TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It
businessinsider.com
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With this set up I can watch marathons of whatever TV show I want on various legal streaming sites. Thus providing same background noise you speak of.
The downside is that cable subscribers subsidize the handful of TV shows I actually want to watch. Individually, every person who quits makes a rational decision, but when everyone quits we don't get a lot of good shows.
Maybe Netflix or Amazon or whoever will take up the slack. Or maybe those shows will just go away.
It already is. Netflix is funding a lot of new stuff (House of Cards, Orange is the new Black, lots of standup stuff). Note that this stuff is being received very well by normal consumers and critics alike. They're also funding canceled shows like Arrested Development, Lillyhammer, etc.
Cable companies make (50M subscribers * $100 /month * 12 mo/yr)=60B dollars per year. TV advertising is another $80B /year. Overhead and profit might eat up 20-50% of that, but we're still left with a bill, to create the TV we want to watch, of a few hundred dollars per US man, woman, and child.
Why would people imagine that we can replace that market with a hundred million $8/month netflix subscriptions and not see a decline in the availability of quality programming?
One month I saw the bill and I wanted to punch a hole in the wall.
They run a wire to my house, so that the TV reception is better than an aerial antenna. That's what cable is. That's what cable does.
The internet service was rock solid, but when they bombard me with a constant deluge of ads offering introductory service at $99 dollars a month (for TV, VOIP and internet), every ten minutes, no matter what channel I'm watching, basically, I expect my bill to be $66 dollars for TV and internet only, AT ALL TIMES.
This is the same psychological process where we rationalize to ourselves that $99 is cognitively less than $100, so it must be a reasonable truth that I'm paying a better price than $100, if I'm only paying $99.
If they know who I am, because they know whether to enable my cable signal, based on whether I've paid my bill, and they show ME advertisements on MY TV, stating that I can get 3 things for a price divisible by three ($99), when we both know I'm only buying 2 things from them, then cognitively, we both know I should be paying 2/3 of what their hellish TV jingle blasts into my ears every 10 minutes.
I'm sitting at work, humming their damned jingle to myself, as I suffer through my 9 to 5 drudgery. Then I come home check the mail box. There are two bills. Cable and Gas/Electric. The cable is more. It's $150 dollars. I'm subscribed to two thirds of their products, and I'm humming their incessant jingle to myself about how all three of their products should cost two thirds of what I'm actually paying for the stinking two thirds of what they offer.
The jingle is thus:
EYE! OH! DIGITAL CABLE!
WATCH A LOTTA CHANNELS!
WHENEVER YOU'RE ABLE!
THE PRICE IS NICE!
LET ME PUT IT ON THE TABLE!
ONLY NINETY NINE DOLLARS WHEN YOU SIGN THE LABEL!!!
Smart phones might be a secret government program engineered to earn the complicity of the citizenry, in volunteering to carry tracking devices on our person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So what?! It's still cheaper than cable!
Cable doesn't keep me warm in the winter. They don't do anything essential to my survival. They don't deliver perishable food to my door. Cable TV can burn.
This seems likely, but the idea that it will be cheaper than cable is pretty specious. The reason you can get TV programming so cheap for just the cost of a Roku and Netflix is because hidden in that content is the millions of dollars that already came from traditional TV.
This doesn't seem like an unbridgeable gap to me. And in fact it's in the process of being bridged slowly -- the problem is that existing contractual relationships and infrastructure won't just reform themselves overnight.
TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying. When I'm visiting my family I just have to turn off the TV, it's impossible to concentrate on conversation otherwise.
It is pretty awesome.
The worst part is that TV ads are a major part of shared culture. People watch many different channels and many different shows, but the large ad campaigns transcend those boundaries. They squat in the shared mind-space and instruct everyone that 'buying your kids junk-food will make you a happy family' (or more insidiously 'your parents should buy you junk-food, because that's what happy, normal families do'). I actually saw one today which discouraged you from asking your friends for help, apparently it's better to pay the company to do repairs than go through all the hassle of having to repay a favour. These sort of campaigns beggar belief, either they are ineffective, or they must surely do serious collateral damage to shared values.
