Paul Graham swings and misses: what he doesn't get about TV | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham swings and misses: what he doesn't get about TV

morganwarstler.com

40 pointsbrlewis35 comments

PG might not have hit a home run, but the author's arguments here are generally either flawed or unfounded, and the ends with a giant piece of _spam_. I'm sure I could spend my time much more productively than arguing with this article, but it's hard not to comment when someone is wrong on the Internet.

1. "It is frankly amazing...that we pretend [communication] should cost dramatically less to obtain on a monthly basis than...other less valuable things."

There is no denying the fact that supply and demand have an impact on pricing, but let me be clear here: the price of Internet connectivity is going down. No company is going to decide that connectivity is really 'worth' more than they're charging and raises prices. It would be suicide. As for the technical side, wireless and wired solutions are being brought forth every day that reduce cost. There is no implicit 'value' being provided than shuttling some bits down a tube (or a series of them).

4."Every TV will soon have a unique IP address."

Excuse the ad hominem attack, but any person well enough acquainted with technology to say "Paul Graham is wrong." should understand how the Internet works well enough to avoid making incorrect statements like this. Even if he did mean that each TV would have a distinct IP address on networks, that really has no bearing at all on the discussion at hand.

3."To give you some Big TV math to work with: One hour of Prime Time TV is worth approximately .64 cents for every single viewer (32 :30 second ads * .02 cents per ad)."

Here it is again. That etherial substance called 'worth.' Even assuming these numbers are correct (the article cites no sources), the current going rate has almost no bearing on the future.

And then the kicker:

4. "Our new company, SaysMe TV has a new model, ... a new form of TV commercial, available for national 'local cable' campaigns meant to be 'Tivo-resistant.'"

This is as close as the author comes to simply admitting that this post is an ad.

In summary, this article is flamebait, linkbait, and spam.

I bailed halfway through the first full paragraph: "From 30K feet, all video is becoming Internet video; it is digital and accessed via standard http (progressive download) protocols. However video being on the Internet doesn’t mean that it will be freely available."

I said to myself, "I don't recall Paul making that argument." And I looked back, and he didn't. Modern-day piracy is cited as being part of the reason internet video is winning (a simple observation), but he also says: "But iTunes shows that people will pay for stuff online, if you make it easy. A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience." Clearly his argument is not that internet video will be or should be free.

With a strawman in sentence two, I'm not terribly impressed.

It does look that way on first reading, doesn't it? I wouldn't have seen it except Fred Wilson commented, saying he agreed with most of it. But look a little more and it does seem to add some interesting perspective to the discussion, not in spite of, but because of the writer's vested interest in having big customers to sell commercial advertising to.

The—what is it that Merlin Mann calls him, the Webcock?—is quickly mutating on our internet. No longer is he simply knocking on the doors of the internet, asking for 30 seconds of your time. Now he does this. He writes a long, mildly controversial blog post as an opinion piece, disagreeing with someone else on the basis of well-traveled platitudes like worth and eyeballs and valuations—you know, the things that only professional-marketing-consultants-cum-bloggers-cum-entrepreneurs ever, EVER talk about—but every inch of his fucking copy is riddled with self-serving spam like that. He's the grown-up version of the Techcrunch commenter who says 'It's very interesting. I am glad that you wrote about this. I have also made a web app using SMS perhaps you would find it interesting kill kill kill kill kill kill'

Nothing invalidates an opinion faster than a plug.

Comment posted on the site:

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Do you really mean 0.64 cents? As in, 0.0064 dollars, or $0.0064?

If you mean 64 cents, you should remove the decimal point. ".64 x" means "64 hundredths of an x". You wrote ".64 cents" which would be "64 hundredths of a cent", or a little more than half a penny. A dollar would pay for 156 viewer-hours of prime time tv.

I would be more than willing to shell out a penny to watch an episode of The Office without commercials. By your math above, that would be a 36% profit for Big TV.

Why aren't the networks just asking me to chip in a penny per episode that I watch? Better yet, charge me $5 a month to download and watch all the TV I can get my grubby little hands on? Even if I torrent ALL of it, my $5 would have covered the price of admission of every viewer who would "steal" it. It's not hard to provide convenience worth $5. Of course, if you don't mean what you wrote, but actually mean $0.64, then it would cost $500 to make that deal, and I'll just download it from the folks who ripped it from the cable stream.

Whether you mean 0.64 dollars (ie, 64 cents), or 0.64 cents (ie, $0.0064), it would be far more interesting if you cited your source for this information. Your argument seems to hinge on this number to some extent, so it would be far more forceful if you were clear about where it's coming from and what it means.

