
The ideal climate control interface should never even have to be looked at. It should just know what to do with your heating/cooling equipment to make your house comfortable.
A ideal TV interface should help you do a lot of things, and ideally be fast in the process.
(The article was down while I was writing this comment, but cable equipment and TVs drive me nuts.)
That's kind of a judgement call - there's nothing wrong with a minimal interface that does what you want it to and nothing more.
Kind of like Chrome as a browser - Google's big thing with its design was minimal and out of your way, so you can focus on the web page (the reason you're running the browser in the first place).
In any case, modern TVs suck at doing either of these things. I wouldn't mind which way they go as long as they do one of them.
It's not just the UX that's broken for TVs, it's the pricing as well. Apple has strong success stories in pricing as well as UX - witness the original iPhone data plan ($20/mo for unlimited data + 200 texts from one of the top-4 providers? very good) or the iPad (both the device and initial data plan).
This really stems from relative non-existent competition in the cable box industry. The consumer doesn't usually get to choose, its just whoever got the deal with Comcast or whoever.
The solution to this, which has been and will continue to be fought adamantly by cable providers, is allowing CableCARD/M-CARD support. It lets you plug in a little card that will allow any device to decode the cable stream.
Its not a full solution though, most people just don't care and the cablebox is usually 'free', why pay for something better?
The other major source of delay is video compression, as defined by MPEG. MPEG uses bi-directional compression in the time domain, which means that frames are sent out of order, which in turn means that they have to be buffered. Furthermore, a complete frame, known as an I frame, is only sent every 10 or so frames (it depends on the profile of the transmission channel - is it lossy or not for example). As the P and B frames are basically diffs from the base I frame, you can't decode an image until you have received an I frame. This too introduces a delay of typically 0.25 seconds, and is the reason why even unencrypted digital is slower for changing channels than analog.
This drives me crazy. I have a computer hooked up to my TV (for the same reason as the OP, we basically watch just streaming or my digitized DVD collection) and every time I upgrade the display drivers, and sometimes just randomly, the display goes wonky and I have to fix it by hand. I don't have to do that with my computer monitor...
This is a feature not a bug. Most people don't understand aspect ration and in fact will get upset if a standard def video doesn't fill the HD screen.
Actually, it is probably just laziness on the manufacturers part but it works out well for most consumers.
The only explanation I have for this is sense of entitlement: "I paid dearly for each of these pixels so you better use all of them, no matter how bad the picture looks like!"
I guess the time before a key frame appears can vary from up to a second to as low as 0, depending on when you happen to switch. It could be that a few frames, or 0.1 seconds becomes significant at that point, though you're right that it's likely to make little difference. I was not aware of the key frame issue until now, though; thanks for enlightening.
It's a tradeoff. More keyframes means faster seeking (when you seek in a video, it has to start from a keyframe too, for the same reasons), but larger data rates for the same image quality.
For HDMI connections, this isn't the TV's fault (actually I think my TV doesn't even let you change the aspect ratio for HDMI inputs.) For SD component/composite, there is no aspect ratio information in the signal so the TV cannot determine it correctly and generally defaults to assuming 16:9 because most people stupidly prefer 4:3 content to be stretched to 16:9.
Since there's nowhere near 720 pixels x 60 frames/sec worth of information being sent to your TV, who cares?
HDMI 1.3 and 1.4 support up to 10.2Gb/sec bandwidth. The video is not compressed, the audio may or may not be. So why would you think that there isn't 720p x 60fps being sent to the tv?
The max video you can get through HDMI is 4096×2160p24 @ 24bit color completely uncompressed which is several times the bandwidth needed for 1280x720p60 @ 24bit color.
Also, depending on the video source, there might very well be a 720p x 60Hz signal being sent to the TV.
Let's do the arithmetic:
720p is 1280x720 pixels
RGB = 24 bits/pixel
60 frames/sec
1280x720x24x60 = 1.3 Gbps
For comparison: Full broadcast HD is around 15 Mbps
Why people think they can see full 720p worth of information is beyond me.
EDIT: Pay attention to the last sentence and the posts above. Of course I don't think people can see 1.3G worth of info.
Again: Why people think they can see full 720p worth (=1.3G) of information is beyond me.
So your argument is that compression doesn't exist? Do you also listen to 128kb WAV files and argue that they are equivalent to 128kb MP3s?
> Why people think they can see full 720p worth of information is beyond me.
From a distance of about 8 feet on a TV about 50 inches in size, the difference between 720p and 1080p is visible to a person with 20/20 vision. The eye cannot perceive 720p worth of pixels at once, but in the small spot the center of a person's vision is on, pixel density matters a lot.