But I think they do do quite a lot of cultural damage.
I don't have the TV on much at all to be honest. I don't understand the people that have it on all of the time, from waking to sleeping. Some people put it on as "background noise" but that doesn't make sense to me - you might as well tune a radio into FM between the stations for background noise or buy a white/pink noise generator and put that on!
It was strange at first for new people, but surprisingly effective.
But there is a shift happening. The biggest question to me is whether brand advertising dollars are/can/will shift with it. We need new ad products. Especially ones that will reach younger audiences who avoid current ad products. Maybe opportunities for Snapchat/Twitter.
Also, content production is going to see some challenges without large amounts of ads to support it. I think there's still --on average -- a big gap in budget, revenue, audience, and quality between successful online-only shows better suited for YouTube and near-filler content on niche cable networks that have managed to stay alive with advertising. Cost of content production is still quite expensive. House of Cards had a $100 million budget to produce 13 episodes. Shows need a lot of audience to make the numbers work, and I'm hoping we see some acceleration here.
Perhaps the better question is, when does traditional TV become so unpopular those satellites taking up geosynchronous orbit space get dumped into the oceans?
There's weather services (for ships and aircraft outside of ground station range), radio (but this is really niche), high latency internet (for, say, cruise ships), maybe some other small niche services. But what's going to replace the $30 billion in revenue they get from TV subscriptions today?
Who is going to buy their multi-billion dollar satellite fleet?
I don't think things are as dire as you suggest, but worst-case DTV simply won't replace the satellites as they wear out.
Orbital slots are valuable, but I don't think those are actually owned by DTV. If they're not using a slot, then someone else is free to ask the FCC for it. Which means that it behooves DTV to find something else to do with the slot. E.g. Internet.
Internet access is not very well suited to geosynchronous satellite orbits due to the high latency and limited bandwidth available.
There have been several low budget films and tv shows that have become highly successful and well regarded, the same is and will be true in the online realm. Look at Mad Max, which was made for around a third of a million dollars, Primer, or Napoleon Dynamite.
But also it's not just production value or even quality but fundamental differences in character. TV was a different sort of beast than film, and even over the last decade commercial TV has changed a lot. Look at all of the independent content that sprang up on non-network TV channels, especially from HBO. A show like The Wire, or even more so The Corner, was very unlikely to ever be made within the confines of traditional network TV. TV has a different sort of character than film in terms of the sorts of productions that are suited for TV, and online video is different as well, but we haven't seen all of the ways that's so.
One example I'd highlight is the Lizzie Bennet diaries, a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in vlog form of over 100 "episodes" of typical youtube length (~3-5 minutes).
Another example would be Periodic Videos (and related projects). These are educational videos about chemistry but because they don't have the length limits or requirements of traditional TV they can be focused on a single subject without being forced to add in unrelated filler.
Or, there's Lindybeige, who's likes to talk about medieval, classical, and bronze age technology and weapons. It's just a guy expressing his opinions and trying to back them up with experience or logic but it's frequently just as informative and interesting as watching a typical historical tv show.
The protocol, cable (and satellite), is dying. Almost nobody in my age range, or younger (late 20s), has cable. Everyone has Netflix along with some other streaming services combined with iTunes purchases and such. If you want to watch live sports, the NFL is free over the air, you'll just miss out on the NBA (oh well).
Cable television has no reason to exist. Get rid of it and use the bandwidth for streaming. I just bought a TV after not having one for half a year, and briefly considered getting Time Warner. After seeing what they charge for the basic service, along with $16/month for the "equipment rental," why would I bother? Life is better without cable anyways, the garbage on there just stresses me out and makes me hate our society! You do not need CNN, my life is so peaceful not knowing what their talking heads are spewing off about.
Are you sure that's not just selection bias? I'm 25 and almost everybody I know around my age does have cable. Some are sports fans (and you miss out on much of MLB, the NBA, and the NHL by cutting cable--the streaming prices for each are extortionate and there are cable-area blackouts for local games), some just really can't be bothered to put up with the delays to get to Netflix or other streaming solutions (for many there is a strong social component to being able to see, and discuss, television programs simultaneously with your peers).