I wanted to strangle the guy when he responded to you with "Yes indeed $.64 cents". Whoosh.

A lot more people make the mistake than you would think.

below is a link to a guy who got charged over because of such a mistake a while ago, he even has a recorded phone conversation of people missing the point

http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-...

but anyone who has a startup like he does should know how to advertise rates, sometimes people are just too dense

By cents, he means "and the number to the left is less than a dollar!"

He needs to do a bit of proof reading. PG articles are a lot better read than Morgans...

He needs a course in logical fallacies, the meaning of "ad hominem" and "straw man", and a sound lashing for using obvious and egregious link bait to advertise his also ran video startup.

I don't usually pick on early stage startups, but when you fail this hard and waste my time by convincing me to read it, well...all's fair.

From the article: :

"Instead of using brand dollars to create programming that can’t be skipped, it instead urges brands to continue buying TV commercials, but to insert content into those commercials that people are more likely to watch: important local event and community announcements."

I can't help it, this evokes some really funny thoughts. I imagine the coffee family having their well lighted morning coffee after their sweatless morning run, and then smiling into the camera with their well lighted teeth announcing local news. That would be so surreal. Maybe some day they can even know my name and tell me news about my own life.

"If only things were like I think they should be, then everything would be right."

What most computer people don't get about TV is that there are millions upon millions of intellectual lazy and/or socially malleable people who would rather follow the tube. It's a demographic, and it's not going away.

I think most people need to be in "passive mode" at times. There is no substitute for sitting on a couch and doing nothing while a device shows a mix of recorded and live content continuously. Having limited choices is good in that context, because it removes the need to think. You flip through the channels and stick with one that seems interesting for the time being.

I believe the current "passive" mode of TV won't go away. It will coexist with the Youtube mode of actively finding, watching, following recommendations, etc.

Add to it the spare time at an airport, in a supermarket, in an office waiting ...

Also disabled people come to mind, kids as well. So TV will definetely stay

I disagree. I'm with PG on this one.

Those 'intellectually lazy' people watch tv becuase they grew up with it. The new generation is growing up with facebook/myspace/im/friendfeed/twitter.

Its the conversation about the tv show that counts, not the tv show. The main problem right now is that tv still makes up such a large part of peoples lives almost out of tradition, and also becuase TV on the net isn't there yet.

The only valid claim this article talks about is about producers/writers -- essentially production value. Thats whats lacking currently with most online-only things. But when there is money, the writers/producers will follow. And the money is coming, if it isnt already here.

My nephew is a teenager and he often plays Xbox Live! while:

-his cellphone is on speakerphone to a friend he is allied with on the current game;

-his instant messenger client is busily chiming away with messages sent to him, which he'll respond to in between game rounds.

-his browser is doing the whole Facebook/MySpace/YouTube rotation as links to interesting content is thrown his way.

You're right; it's incredible how focussed that generation is on the conversation. They don't let anything get in the way. In fact, they use every technology at their disposal to ensure that the conversation must go on. I'm not exactly old, but I worry about constantly being plugged-in. He and his friends worry about ever being disconnected.

Those 'intellectually lazy' people watch tv because they grew up with it.

Yep. Never underestimate the rapidity with which a brand new thing can become an ancient and treasured tradition. And never underestimate the rapidity with which an ancient and treasured tradition can disappear.

One of my favorite examples of the latter is billiards. In the first half of the 20th century billiards was one of the most popular spectator sports in the United States. This, mind you, was not pool, a game which was considered shady and low-class -- and still is. This was proper billiards, the kind played on a pocketless table with three balls. [1] The USA harbored some of the most famous, most talented billiards players in the world -- guys like Willie Hoppe and Welker Cochrane -- and as late as the 1940s these guys would tour the country selling out big billards venues. Every town had a billiard parlor.

Billiards died. [2] It died hard, within less than a generation. The prevailing explanation is that it was killed by television. TV gave people something good reasons to stay at home or lounge around in bars, instead of devoting hundreds of hours to mastering a rather difficult game that tends to embarrass any new player. (I tried playing three-cushion billiards once. I couldn't score one point without deliberately setting it up for myself. This isn't eight-ball.)

Perhaps now it is TV's turn to die. The name TV might live on, but only in the sense that the word billiards lives on in American popular consciousness: As a nickname for a superficially similar game (pool) that had better survival characteristics than the original.

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[1] If you didn't know this you probably didn't understand certain lyrics in The Music Man. Those lyrics are obscure today, but back when the musical came out everyone understood the joke. Indeed, it was barely a joke!