Both of us find it hard to imagine people can actually tolerate watching TV that way, even though we've done the same for a long time.
But imho it's not so much TV that is broken. It's advertising. In today's world of on-demand personalized information, advertising has zero value. It's just noise. In SF movies we often see a world full of advertising everywhere, with lots of sound and motion. I like to believe the (near) future will be exactly the opposite: the advertising industry, no longer adding any value or generating any ROI, will collapse. Taking old school "broken" TV with it.
Agreed. It's simply a bad business model; you're the product, not the customer, etc. It also has a hugely distorted effect on content production, incentivizing shows to shoot for safe returns and broad appeal instead of monetizing hardcore fans of innovative niche programming. Put simply, I want businesses to care whether they have my money, not my eyeballs.
I cut most forms of advertising out of my life 7-8 years ago: no radio, no broadcast TV, and FlashBlock+AdBlock. Once you do so, it's hard to go back. (Although YouTube's trend towards more and more video ads is getting frustrating; I wish I could throw $20/month at YouTube Pro or something to make it go away.)
There's definitely quality non-profit radio stations (NPR affiliates, for example) depending on where you live. At worst you get the fund drives that are annoying (but understandable) for a week.
EDIT: This assumes you're in the U.S., though.
Fortunately, I'm seeing more and more cars support USB interfaces. Now I can just load up a USB stick (they are so cheap) with my music and old episodes of This American Life and I'm good to go for hundreds of miles.
I have no idea why they don't have any talking or ads, but i don't mind. I suspect it's because this is an offshoot station--there is the normal station, with more mainstream classic rock, talking and ads and then there is this "HD2" station with no ads and different music.
I really don't know why they run this station or even how it makes any money, but it's there and it's nice. So, for whatever reason, not all commercial stations have ads.
I've switched to Pandora and my mp3 collection on my phone. I pipe that to my car stereo, which works well enough.
It's like a casino that sells cheap dinners. Clearly, they want you to eat the cheap dinner and lose much more money gambling. But you're allowed to eat it and leave. If they wanted to prohibit that, they could make the dinner available only to those who gamble. But if they haven't set that condition, you don't have to obey it.
All that said, I don't mind tasteful ads. I don't block ads on StackOverflow because they're interesting. I do block ads on Yahoo Mail (on the rare occasions that I log into my throwaway account there) because they're annoying and often offensive. If Yahoo says to me, "we're closing your account because you block our ads", I will say "that's fine."
There are services I'm willing to pay for and services I'll only use if they're free. Looking at ads is a form of payment. Some sites are worth it, and others aren't.
What happens to Google & Facebook without advertising?
I'd still rather pay for GMail instead of seeing ads.
You can; it costs $50/year, though: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html
disclosure: I have no affiliation with Fastmail.fm other than being a longtime customer.
I don't know about you, but I would pay for Gmail in a heartbeat. It's a great service. I can guarantee that Comcast would make something 1,000 times crappier and that I'd waste hundreds of hours of my life fighting with it.
In fact, I'd rather be paying for Gmail so that I'd be their customer and not their product. I'm happy that I pay for Pinboard because I know that it motivates them to please me and not someone else to whom they can sell my data. And I'm happy because my payment is an investment in the continued existence of a service I value.
You're asserting that Gmail and Google search aren't valuable enough for people to pay for them. If that's true, they shouldn't exist in a free market. But I don't think it's true.
> You're asserting that Gmail and Google search aren't valuable enough for people to pay for them. If that's true, they shouldn't exist in a free market.
The free market involves advertising. How much entertainment in paid for with advertising? Should none of that exist? Should, e.g., "How I Met Your Mother" be cancelled? I seriously doubt it would exist in an advertisement-free market.
If you have internet through your cable provider they already have to make sure the signal gets to your house and you're already in the computer, so adding you as a TV subscriber costs them nothing at all.
I never watch broadcast TV, but when my internet connection goes down it's a handy troubleshooting tool - when I flip the TV on and see car commercials it means there's no cable break.
TV viewership in hours per week is pretty stable because as boomers retire and become disabled and unable to do anything else, they watch more TV. Young people, like under 50, are turning away from TV.
Generation X and younger people have been falling out of love with TV for a long time. In my case I remember sharply losing interest in TV around the 1990s. Even around 2000 I felt insulted by advertising that is aimed at people who don't have money -- only medicare benefits they can spend and the hope that they can hire a ambulance chasing lawyer to make a big killing.
TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it.
Some day the last television viewer will die and the cable companies and networks will turn off the lights. Much like the music industry, the TV industry has been losing it's audience for a long time, and one day they will wake up and realize that their frog has been boiled -- and find somebody else to blame.