So what do I do when I don't get proper service? Piracy - it gives me on demand HQ content.
I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century. The next network delivers cheap, on demand HD content worldwide will make a ton of money :)
> I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century.
2016. That sounds glib, but that's my real prediction: my suspicion is that a lot of contracts are going to be coming up for renewal over the next 3-5 years and either they're not going to be renewed or they're going to take vastly different forms.
The big problem is figuring out what "cheap" actually means, of course. Internet users sometimes seem to have kind of unrealistic expectations about pricing.
It's true there's nothing about "copyright", the legal concept, that implies that there should be no legal way to watch The Walking Dead in Europe... but it's also true that setting up that sort of circumstance is the point of copyright law. Copyright law is what enables the contract clauses you're talking about.
If piracy never existed at all, imagine how insane those restrictions would be now. They would charge per minute, they would charge for pausing, they would charge for recording. It would be state by state, province by province by province, town by town.
You can't buy the box set anywhere? You can download it from iTunes or another legal service? I'm in Europe too (UK to be specific and can do both of those things).
I'm guessing what you really mean is you can't watch it when you want to, you have to wait a little while longer.
This is a pedantic restatement of the original point. It's still the fact that there are many cases where the copyright holders choose not to make something available in any form for people who don't live within a certain region or use a specific technology. They might change their minds in the future but until that happens, the only intellectually honest description is “no legal way”.
If you're like me and don't like dubbed content and have already phased out physical media, there often really is no way of getting the content legally in at least a semi-comfortable way.
I guess this is my point. If it's available on physical media that seems convenient enough to make it morally wrong to pirate. There is a moral argument for piracy when content isn't made available but when it is available in several versions and someone still chooses to pirate it because it isn't available in the version they prefer that seems indefensible to me.
I know the last season was. And it's available next day on iTunes. That excuse doesn't really hold up here.
Direct, worldwide on demand content models will start as soon as they think they will make more money from those models than the current double-dealing, relicensing, government subsidies models they currently use.
It's called bittorrent. Enjoy! :-)
The result? You'd hear the screams from the neighboring offices (and it was very easy to differentiate whether the team scored or missed based on those), but in your version the ball was still in play, so the emotion was gone.
Turns out, Scousers actually don't have the best sense of humor in the UK.
Of course, the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is an anachronistic bit of nostalgia for many reasons.
We have an Apple TV which plays Netflix, Hulu, PBS, Rented Movies, Music and YouTube.
After 2-3 months of us never switching off of the Apple TV HDMI port, I told the kids I was going to cancel cable which they could never find anything of substance to watch anyway and they didn't even put up a fight.
None of us watch sports so there was virtually no reason to keep cable anymore.
What I found slightly disturbing was how hard it is to setup an over-the-air TV setup. It's going to cost about $200 in equipment and another $100 to setup on my roof. It seems almost insane how expensive free TV has become to get. It'll still pay off because we were paying over $100 for TWC; it's just strange to see something that used to be so simple become so complex and I didn't care about it because I thought I would just have cable the rest of my life.
I am not a electrical engineer, so can anyone shed light on why the range for channels on digital is so much lower than it was with analog, also is weather much more impeding for digital than analog?
All things being equal, an ancient coax cable with X milliliters of water contamination or Y amount of corrosion will have more loss at UHF than VHF. Pretty much everything is more critical at UHF. Even antenna aiming.
The other way its a problem, which is actually pretty funny, is marketing of "HDTV" antennas where HDTV means UHF only, which works great if all your local broadcasters moved to UHF with the transition; As you can imagine a UHF antenna doesn't work so well if you live in an area with one of the few remaining VHF-Lo band transmitters which you "need".
To say this is a local issue would be an understatement. I'm sure you'd get a better answer from a neighbor than HN.
