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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

If someone mentions a TV show and I search for it, there will be 100 reviews of the show, 1000 short clips of the show. Try yourself: think of a TV show that was big in the last 10 years, then search for it on YouTube. Whether or not the actual content is ON youtube (which is the question my search is trying to answer) you'll get thousands of search results. In the off chance that the actual content of the show is actually on YouTube, the odds that you'll get the episodes of the show in your search result in any sensible order seems like zero.

Another example: a huge use of TV is news. Every big news outlet has a presence on YouTube. But if you pick one (say CNN) and go to their page on YouTube, you can see a list of clips. But the clips seem randomly selected and unordered a a week old. So there is no way I can play their "news"? At least not at first sight.

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> Try yourself: think of a TV show that was big in the last 10 years, then search for it on YouTube.

I did. I thought of "Breaking Bad". Searched for it. There are indeed many reviews and shorts, and on the side of the search result in a separate box I see the official show with a big "buy" button. Apparently I can buy the first season for £10.49.

> In the off chance that the actual content of the show is actually on YouTube, the odds that you'll get the episodes of the show in your search result in any sensible order seems like zero.

Not for me. It is all organised neatly into seasons. I can buy individual episodes or whole seasons.

> But if you pick one (say CNN) and go to their page on YouTube, you can see a list of clips. But the clips seem randomly selected and unordered a a week old. So there is no way I can play their "news"? At least not at first sight.

Not in my experience? I typed "CNN" into the search bar and it displayed a big box on top of the organic results saying "Latest from CNN" with the latest video uploads of theirs in order.

When I click on the CNN channel it indeed shows various programmes CNN has. If I want to see their latest videos I need to click on the tab "Videos". It can be ordered "latest", "most popular" and "oldest" where "latest" is the default for me.

When I look at CNN’s or BBC’s latest it’s not tv-broadcasts it’s just uncutated clips. To use that for TV replacement seems painful. (If by TV we mean watching something on a big screen without having to interact with it for a long while). The only way to watch clips that way would be to queue up a playlist of say ten 3 minute news bites but that still doesn’t tell me anything about their relative importance.

So what I’m looking for is the 30 minute broadcast where these clips are used, where a less important story (objectively! I don’t want personal content that defeats the point!) gets perhaps broadcast cut down to 10 seconds while the big headline clip gets the full 3 minutes. YouTube is the opposite of that. It’s trying to let me pick what I personally find interesting. But at least for news this is a completely useless idea most of the time. Perhaps some outlet publishes their “news at 6” type programs too?

> So what I’m looking for is the 30 minute broadcast where these clips are used, where a less important story (objectively! I don’t want personal content that defeats the point!) gets perhaps broadcast cut down to 10 seconds while the big headline clip gets the full 3 minutes.

Maybe the solution simply is that what you want is not youtube? Horses for courses. If broadcast TV fits exactly what you desire then that is what you should watch. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

But that isn't the intended use case for YT? How are you expecting to watch a professionally produced TV show on YT for free? YT offers a catalogue of tv shows and films that you can purchase and watch on the site but I'm confused why you think you'd be able to search for a tv show and be presented with every episode nicely catalogued in order? YT has always been focused on user generated content - however in recent years you will have noticed this shift toward more professional style videos from larger channels who can afford to employ a proper team

There is tons of professionally produced content on YouTube. And that’s all I want curated, professional content. But it’s hard to find.

YouTube has about as much commercials as the broadcast TV I watch (a lot of which is free and all of which is professionally produced) so I can’t see how YouTube could never have pro content. Their paid subscription also costs quite a bit so just having e.g recent news broadcasts there - which are already produced anyway - doesn’t seem impossible either. I don’t want to watch GoT I want to see a 2004 sitcom or yesterdays BBC news at 6…

BBC news has a page with recent clips - but that’s not a news broadcast. It’s not “TV” just like an rss feed with news studies isn’t a newspaper. TV news requires curation, not merely moving pictures with news.

On the page for a channel, click the Videos 'tab' to see list of the channels videos ordered by most recent.

Doesn’t look like the big broadcasters/news sites want me to use YouTube “as TV” judging by what I see. It’s just clips not programs. BBC for example has some news stories but no news broadcasts.

The curation is what I want. A big important story should take more time of the broadcast. I don’t want to choose what story I’m interested in I want someone to do it for me. That’s the difference between a news program and a set of N 3 minute news stories.

It’s like the difference between an rss feed and a newspaper. A big point of the newspaper is they decide what space to give everything and what to put on the front page. You can’t meaningfully understand the world by reading an rss even with the same articles, because a key insight is knowing what the big story is in the sense of what other people have seen.

Old media corporations have never used Youtube well. But people aren't "replacing TV with youtube" by watching that old media content on Youtube; rather they're not watching that old sort of content at all and now watch the new style of media, mostly done by individual "creators" or a few new-media saavy corps. The remaining audience for old media corps, NBC/etc, are nursing home residents or soon to be.

Yeah even I (an old fart who prefers linear broadcast to anything where I need to click) is consuming a lot of online video content. I like YouTube for learning how to play a song on guitar, tech content, learning how to repair a gadget and so on. But I do this on my phone, perhaps on the bus. Hell, I often do it while watching TV. I'm not surprised YouTube is huge, but this article says that YouTube is big on television screens. And that surprises me.

My big TV I use mostly for watching something together with others - at least with others in the same room - and that's hard with YouTube. Too much to choose from/too niche, and 5 minute intervals between having to choose something. But this article suggests it's something people actually do these days (or perhaps it's "watching together with others" that's also dying in this process? The stats don't say).

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