I am curious about what you mean by 'TV for kids'.
It seems to me that 'kid shows' have been pretty good since the early nineties (Ducktales, Animaniacs, Gargoyles, the DC Animated universe cartoons). More recently: Kim Possible, Spectacular Spider-Man, Samurai Jack, Sym-Bionic Titan, Transformers Animated, the Avengers and Young Justice have been phenomenal with respect to writing, voice acting and animation. This is one area where I'm a little envious of kids these days.
I grew up with cartoons made to sell toys. They get shows made to tell (good) stories.
EDIT:Spelling
You may think it's crap, but go back and watch the sitcoms you watched as a kid (Brady Bunch for me). It's even worse than you remember.
I certainly never see them on cable when I visit friends and family. I saw Kim Possible once a long time ago, and I also was really impressed with Teen Titans, enough to get the box set.
Are these on a channel they don't get? On AMZN or Netflix? Or do you just have to get them through BitTorrent?
There might be some good stuff, but it's never on. Spongebob Squarepants is always on... I wonder if there's a connection.
Honestly, the only way I'd ever go back to cable is if I had an a la carte system; and then I'd take Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, G4, Discovery Channel and their affiliates. I don't want/need the rest...
(also, haven't paid for cable in > 2 years. Netflix, Redbox, Vudu are my friends)
Also check out Sym-Bionic Titan, it's the Firefly of animated TV shows.
Which is extremely entertaining, by the way. Also, oddly enough, it has formed quite the internet cult following. I think it's quite the cute show.
It's annoying that my kids and I can only watch it in letterboxed SD. I've torrented HD versions (from an HD stream of the same channel, no less), and it looks great.
You are clearly not watching excellent kids shows like Dinosaur Train, Sesame Street, or Word Girl. Of course, these are all PBS show... interesting. We don't get cable and only sometimes catch an episode of something else on Netflix, so maybe you're right, but PBS is still putting out top notch stuff.
Just another happy PBS watcher here.
Back when he was young (three) I could never get him to sit still in front of that stuff.
From my point of view, all of that e/i stuff on broadcast was invented by some liberals who want to turn off the next generation to TV.
Have you considered that it may not be the quality of the TV, it may be him? Some kids don't want to consume, they want to do. It's not bad, but trying to get a kid like that to watch TV will be hard no matter how good it is.
You're right though, that is a tough age. Part of the problem is that kids in the 9-12 range don't want educational. You can grab DVDs of the old Batman animated series or similar, but if you want educational you are stretching. Most local stations have to purchase e/i programming themselves to meet their requirements, so the production qualities tend to reflect "local budgets". There is some good stuff out there (Aqua Kids used to be pretty good, but it's been a couple of years) but it's so hit and miss. If you think what you've got is bad, look through the catalog sometime and see what your station rejected...
That's one of the reasons I like PBS so much. He could still do Arthur, WordGirl, Cyberchase, The Electric Company or Fetch! (which is not my favorite show, but I bet a nine year old would like it). If he's not digging those, have you tried Nova ScienceNow? That one has the added benefit of Neil Degrass Tyson.
This is definitely not the case. People still like watching television and consume those programs, but now people are finding other options besides cable to fill that role, such as streaming and digital purchase (and piracy).
The movie industry, for one thing, is intelligent about pricing. In particular, if you want to see a movie you've got a choices that range between a 3D theatre ticket, $40 collectors editions, usually several Blu-Ray and DVD editions with different features, $5 bargain disks as well as movie channels, Vudu, Netflix, Redbox and other things.
Now, in the long term it's an interesting question if "TV" is the same medium if you watch it going by on a set or if you watch it prerecorded on your own schedule. There are certainly forms of "TV" like cable news and the weather channel that will dry up and blow away in the digital transition.
Proof?
>Generation X and younger people have been falling out of love with TV for a long time
Proof?
>TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it.
Proof?
>Much like the music industry, the TV industry has been losing it's audience for a long time, and one day they will wake up and realize that their frog has been boiled -- and find somebody else to blame.
Not watching tv doesn't make you cooler.
I don't enjoy feeding trolls often, but I've to ask: would you ask a US WWII veteran for `Proof?' if he were to exclaim, as a matter of fact, that "[his] generation hated the Axis powers before 1941"?
Asking for citations is a poor attempt to discredit another's claims. Why don't you form your own counterargument instead?
I have an expensive cable package. But I am also a frequent Bittorrent user because the process of finding and watching is far preferable to the online services, and sometimes the cable on-demand service. As a result, I often "steal" via Bittorrent, content I've already paid for. Not sure whether I'll keep that expensive cable package much longer.