The Shannon–Hartley theorem[3] relates the necessary signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) that is required to cram a given amount if information into a given amount of bandwidth. Digital TV uses a lot of compression to reduce the amount of information that has to be crammed through the pipe and extremely sophisticated encoding to cram a bunch of bits into each symbol (baud[4]), but, at the end of the day, you have to have an adequate S/N ratio (good enough reception) to decode the signal.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC "Each frame is composed of two fields, each consisting of 262.5 scan lines, for a total of 525 scan lines. 483 scan lines make up the visible raster."
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem
He sent me a YouTube link to instructions for one. Not hard to do.
Of course, results vary. But perhaps worth looking into.
The interesting thing is I could pick up channels over the air that were not on the cable TV lineup.
If it's available in your area.
I just hope that google doesn't destroy their golden goose merely because they are too incompetent to understand its value or importance.
Edit: Unrelated, I was annoyed by the quality of the "net subscriber adds" graph since it's obviously dominated by an annual signal, so I created a smoothed version (the raw data should be accurate to within ~5-10 pixels give or take): http://i.imgur.com/ffBzR8g.png
A little more reasoning would be appreciated.
A lot of independent video producers have switched from using their own proprietary video distribution systems to merely hosting their videos on youtube. The monetization difficulties are made up by the ease of distribution, network effect, and lower costs.
Also, there are a fair number of kickstarter projects where the end result is the creation of videos on youtube (such as Tropes vs Women). Within the Film & Video category on kickstarter many projects in all sub-categories will release their content on youtube and the webseries sub-category is almost entirely youtube projects. If youtube had better monetization models and improved ability to host paid and unpaid content almost all of those projects would host on youtube.
Consider the many musical acts that have risen to fame through exposure or maturation through youtube. Walk off the Earth, Julia Nunes, Pentatonix, and of course Justin Beiber being just a few examples among many.
Consider that Bon Jovi's song "Living on a Prayer" recently made its way back to #25 on Billboard's charts (27 years after release) almost entirely due to the popularity of a viral video on youtube of a fan at a Celtic's game dancing enthusiastically to the song.
(Edit: also look at the importance of youtube in the most widely heard pop music such as Psy's Gangnam Style, LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem, Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know, etc. It's clear that youtube is as culturally relevant as MTV ever was, and that's just a tiny fraction of youtube's influence on the world.)
Or consider the veritable ecosystem of new funding platforms springing up to help creators using youtube to monetize and support their work (such as subbable.com, tested.com). Google's idea along these lines is to introduce pay walls, whereas almost every creator prefers to use more of a pledge drive / premium level model.
Google has tackled the technical bits of web video quite well. They built a system that handles video uploads at greater than 6,000x real-time (over 6,000 seconds of video are uploaded to youtube every second).
Youtube alone is responsible for nearly 1/5th of all internet traffic.
Stop and read that again, it's important. 1/5th of the usage of the entire internet is being dedicated to the use of youtube. And that figure is growing by double digit percentages year over year.
Unquestionably people are increasingly spending their video viewing hours watching content on youtube. And creators are increasingly turning to youtube as their distribution platform.
So yes, I'd say it's fair to say that there's a very strong case that youtube is the future of video. And yet google still treats it as a hindrance, as a second class citizen. As mentioned above creators are desperate for tools to help them support and monetize their video making but they have to turn to 3rd party services to do so. Google has the expertise and capability to offer creators everything they need in a one stop shop. They also have the ability to invest in and support video makers to plant a seed of content creators on their site. And they did, but half-heartedly and without sufficient follow through. It's going to take years until more than a handful of people can support themselves through youtube and even longer before we can see the sort of content that a "youtube generation" of artists is capable of creating. In the meantime such creators have to contend with google making arbitrary changes to youtube for their own petty reasons with little thought for the true potential of what they control.
You rightfully pointed out some successful acts that have gained notoriety through YouTube, and good on them. They were the top content creators and were awarded for their efforts. YouTube seems to work if the quality of your work is good and outstanding. Personally I think the current model works well. Should all the crap that's being produced be monetizable?
I don't understand the Internet traffic thing. YouTube serves video which naturally takes up a lot more bandwidth than textual content, i.e. Twitter. I understand that YouTube is popular but you can't really measure popularity in bandwidth.
The ad market is huge, but the entertainment market is much larger.