[2] In the USA, that is. In certain other countries there are many more billiards players, though I believe their games have different rules.

Is it being intellectually lazy or socially malleable to enjoy the occasional piece of well-written, high-budget content?

I submit that HBO's "Rome" was better than anything youtube has ever produced, and more satisfying to me than many hours spent wandering facebook and social news sites.

I don't have an easy a time judging other people's tastes; I have a little humility.

> Is it being intellectually lazy or socially malleable to enjoy the occasional piece of well-written, high-budget content?

No, it's not. But the television infrastructure as we know it is designed not for people who enjoy it "occasionally", but for hours upon hours every day.

If you have kids, not having a TV is plain cruelty.

I grew up in the country where we had barely one channel through the fuzz, I maybe watched half hour a week. The rest of the time I played outside, learned how to work hard on a farm, immersed myself in Legos, wrote stories with my sister, and played cowboy in the woods.

Giving the creative mind enough time away from a TV to have to earn it's own entertainment is hardly cruelty.

"I grew up in the country where"

Right, and since everyone else was in a similar position, I'm sure that worked fine. My problem comes when everyone at school is talking about some element of popular culture, and one kid doesn't have a clue what to say because his parents don't let him watch TV.

Everything in moderation though :)

Well stated and I completely agree. TV is valuable socially, although many would like to disagree.

I grew up without a television, and it really wasn't that bad. The problem I ran into was a little different- when I was around a television, I couldn't stop paying attention. I've gotten better about that sort of thing as I've gotten older, but the truth is, I still can't tune out noise, or televisions, anywhere near as well as my peers who grew up with televisions.

I don't know if that's a common experience though.

I experience this already with my six year old when he plays with the neighborhood kids. We have a TV, but we don't have cable, nor do we have bunny ears to get the local stations (not that we could get them in the future anyway). We don't bar them from watching TV (much like the friends and grandparents exception someone else mentioned), and we do all watch kids' movies at home once a week or so. The only bits of kids' culture that they know are Sesame Street (because of a few videos) and the various Pixar movies (Cars, Wall-E, etc).

Are you kidding? Not being able to talk about pop idol wannabe got booted is a serious problem for you?

  "My problem comes when everyone at school is talking about some element of popular culture, and one kid doesn't have a clue what to say because his parents don't let him watch TV."

This sounds like your projecting your own issues onto your kids (believe me when I say I know how that plays out, ask me why my kids aren't going to school sometime). Actually forcing TV on your kids or insisting that it's vital is utterly ridiculous.

Forcing your kids to eat unhealthy is cruelty, locking them in a closet is cruelty. Not having a TV is un-American, not cruelty.

"Actually forcing TV on your kids"

What??? I'm not forcing anyone to do anything. I don't realy understand what you're trying to argue.

Preventing kids from growing up with experience of popular culture, is what I considered cruel.

I would have the TV but not subscribe to cable.

If you have kids, not having a TV is plain cruelty.

You could just as easily argue the opposite!

Do you know what kids do (in my experience, at least) if there is no TV around? They read.

The main problem with having no TV is the risk of it becoming forbidden fruit in the kid's mind and thus becoming more attractive. We hit, inadvertently, on a nice solution to this: we always had a TV around, just a really crappy one. It was rarely on. The kids were welcome to watch TV at friends' houses or their grandparents'. At home, that time mostly went into reading or playing.

Edit: I don't recall any evidence that they felt socially out of step with TV-watching peers. I do remember that when Power Rangers were a huge deal, our daughter became passionate about Power Rangers, so we always let her watch it. Then one day she said: "I don't care about Power Rangers any more. The story is always the same." That was a proud day in the gruseom household! :)

>> "Do you know what kids do (in my experience, at least) if there is no TV around? They read."

That's a pretty vast generalization and IMHO extremely wishful thinking. Is this from personal experience? eg your own kids?

When mine aren't watching TV, they're doing many other things - playing, reading, screaming, fighting, drawing, etc etc etc.

TV is but one activity, but I believe it's one they should certainly have in moderation.

Is this from personal experience?

Yes, when I say "in my experience" I am generally referring to my personal experience. :)

No doubt having a lot of books around, parents who read, and general encouragement to read are all factors as well.

Yup I'd say those are the biggest factors. I dislike the notion that reading is somehow better than other activities though. Kids need a balanced diet.

Socially, I'd argue that TV is better for kids than books.

I didn't have a television growing up, and I read. A lot.

We don't have a TV... but we let our daughter watch movies and cartoons (especially Russian ones on rutube.ru). Her favorites are the ones produced in the 1950-1970 timeframe.

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