My kids are older and know what commercials are, but they are growing up knowing that TV networks (via cable or online) are just not usable. They have now, and will expect in the future, a large selection of content, and instant delivery with no interruptions.
Yes, the commercials can be grating, and are still annoying but I think that is a small price to pay for streaming my content when I want. Also they are not NEARLY as long as the commercials on TV and if a TV commercial is really loud (I'm looking at you eHarmony commercial) and you complain they will actually do something about it.
Hulu may have its limitations because of stupid studio rules, but overall the experience of watching content online with Hulu is pretty straightforward and easy.
I would happily pay for Hulu Plus Plus, where the extra plus means I pay more and they turn off the commercials. But I'm unwilling to pay for Hulu Plus at all.
At one point they were experimenting with a "Watch one long commercial at the beginning then no interruptions" thing, which was fantastic, but I guess they nixed that, because I haven't seen it the last few times I've been on Hulu.
1. Subscribing does not remove commercials.
2. A large number of the shows on Hulu cannot be played through a set-top box like a Roku.
Perhaps more interesting is my older brother (approaching retirement age), who doesn't stream content but consumes through cable. Even when watching currently playing shows he records to DVR and delays watching long enough that he can skip commercials.
It seems to me that the old broadcast model was always awful, but it used to be the only thing going. The first hints of its eventual demise really first appeared with easy access to movie rentals and home video recorders.
This year, I watched all NFL through the RedZone channel. It increased the amount of games that I could follow, but eliminated all the commercials. It does take some of the suspense out of it though, since you don't really get a good flow for a single game. It also helped that I recently moved to CA from Indy and got DirecTV Sunday Ticket to watch Colts games. That was before we knew how bad their season was going to be, so I wasn't too invested in following particular games.
When people hear that I don't have cable, many are confused that I can receive HD programming over the air. The cable companies have done a brilliant job confusing the public into believing that you must have cable to watch TV and/or access HD content.
We couldn't be happier. I challenge anyone to give up paying for cable tv. Good luck!
I tried to set up Netflix for someone who was bed-ridden and the fact that the nurse has to keep going in and selecting the next movie after the previous one is done is just agonizing. I love Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo but at least for people with accessibility issues, "what's on" is still more convenient than "what do I want to watch".
I feel like the young girl every time I'm at a friends house and trying to navigate whatever cable/sat guide they have. Seriously, it's 2012 and I'm paging through this endless list of "channels" labeled by NUMBER and a CALLSIGN? 1006 WKOW-HD. 12.1 ABC. Try to watch Jeopardy and get assaulted with denture paste, hearing aides, and adult diaper commercials! What the heck is going on? It is truly astonishing how bad the UI for these set-top boxes is, combined with the process of finding out what and where the correct ESPNx channel (HD or not HD) is to watch the game.
Huge potential for serious changes in this industry. I don't like to throw such a vague word like "app" around, but that is the future. ESPN will have an app that will deliver their content in the best way. The closest thing I've seen to this is the work Major League Baseball is doing on mobile and TV. They're able to provide the video/audio, but augment it with other datastream. For sports this makes so much sense.
Showtime has started doing this thing where you logon to their website while the show is premiering to do/see something but I've never done it because I DVR Showtime shows. Showtime had a press release that they were going to launch their own version of HBO Go but I've not see anything.
I'm excited. I think premium channels like this are going to be the change.
Etc. etc. The list goes on indefinitely...
Beatrix isn't the customer. She's the product being sold. TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things.
Hopefully young Beatrix is an outlier like her parents and she'll never get hooked. But it could be that, like most adults, she'll get used to sitting there through the commercials, wasting 8 minutes of her life to get 22 minutes of entertainment. Plus, of course, whatever she wastes on buying things that she doesn't need.
That's exactly what's happening, though. Most adults don't sit through commercials any more. The percentage of people who don't get their shows through the internet and don't skip over commercials with a DVR is something like 33%. I'd bet my last dollar that demographic skews elderly in a major way, too.
When visiting DVR-using friends, I see them watching some commercials (especially, if it's interesting, the first one of a group). And I know that some people who get their TV over the Internet end up seeing ads (e.g., Hulu, YouTube, network sites).
So I suspect that a fair number of ads still get watched, but I can't quickly find any data on how many versus past years.
So the real question is, once the current younger generation gets older and everyone switched off their cable, how will the production of quality content be financed, other than per-view fees?
When I was a kid in Germany there were three channels, all publicly financed, to a large extent via a per-household radio/TV fee. TV was only broadcasting for a few hours a day. The overall quality was very high and commercials were in a block between shows. I'd love to go back to that model but I doubt the general public would agree.