Content on youtube, whether it's "crap" or not, should be monetizable if it's capable of being supported. Currently the basic tool that youtube provides for that is a crappy ad system and a tiny cut of the ad revenues. They could, and should, do so much more. They have the opportunity to make their viewers and their creators not just users but customers. They have the opportunity to take a bite out of the multi-trillion dollar worldwide entertainment budget. They have the opportunity to have works of legitimate value (not just viral videos and pop phenomena) find a home on youtube and for youtube to become to be associated with works of quality instead of works of frivolity.
There's already lots of good stuff on youtube, but most of the best stuff is made at a loss. Youtube is perhaps the foremost instructional video publisher in history already, for example, but almost nobody publishing those videos is making a decent RoI on their efforts through youtube.
Web video is a medium and youtube is the apotheosis of that medium. To downplay that medium is as short-sighted as downplaying literature or film. There will be "youtube shakespeares" in the 21st century. There will be web videos that we find as powerful and meaningful as any other form of art (if there aren't already). I can say this with certainty because it relies on the simple fact that humans will always create art in any medium. If you give a man a steel barrel he'll create a steel drum, if you give a man a plastic barrel he'll create STOMP. It's really only a matter of time.
But by the same token, the fewer tools that google puts in the hands of creators and the more difficult it is for creators to make a living off of their creations the more potential will be wasted. Imagine how different the world would be if Elvis or The Beatles couldn't have made a living off of his voice and guitar.
I think it was Mick Jagger who said something like that the time we've lived in was kinda special. There has been no time in the history of humanity where musicians were able to make such amounts of money and those times are pretty much gone. If you're an emerging artist, whether a musician, movie maker or what ever, you're pretty much to par with the troubadours of the middle ages.
Going back to Google, I think Google pretty well understand the ad market more than anyone else on the planet and if there's money to be made they will and it seems that your view isn't aligned with theirs.
Youtube is the apotheosis of the medium of web video. As a medium it will suffer from all of the usual problems. There's no avoiding Sturgeon's law in any medium. But the existence of, say, Jersey Shore doesn't undercut the existence of The Wire the same way that the existence of Danielle Steel doesn't invalidate Mark Twain or TMZ.com doesn't invalidate wikipedia.
Even today there's a lot of great material on youtube that would not have been accessible before. Especially educational material. I cannot even begin to fathom what I've learned from youtube that I would not have otherwise. And that's just a tiny fraction of its potential.
There is a clear attitude that "TV megacorporation junk bad" in the sense that it will "rot your brain" or "it has ads" or something vague and "YouTube good" and that is just naive.
http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2013-10-21/less-time-i...
Younger the viewers, less TV they watch.
Per week. I had no idea.
Also, I think a lot of people need television as background noise. They don't necessarily watch it, but it's on while they do chores and what not.
I do think TV is in long term decline, though as I explained in a nearby comment I think that's more to do with the model of TV distribution than production. The subheading on the graph actually acknowledges this (saying that streaming video services are disrupting the traditional pay TV audience model), but the headline is misguided - I'm not convinced people are spending that much less time sitting in front of the TV than before.
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised the decline isn't steeper, although I'm basing that partly on changes in my own viewing habits (n=1) as the selection on Netflix improves - Iwatch about 6 hours of news and 4 hours of entertainment on TV in a typical week, but since rescuing a dog has made it hard to go to the movies, over the last few months we've been systematically working our way through every episode of Star Trek instead.
I don't think services like Amazon or Netflix counts as TV even though they carry a lot of TV episodes
When I was a kid we came home and watched Pokemon, CardCaptor Sakura, Yu-Gi-Oh, every afternoon. All those cartoons are gone now.
I do agree with your observation about old people and TV in that my experience with elderly ancestors is an extremely high correlation between watching TV all day and death within the next couple years. When you can't do anything anymore physically but open your eyes, the socially accepted dumping ground (at least on a small scale) is in front of a TV. I believe this explains the peculiar claim that 80 year old people "watch" 16 hours per day of TV on average. This does not explain the claims about 50 year olds.
With time though... with time...
