Television Accounts for Less Than Half of U.S. Viewing Time for the First Time | Hacker News Reader

Television Accounts for Less Than Half of U.S. Viewing Time for the First Time

wsj.com

25 pointsbookofjoe17 comments

I hate broadcast television so much. How did I ever watch those unskippable ads? I must have been taking a lot of breaks from watching TV to do things.

TV ads haven't been unskippable since Tivo came out in 1999. Try exercising that much control over an internet stream these days. We're going to look back at cable/DVRs as the last time advertising was strongly separated from content, without microtargeting, and easily skippable with the ability to arbitrarily navigate ahead/back in the video stream.

Although I will say if I do watch something live I don't find it annoying to mute the commercial and get up or use my phone during that break. What's more important to me is that it's a hard separation from the content.

Baseball is the one thing that's no longer watchable to me at all. The announcers read ads between pitches/at-bats. Muting doesn't work for the frequent 10 second ads that can come anytime during the programming.

> TV ads haven't been unskippable since Tivo came out in 1999

My cable company says hello. Their set top box now has unskippable ads thanks to software updated and MPEG TS signalling.

Baseball has almost reached that point for me. Those half-screen ads between pitches are well and truly evil.

What's funny is that even when you're at a sports event you can end up waiting for ad time even if you're not exposed to the ads.

So true. I stopped going to televised football games because of the interminable breaks between plays/quarters and eternity of halftime.

Tivo wasn't helpful for anything live, but yeah, it was amazing that we had it.

The trick was to not watch anything live. If you waited until at least a third of the show was over you were usually good to go.

I get that you can watch a sports match an hour or so behind, but it's not the same. For a pre-made TV show it's fine.

And also the enjoyment-wrecking results streaming across the bottom of the screen.

I understand broadcast and am worried about its state, not just in tv but also radio. I think it serves a vital role. Not everything has extensive ads. Sometimes I wonder if licensing needs to be more consumer friendly, for the media's own sake if nothing else.

I do think we used to learn how to allocate attention around ads more. Usually it involved doing other things. Sometimes honestly it wasn't a bad thing as it broke your attention to the media.

Cable is my least favorite thing now, per the article. Streaming or broadcast make more sense to me (although streaming is headed to its own self-imposed problems, with packages). Ideally I'd be able to pay for individual products streaming, and get a good mix of locally and otherwise run broadcast outlets.

> I must have been taking a lot of breaks from watching TV to do things.

Or you (we) watched mindlessly because it was a moving image, and humans are evolved to keep an eye on such things to identify predator/prey.

The content is the same, same writers, directors, actors, background actors, production companies, etc. The difference is now you have to pay multiple providers instead of just one.

Honestly, I'm not surprised. Imagine if TV was invented recently. Would anyone actually use it? It doesn't exactly have a great elevator pitch:

"Watch shows on a schedule decided by us, complete with unskippable ads! If your favourite doesn't get 10 million viewers in its first season, it's cancelled, and every piece of content has to go through our strict guidelines to make sure some random folks don't complain about it being offensive!"

So what's the selling point? If you want entertainment with a higher budget, then film exists. If you want entertainment that's interactive and can be enjoyed for hours on hours, there are video games. If you want ground breaking, edgy content, then it's probably going to be found on the internet. Same with any coverage of any hobby or area of interest that isn't immediately appealing to about 40% of the US population or more.

And if you're a creator, there's even less of a point. The audience is dwindling, you lose almost all control of your creation on TV, and whether you can keep making it depends on unrealistic viewing figures that most niche shows can't hit.

https://archive.ph/qoNj2

I wonder if archive.ph is being hijacked and used to proxy real captchas for other sites. It's weird that some people, myself included, get stuck in an infinite captcha loop using mainstream browsers (iOS Safari, in my case).

It's never not worked for me: Chrome x MacBook Pro

Reply on news.ycombinator.com