This is it. The same as music has been doing for years. It's not like there's not an existing model for this, direct to video movies have existed for a long time (though they were generally considered "low quality" and thus didn't get theater time). Netflix is already in the original content business and I think we'll see more of that. The problem then becomes the translation of content silos to the Internet. I have a Netflix subscription because it has the most stuff. I have no intention of getting a subscription to Hulu Plus or the myriad of content producers individual plans (the future HBO.com, AMC.com, etc.) Hopefully they can find a way to aggregate pay-per-view into a consistent online platform.
On broadcast TV there is nothing but the e|i junk that is so unwatchable that the category must have been invented by the author of "four arguments for the elimination of television".
On cable there's an amazing number of channels, but the only sure things are Spongebob Squarepants (yuck!) and those live action dramas by Disney about impossibly rich teenagers who have no discernable problems.
At least kids in Japan get to watch animated shows about cute girls who beat up the bad guys that are formulaic but have a level of art, writing, and voice acting that make American TV programming look like the stuff I make with a cheap camcorder.
Slightly off topic, but the messages, subliminal messages, and methods of targeting these commercials do are sickening. I think some of them and their authors should be tried for criminals.
How is it okay that, for example, jewellery commercials basically attempt to trick female minds into defining love and levels of love by the metals and rocks their loved one purchases for them? How is a 5 year old supposed to know better?
The thing that advertisers don't seem to understand is that we consumers are actually interested in the right ad's. I would choose to watch the new trailer for Game of Thrones - Season Two for example. Or an add for the new Honda Element, if I were shopping or just curious what the new model looked like.
All the sponsored by ads could be google-style customized to the viewer, and the view-rate would likely be higher than it is now where I DVR skip pretty much all ad's since there is no easy way for me to know what is being shown.
On top of all that, advertisers would be able to know exactly how many people were actually watching their ads. They could even add in interactive 'like/dislike' voting to further determine the effectiveness of the ad.
I thought of all this 5-6 years ago when DVR's really got popular. It seemed to me an obvious way to 'evolve' TV, and I'm pretty surprised something like this hasn't already happend. I guess it's expecting too much from an industry that is used to just shoveling ads at us from all angles, the idea of 'choice' is probably pretty scary/imposible for them.
Maybe this is the way Apple intends to crack TV?
http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-rules-restricting-lou...
I went through the motions, and had an entertaining exchange with my sister. Something like:
Me: "I just selected 'Modern Family'. Why is 'Modern Family' not playing now? I just see a short description and no 'play' button."
Her: "Don't you remember how tv works? It's not on right now, this is just a tv guide"
Me: "I guess tv is worthless. I hope nobody paid any money for this"
I wasn't being deliberately obtuse. I was genuinely surprised at how much it sucked, and I really do not understand why so many people pay so much money for it.
Until a few years ago I didn't really mind ads - I would happily sit through them until my show came back.
Then in mid-2009 gocompare.com launched their ad campaign (with Wynne Evans singing.) They pushed it really hard - it was on nearly every show on every channel. The song was so irritating that I got into the habit of muting the TV during the commercial breaks.
If I had been a TV network executive, I would have refused to run those ads. They are so awful that they encourage viewers to avoid ads, and I'll bet it has decreased revenue from other advertisers.
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_-9QFvhQWo&noredirect=1
I'm not sure what TV you're watching, but good content is significantly harder for me to find on traditional TV than the internet.
Yes, because there's rarely any good content on in the first place. You're just forced to settle for something mediocre, or not watch TV.
Just use Google: http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&ix=hca&sourceid=chr...
Or some similar search engine.
I do not watch much TV to begin with, but when I do, I will load up Netflix and see if anything catches my eye. Most times I'll spend 30 minutes looking for something and then simply give up and move on to something more interesting. Having access to even more content just makes the problem worse, not better.
Sometimes I'll catch wind of good programming recommendations from others, but those sources are easily exhausted. The internet does a much better job. I can just turn up here and I'll probably find at least 50% of the links interesting at any given time. TV needs something like that.
Seriously. Someone make a hacknews/reddit-style discovery system for TV. Channels become subreddits. If you finish item one, item two starts automatically.
(btw that illegal torrent u suggest is still going to take hours to download)
I think you need to double-check your math. I just found a Bluray rip of the Hurt Locker on a torrent site that is 3.78 GB. Using my 24 Mbps fiber connection ($55/month, in America), it would take:
3.78 GB * (1024 MB/GB) * (8 MB/Mb) * (1 s/24 Mb) * (1 min/60 s) = 21.5 mins
Also, there are plenty of fly-by-night sites that have full episodes of most shows that people care about. I won't link to any here, but just Google "watch full episode" and you'll see what I mean.