I subscribe to Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Cable TV.
This way of getting entertainment is actually frustratingly expensive.
And to make things even dumber, sometime NONE of these services have what I want without an additional convenience fee. So my wife and I will stop at a Red Box and get a movie for about $1/2, LOL. It's crazy.
When 3 or 4 more $10 per month options pop-up, and everyone is watching some great show exclusive to that service, then what? Things get WAY worse.
Someone needs to start a company where I pay $80-$100 per month, and I get EVERY one of these services streamed through 1 site to every room in my house :) Someone get started, make the deals, get this going, OK. Good luck.
That's because you still have cable. Dump it and you'll get down to a reasonable cost.
Hulu + Netflix + Prime is around $23/month.
So individual shows rating may be dropping and rating for networks may be going down, but they are spreading their revenues across a lot of the more niche properties. They also make a huge amount from Cable licenses for the whole package of networks to ensure they have as many channels available to viewers as possible.
They are now learning to monetize their properties across digital media, and you will see that growth into online media and consolidation there soon.
I work with major media groups helping them with social media and the growing time-shifted audience, so I've heard a lot of the plans for the future. They see the writing on the wall, and while broadcast and cable might be shrinking, the content creation and advertising around video entertainment will keep growing, of that I am certain.
It claims people are chucking broadband subscriptions and using tablets and mobile internet, or more often, just free wifi from Starbucks (or neighbors?).
Fascinating. If everyone dropped broadband, TV, and phone lines into the home, what's that world look like?
They promise a graph showing in hard numbers that broadband subscriptions are down, but never actually provide one. They just provide a graph showing, as best I can tell, that total customers for cable companies are going down. In fact, they confusingly state that customers are moving from cable with broadband to "telco companies like AT&T and Verizon who offer TV as a package with high-speed internet access."
From the description, this apparently isn't referring to mobile Internet, but AT&T U-verse and the like. So high-speed Internet from AT&T doesn't count as broadband on the grounds that they're a telco.
My best guess is that when this whole article is founded on the strange understanding that TV through a cable provider is the only real TV while getting the same content through satellite or what-have-you is "mobile," and cable Internet is "broadband" while anything from a "telco" like AT&T is a totally different thing. A rise of alternative providers is an interesting story, but it's a pretty different story from the one they're trying to tell here where everybody is just taking their iPads to Starbucks and watching cat videos.
Ha, yeah, fair point and reasonable analysis. The dozen misleading graphs that don't quite support his point are looking more suspicious by the minute.
I kind of want to call Jim Edwards and tell him this is an interesting direction for a story, but he should probably chuck this rough draft and start from scratch before someone accidentally puts this on BI's site.
On that note, he, and commenters, and saying cable is "killing itself" by raising rates. Subscription rates are actually rising more slowly than the content costs cable cos pay. The content creators are driving this process.
> Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, "The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever." All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn't sound like a huge deal — but it includes internet subscribers, too.
Except the source is another BI article, and _its_ source mentions nothing about Internet subscribers:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-c...
I have broadband Internet at $35 a month (about 20mbps), Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and Netflix, and I have more than I need. I spend a lot less time wasting time flipping channels and watching commercials. I total about 3-4 hours a week of watching anything on TV.
You may not like, say, Miley Cyrus (I don't), but artists and groups like Daft Punk and Radiohead are quite mainstream, quite successful, and quite good as well. The broadening of what is "mainstream" has added a lot of choice for pretty much everyone and a lot of it is quite good.
When they were growing up I allowed them to be bombarded with information - TV on, web access, phones from an early age - and they've developed the ability to filter it quite well and just ignore things that don't interest them.
The only down side is:
"awww dad I didn't get anything done today" "why, son?" "some Internet happened"
Try watching a slow movie like Gattaca at home, with a dozen devices and apps competing to take your attention away, and see how many people drift off and watch it from the corner of an eye or don't even finish it at all. Does the movie deserve that? Maybe; if only short-form content or frenetic Avengers-like action can hold people's attention from start to finish, then that's how it is. But I, for one, appreciate immensely when people commit fully to something, the way it was intended to, for better or for worse.