>"Also, what about the illegal factor?" As long as gullible sheep continue to finance shows by paying to watch ads on cable, I'll continue to not waste my life watching ads or waiting for them to play what I want to watch. To hell with imaginary property.
Then i suppose you also give your work away and your house doesnt have windows or doors, and your life is not really yours alone (all property is imaginary, it's just a convention).
Yes, I use a private torrent site that I've been a member of for more than 5 years. Speed is never an issue.
> Also, what about the illegal factor?
As I said, I use a private torrent site. The risk is minimal when most anti-piracy organizations will be focusing on low-hanging fruit like public torrents and file hosting services (such as Rapidshare and the now-defunct Megaupload).
I miss analog.
First, while the attention span of adults is normally quite a bit better than that of kids, the digital age is eroding our ability to focus on one thing http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312119/Faceb.... While this may be a temporary trend as we adapt to the information overload the internet can provide, I think it's fairly safe to say that people 10 years from now will be far less likely to sit patiently watching TV than people 20 years ago.
The most obvious implication from this may be that commercial advertising, rather than TV in general, is going to need to adapt. I imagine part of the reason why people under 30 are cutting the cable in increasing numbers is because they aren't willing to sit through loud, irrelevant commercials in order to watch something they don't actually want to watch. The tolerance of the consumer for TV style advertising is shrinking proportionally to the consumer's attention span. This should be good for subscription services like Netflix, and would be good for HBO/Showtime if they didn't for customers to pay for cable/sat in addition to their services.
Now, I have a Samsung 55" LED with a beautiful picture that I bought online for cheap. I plugged an older Macbook Pro into it via hdmi. Couch Potato, Sick Beard, $7/month lifetime unlimited usenet account from a thanksgiving special, mplayer extended to play it all. I haven't seen a commercial in years. As the author says, if it isn't online, I don't watch it.
TV isn't broken, cable companies are.
I honestly could not imagine a better setup. The only issue is that the initial setup is way too hard and time consuming. But the result can't be beat right now.
Think of newspapers and how their business model broke when Craigslist wiped out their classified ads market.
If you'd like to discuss something else, try using a different web site, that will also be discussing one and only one story.
TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed.
People buy devices to mask these problems, but they really don't solve them.
Hulu is slightly less broken. Netflix Instant Watch is even LESS broken.
And that is why we have a DVR. It lets you pause, rewind, watch something you missed, and the networked one in my bedroom has every episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse ever broadcast for my son to choose which one he wants.
The only "live" TV that we ever watch are sports.
The problem isn't that TV is broken. There are still good shows being made that audiences want to see.
The problem is that some people still think of TV as something that has to be watched in the moment. With DVRs the subscription is less about delivering live TV and more like a fire-hose of media. The DVR captures what you want, and you can ignore the rest. Hell, I have satellite service, and because I can get east-coast feeds, I often am able to record and watch shows much earlier than people with cable.
You can watch something that you remember ahead of time to tell your DVR to record for you, or that miraculously it thinks you might be interested in.
TV has fundamental flaws, compared to other technologies that exist... It's broken.
They have a feature called "Primetime Anytime" that records the entirety of primetime (8-11pm) programming on the 4 major broadcast networks (NBC, Fox, ABC, CBS) for the last 8 days.
That means you can turn on your DVR and watch anything that aired in primetime in the last week.
The way they achieve this is by silently recording the networks in the background. The DVR has a 2TB hard drive, of which about 500GB is allocated to this feature, I believe.
(Note that doing it this way also absolves Dish of having to negotiate with the networks a la Hulu.)
But, when you take the subscription for what it is - the best delivery vehicle a wide variety of HD content - then it isn't bad. You just have to live with the limitation. It's not like streaming content online isn't without it's limitations.
If I missed an episode of "Top Shot" for example on History, I still couldn't see it on Hulu until the next day.
Not sure your market or cable company. But in Berkeley (and SF) with Comcast under on-demand I have a section called "TV Shows", the "All Shows" section lists about 300 TV shows.Each with about 8-20 episodes. All On-Demand all with rewind, pause etc. The exception is it won't let me FF through the limited ads embedded in the streams.
Assume this was all current content. How much would you pay for this service? With Ads? Without? Because its not anywhere near the $10 price you're paying now for Netflix or Hulu.
The part that the cable companies don't get is that customers don't want a buffet. They want a la carte.
And they want pricing that is related to the value of a movie or a show. I don't mind paying premium price for something that's still out in theaters. But once that's gone, drop the price, will ya?
I cannot give them my money, to watch it. I could wait a couple days for Netflix to mail me the DVD, but by then the impulse might pass.
TV is broken.
For instance, you could watch the West Wing Season 2 on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/the-west-wing-season-2/... Or Amazon Instant Video: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0047N63NE/ref=tmm_aiv_titl...
If you want to make an argument, argue that distribution is broken. TV as a content production industry is still doing okay.
BTW - that was a good episode of the West Wing. While it was all done in flashbacks, you get to see the history of how people came to work in the West Wing. Donna's character particularly got more interesting after that episode. But you probably don't want to watch just that episode, it was the second half of a two-parter.
If the people who produce TV shows had good contracts, they could also sell me their content directly - with no middle men. Or at least, different middle men. There's no technological reason they couldn't.
I agree that you're right that it's a distribution problem.
But there's a supply of video, and a demand for video, and people standing in the way of that market. The people standing in the way are eventually going to go away.
...that's my belief, anyway. Until then, when I have money and want to watch a show, but can't, TV is broken.
How about watching something else while you order the DVD?
Now that's not to say that the cable industry has it all figured out, or that there isn't room for improvement. But they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves if you assume their job is "get people to watch more tv."
I'm looking forward to a world where people produce content and I give them money to watch it. It works for the porn industry, so why not everything else? (Probably the same reason why our cell phones don't treat voice and data as the bits they are. There is more money to be made for the middlemen by offering "value add" instead of a "dumb pipe". And there's one thing middlemen do well: keeping themselves alive at the expense of everyone else.)
In the mean time, I'll just pirate everything. That cuts out the middleman!
I'm not saying that there are no problems with the way TV is presented, but to raise a child in a relatively TV-less environment, marvel at their confusion over how it works, and then come to the conclusion that TV is broken... that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.
I think that's because Netflix buffering has an explanation that directly relates to the activity itself, whereas the explanation for advertisements is a lot more abstract.
0. http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/22/3444862/google-giving-s...
I haven't really watched tv since the mid 90's and never in the USA so I might miss something obvious here. But where I lived, regular channels were broadcast nationally over the air and they had commercials. I always thought the popularity of cable/satellite subscription was based on you getting rid of the commercials, not paying for seeing more commercials on more channels?
Basically, the main television networks are all double-dipping (cf Marco Arment: http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/double-dipping-ads-in-ipad-m... ).
Publishers/networks are broken. The industry needs something to happen to it like Steam, then Facebook, and finally Apple did to video game publishers. Take the (old) middle men out of the loop. Let content producers "sell" directly to consumers.
The folks at PandoDaily ran a nice article about us, too:
http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/23/nthcode-wants-to-bring-the-...
As a Cablevision/Optonline subscriber, I find that using their iOS app is way ahead of using the actual cable box interface.
Is it IR that just makes the interface slow or is there some other hardware constraint that?
1. Touching the screen (and swiping) didn't do anything.
2. The concept of having to wait until a specific time to see a show was completely alien.
Thank heavens we at least don't have commercial breaks in kids programs (Poland).
How could all of these brand new things possibly be outdated? ;)
The pace of technological evolution is exponential, not linear. http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
We have to operate on a day-to-day basis, not a cosmological one. We should apply current scientific knowledge on a large scale immediately.
* Cars/transportation -- Where Robot Cars (Robocars) Can Really Take Us http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/
* natural language -- Problems with natural language for requirements specification http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Books/SE9/Web/Requiremen...
* government -- Politicians Are Not Trained To Solve Problems http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvoh2vsQSI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_I9-MJKQ4c&feature=relat...
* economics -- ARE ECONOMICS A SCIENCE OF TRUTH OR AN IDEOLOGY OF POWER? http://www.futuremagazine.net/economicsiencie.html
* agriculture -- Urban Farming: Hydroponics in the City http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcBCcSLDlo
* manufacturing -- Hod Lipson on Programmable Matter: Shape of Things to Come http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmPLeQLdfPA
* humans -- not really quite outdated yet, but soon. Jeopardy! IBM Watson Day 2 (Feb 15, 2011) Part 2/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QYchgv5dMM&feature=relat...
* infrastructure -- Evacuated Tube Transport http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92dK_yxaKvk
(It's hard to fathom now, however, how I ever coped with TV before getting a TiVo, which I've had for more than a decade now.)
Throw away your TV? So 2006. You want to take care of your kids? Cancel your streaming video accounts.
I like Shiela Ash's question about cigarettes: "Why would you pay for something that goes up in smoke?!"
Modified for streaming: "Why would you pay to rot your kids' brains?!"
No. You shouldn't have. Thanks for making the free hotel wifi choked for everyone by pulling down a long-term video. What you should have done was bring along some videos of your own.
If the "investment money" ever stops supporting youtube/hulu/(insert profitless service here), then goodbye web substitute.