And that's why I love the movie theater.
That said, and for all the love I have for computers and even for my Nexus tablet, I fear I'll become an anti-smartphones curmudgeon soon. I already feel uncomfortable when everyone takes theirs out right after lunch, killing any possibility of a conversation.
TV shows may die, but our need for storytelling will survive.
Comcast: OK... Done. We'll miss you as a Comcast customer. Will there be anything else?
Me: Yes. Please sign me up for internet service. I'm going to watch TV over the internet.
Comcast: OK... Done. We'd like to welcome you as a Comcast customer.
Sorry, and on a more serious note, I should hope this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone. Moving out a few years ago I ordered a 25/25 fiber line and completely dropped any form of cable/satellite package.
Norway, similar to the UK and probably many other countries, has a "TV Licence" which I still gladly pay, even though by law I am not required to do so as I don't technically have any TV channels in my house. NRK (Norwegian "BBC") provides a fantastic internet service on par with BBC's player, that does not require me to handle the archaic technology that is decoders and their 1990's era hardware running millennium software.
One word: Kodak.
(They had no idea customers would turn to digital photography so fast and so completely. World-dominating brand now defunct.)
Germany is now forcing to pay every household for state TV propaganda, even those who do not own or watch TV.
Greek instead closed state TV stations, because they can not afford them.
Mind you, what do i know, I gave up TV in 1991 - there's just for more to do on the internet.
Gravity made 500Million USD.
Something does not sit right.
What I'm getting at is people used to go to movies to see a movie. But thats technologically obsolete and frankly with all the previews and ads and hyper expensive junk food its too offensive to experience. However, movie theaters currently exist, and will exist in the future, solely for younger teens dating / makeout sessions, a social party atmosphere, that kind of stuff. And thats apparently a lower level yet stable and mostly constant line of business.
So what will the TV analogy be after most people no longer watch TV? My guess is sport fanatics (despite the stats showing dramatic declines in watching pro sports). Also I think mindless shovelware while people eat. Propaganda such as religious shows or news reporting? Imagine a world with only three cable channels remain, EWTN, ESPN, and Foxnews.
.... in the U.S.
Granted, the news in TV, radio and most newspapers aren't any good as it stands now, but if we keep moving from TV to on-demand services like Netflix, funding serious news broadcasting will become an issue.
I'm not sure how it works in the US, but in many European countries, like the UK, Germany and Denmark, the public are required to pay for public broadcasting). This in part is suppose to pay for news and journalists... In reality it pays for crappy talentshows.
Still what's the model for serious news broadcasting going to be in the future? The models that seems to "work" is having a rich sheikh pay (Al Jazeera) or government funded (RT.TV / Press TV / France 24). This doesn't give you the best of news, but then again neither does ad funded news live CNN.
Here's a good reason:
http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-...
Television, however, is going through the same metamorphosis that music, retail sales and newspapers are enduring.
I'm not worried about the music industry. They've made the shift from vinyl to cassette to CD to digital, and may owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jobs.
However, newspapers and brick & mortar retail have been decimated.
So the question is, will TV go the way of music? Or newspapers?
So the stats are going up up and up!
Not only do you have to buy the receiver box, which craps out and has a separate remote and interface, but Digital TV has really really terrible reception. I live in a large metro area and even we have tons of problems with reception, I can't image what it's like for people who live out further.
This is a crazy law to even propose, but the idea behind it should be considered by the cable industry hard and fast.
People aren't cord cutting because they can't find anything good on. People are cord cutting because their cable bill is too high.
I left the U.S. in the '90s. However I do occasionally see some American TV on trips, and it seems different than what I remember, full of creepy bizarre ads for drugs and the like.
TV ads in the old days obviously weren't great art, and were often annoying, but there seems something palpably ... wrong with the state of things now. "Creepy" seems the best description.
Sadly, most recent commercials lack even the charm of that. I have an OTA antenna just for occasional live sports, but TV is just abject now. One time I found like three celebrity gossip shows on at the same time, on broadcast networks! The networks used to be more dignified than that. So just to protect my will to live, I always change my tuner to the Mexican station before I turn the TV off. Not that Mexican TV is any better, but my intelligence is that much less insulted when I don't understand what they're saying, and it is ever so slightly more surreal to watch than the Chinese stations and occasionally has soccer highlights.
Just after TV realized that O.J. Simpson, and Amy Fisher, and Nancy Kerrigan could feed a news cycle for months, if not years, TV lost a lot of charm. It was the popularity of the O.J. Simpson case that spawned the Court TV channel.
Right around the time when the constantly scrolling, but nigh-unreadable news ticker showed up on all of the news channels, TV mutated into this hideous disease that vomited itself into my living room.
Somewhere amidst the election ads and the telephone ads, the Big Pharma ads came along, with Montel Williams and Rikki Lake and Jerry Springer, and then Realty TV exploded for beyond the already intolerable spectacle of MTV's The Real World. Vapid scummy channels like E! spewed forth with shallow, narcissistic tabloid hopelessness. MTV itself devolved into TRL and Britney Spears and then 9/11 and Iraq blew all the gaskets open.
With every celebrity fearing for their pathetic career, at the very premise of disagreeing with a "Wartime President", that very chilling effect of self censorship attenuated all intelligence on TV.
The internet, meanwhile, was uncensored, unfiltered virgin wilderness to explore. Hard core pornography and gore sites were immediately available, and you didn't have to skulk around the adult section of the video store for Faces Of Death or Debbie Does Dallas. You also didn't have to pay extra to get a glipse of tits or hear some curse words on HBO. TV knows this, and has grown even creepier still, in an attempt to compete with the total lack of boundries found on the internet, to the point where it feels disturbingly questionable that Cialis ads are directly juxtaposed with Honey Boo Boo episodes.
The rationale for Court TV finally died about a decade and a half after the O.J. Simpson case, and by then it had transformed itself into a dumping ground for re-runs of To Catch A Predator and COPS, and then rebranded as TRU TV, and now also includes shows about repo men harassing irresponsible poor people.
At these times scales of ten to fifteen years for a complete life cycle of a trend like the one caused by O.J. Simpson, I shudder to think what TV will be like when the 9/11, Iraq War, Fox News trend cycle wraps up. The current trend feels like it still needs about ten more years to fully play itself out.
The oddities were still out there, as a subculture, but no one was actively shoveling them to the forefront of television in hopes of a slight ratings bump at the sheer spectacle of yet another train wreck.
TV didn't have to try hard back when the only competition was movie theaters. In the 80's, before cable became a fashionable norm, some television stations could still rationalize "going off the air" between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m.
Online gaming is becoming as much of a time drain. It at least does not have as much of a social, political and interpersonal agenda as television (though it does warp you mind in other ways) but still, what a waste of precious life.
What would the world look like if television was gone tomorrow. No more marketers and hidden agenda writers and directors programming your mind subtlety.
What happened to board games? getting together with family and friends to socialize? I would like to see numbers on what television, media, and gaming has replaced (as far as time spent). Eventually, humans won't even act like traditional humans. All social skills and collaboration, perhaps even empathy one day will be far diminished or lost. Our very humanity.
See how much your demographic watches (or is influenced/brainwashed by): http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2013-10-21/less-time-i...
Anyway the relevance to this discussion is as TV dies out, what will be the analogy of the Janet Jackson superbowel half time show? Who will legions of mindless drones mail (email?) complaints to, regarding reddits gonewild showing about 3 square inches more of flesh than you'd see at a beach or the mall? Who will the super-conformists conform to if their holy altar of worship, the TV, goes away?
I guess what I'm saying is a darling of the censored neutered content biz is dying, but that doesn't mean weirdos (or prudes or whatever you want to call them) are going away any time soon.
So aside from this interesting and overlooked observation, whats the likely result of the final death of government censorship? Or will it be the final death...
The tide seems to be that, all things considered, the internet will have free speech. Actual, real free speech.
Its hard to imagine politicians not pandering to the prude weirdos or neopuritans or whatever they call themselves and instead embracing 4chan or reddit (or HN?) culture, but maybe its inevitable?