Even The Daily Show has gone into full annoyance mode lately.
Not even close. Take the entire amount of advertising $$ spent on TV ($100B+) and divide by the folks watching. That is the money that people would have to shell out one way or another.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-07/tech/30048336...
(The UK's is about $2.5B, despite it having around 20% of the US's population. Quite a stark difference.)
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/can-google-c...
Here we see a 750MM subscriber base in the US:
http://www.bgr.com/2011/05/19/internet-and-telco-tv-eat-away...
So, that's what, ~$100 per subscriber...PER YEAR, to compensate for zero commercials? I hope my math is wrong!
Old numbers of ~160MM households as below, with 58% subscribing to basic cable[1], gives us ~93MM
77.5B / 93MM = $833/yr, or $70/mo.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_...
$100B advertising / ~160MM households = $625/household/year, or about $50/mo.
You're right, I wasn't even close. I was way over.
Good luck.
I've never personally ordered cable, and grew up with out it as well.
I use a PVR for all of my "TV" needs (I have two large wall-mounted screens. They are great entertainment devices. I only mention that for consistency with those proudly informing that they only old some small CRT in the corner somewhere). When I get around to watching it has all of the episodes of the shows I care about. Many of them come from ShowTime, HBO, PBS or the Movie Network, having no commercials. Of course I explicitly pay for those channels individually, well outside of PBS.
Other channels have a different business model, but strangely neither my children, my wife or I have any mental issue with it -- it's just the way it is. Nor do I have an issue when a play has an intermission, even though really I'd just like them to keep playing through.
In some ways this reminds me a bit of this submission from the other day - http://ihnatko.com/2012/02/20/heavy-hangs-the-bandwidth-that...
I wonder if this is the kind of stuff that keeps advertising executives up at night. What would happen if everyone under the age of 20 thought like this (assuming that ad-free media sources still exist)?
Nonetheless, it is understood that children notice change. If you give your child maple syrup when they're accustomed to Aunt Jemima, they will ask you what it is. They will probably ask for their Aunt Jemima back. Children are not savants supplying higher information (and I say that as a very proud parent of four of them): They are creatures of routine and habit. A day later they would happily enjoy maple syrup, rejecting their old standby.
There just isn't anything profound or particularly insightful about that observation. It doesn't merit the "TV is broken" bit.
My own niece certainly notices that records are different than music from my Boxee. But records don't really bother her. She thinks they're weird because they're so big, and you have to find them and put them on the player and be careful with the needle.
But she happily drags out the player, shuffles through the handful of records I have and listens to them from time to time.
Yet she had a very similar reaction to what's described in the article, when she (briefly) saw Shrek on Cable. Her grandmother (the only one in her family who watches broadcast anymore) flipped through the channels and passed Shrek, whereupon my niece convinced her that they should watch it. After the first commercial break she asked if we could just watch it on the Boxee.
So it's not "child notices change". Not entirely. It's mostly "child dismisses interstitial advertising entirely".
Youtube showing mandatory, non-skippable video commercials before the video you want to watch is the single most annoying thing that happened on the Internet in the last few years. I still haven't figured out how to get rid of them, but if I ever find out, I won't hesitate to do so.
I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix started ads soon, since they seem to getting slowly crushed with the high cost of licensing content.
People will pay for no ads, but they won't pay for ads for very long, especially my generation.
The bias of the BBC has always been in dispute. The right wing think the BBC is left leaning (because by their simple ratonale anything state funded is). The left wing want to keep the BBC out of the hands of the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The Scots, Welsh and Irish see the BBC as a propaganda machine for Westminster.
However, regardless of it's flaws, the BBC is probably the premier broadcaster of quality television on the planet; though I fear too many changes from idealogical government intervention will change this for the worse.
No one pays any attention to it anymore. And most people I know, like me, don't even have broadcast TV. Or cable.
I watch shows, yes, on DVD -- and largely on my own terms. No adverts.
... and, that's bad? Personally, most of the movies I might want to watch are certainly in black-and-white anyhow.
I actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the pretty girl once he is done blowing things up. And recently the explosions have become more awesome, so I prefer the never movies.
You keep Casablanca, if you want.
Die Hard is "years old" (24 of them, actually) and is an awesome movie in this genre. In fact I am going to preemptively declare you to be an action movie hipster if you like them but not Die Hard.
Being old doesn't make a movie bad. Being bad makes a movie bad. Sometimes that's because the times have changed and the plots are hard to relate to, but usually it's got nothing to do with the age.
I'm going to choose to pretend that wasn't a typo. ;)
Seriously though, there are some great older action movies out there. There's some pretty top notch new ones, too. It's all good.
so hipster :D