Inside the Incubator – Silicon Valley is satire, but feels like a documentary. | Hacker News Reader

Inside the Incubator – Silicon Valley is satire, but feels like a documentary.

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84 pointsedw51947 comments

This wont be seen by the target audience, as this requires cable.

There's this new thing called Roku, Amazon TV, Apple TV and such, it just came out, check it out. Even tablets or touch chrome-books ($300), let you watch it while commuting. You know, internet will be big some day. /s

You sound like a character in the show.

I know we're not supposed to upvote snark...but...zing!

As revolutionary as the Internet and video streaming has been...yeah, I don't think HBO is soliciting advice on how to survive the current disruption in the content production and distribution business

Everyone on here does!

You can watch HBO on any computer/tablet/smartphone plus Roku and Apple TV using HBO Go. (I hate to sound like an advertisement here. I'm not a customer of HBO Go, but it's worth noting that they were actually one of the fastest cable TV companies to put their content online.)

Last I checked that was only true for HBO subscribers, which you can only get through cable systems. So their content isn't online in the sense that puppetmaster3 means.

Those cable companies have been their distributors for 30 years. They'll loosen gradually. The new infrastructures will help. But I don't fault them for taking it slow and easy.

Oh, agreed. HBO has no need to rush; they're doing fine financially, and cable companies still have a lot of power. And I've been impressed by their attitude toward the piracy of their content. Right now I watch Game of Thrones via torrent and then buy the DVDs when I can just to support them.

True, but if you have Comcast or Time Warner internet, they'll give you "basic cable" + HBO for about $20/month. http://www.wired.com/2013/10/hbo-go-comcast/ At that point, you're pretty much buying HBO à la carte. And they don't care if you even have a set-top box to the the digital TV signal.

"HBO GO. It's HBO. Anywhere."

Well, you know, except in most of the world. It's a shame because I'd love to pay for HBO in the UK.

http://www.hbogo.com/geo.html

I am a HBO customer. And GO makes it that convenient.

Eff them for giving an easy way to pay for great content?

Game of Thrones is worth the price alone. Most of their library is available on-demand. And they've transitioned to where Netflix wants to be...in ten years.

I don't see much of a problem.

for me, as an internet only customer, it costs $30/mo (via a promo email i just got from twc this month to sell me on hbo via GoT) for 12 months, which is only a promotional period and does not include associated install / equipment costs. As much as I like GoT, it is not worth $360 ($30x12) for one season.

The target audience will be torrenting it anyway.

If by "target audience" you mean "young people", Girls and Game of Thrones (which are also HBO) both seem to be doing just fine. If instead you mean techies... well, I don't think the target audience of this show is purely people in Silicon Valley. HBO is doing just fine, even with the advent of the internet.

HBO Go is on Roku, Xbox, etc. I'm not sure I know anyone who watches an HBO channel.

HBO's model is broken because it requires a Cable subscription. They should just allow me to pay them for their service. Why tie it to TimeCast?

HBO's model is not broken...they have millions of subscribers who generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

If you have HBO, you're not an HBO customer. You're a Comcast (etc) customer. HBO doesn't have to deal with billing, customer support, they probably don't even know your name. Heck they don't even have a database to put your name if you told them! They just don't deal with any of that.

Because they make more money this way.

You mean the same people that will rave about The Wire and Game of Thrones?

>Game of Thrones?

You mean the most pirated show of 2012 and 2013?

And the one you can buy on iTunes or Amazon. And yet they still pirate.

Worrying about pirates is counterproductive. Some might do it because it's easier, but I remain convinced that most do it because it's free. Trying to attract them is a sucker's game.

Some of us have HBO GO, pay a cable subscription, have Amazon Prime, and still pirate it. It's nice sometimes to be able to download it once and then not waste the bandwidth watching it again, especially when your ISP puts a bandwidth cap on all customers and calls you "data hogs". I also wholeheartedly support piracy (even of the things I make), so there's that.

The availability delay is significant for the other services.

A large number of viewers live where HBO GO doesn't exist, and since the buzz around each episode hits the internet at the time of first broadcast, the rest of the world immediately pirates the show.

Yes, you can buy it if you don't mind waiting 6 months or sometimes much longer.

Oh I'll be watching it. Just not on HBO.

you are begging the question of who the target audience is.

hint: it's not you.

Is the target audience the people involved in the industry?

The Office wasn't targeted towards people in the paper sales industries - but I'd imagine the target audience to be the same.

you are begging the question of who the target audience is.

That seems appropriate, since Judge did "Office Space", the finest documentary ever made about the tech industry.

And don't forget "Idiocracy", the finest documentary ever made about SoCal.

Well, it's got to be better than Amazon's "Betas", right?

HBO has made it available on Youtube until the 28th.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvkmsI54ss4

Having just watched it, I take back my earlier skepticism -- it's eminently watchable.

Please say it's better than Betas. I only lasted 10 minutes into that one.

If anyone wants to read the pilot: http://www.fileswap.com/dl/wQwDwVML9f/

Honestly wasn't a fan at all. Felt very contrived and inorganic. Would have been a bigger fan of a more serious take on the subject matter.

> Would have been a bigger fan of a more serious take on the subject matter.

But...it's a comedy. Isn't the point of a comedy to take a not serious approach to things?

The comments in this thread are the exact reason why this show will be hilarious.

I saw the first two episodes at SXSW and it's hilarious.

I will be checking this out for sure but I really hope they get the tech terms right.

It's going to be hard to stand if they do the usual technobabble.

They could win major points with their target audience simply by namedropping Vim or BSD.

Mike Judge and his co-creator were doing some research for the show about 2 years ago, and stopped by our office in SOMA (San Francisco). We were telling them about open source, meet ups, editors, and stuff like that. Here are some clips of it:

Here's him asking about ruby: http://www.tout.com/m/t0x6dh judge drawing on one of our desks: http://www.tout.com/m/q8ppc1 here's the full stream: http://www.tout.com/hashtags/MikeJudgeToutHQ

Does Mike Judge and his co-creator visit HN for research as well? He would get tons of material.

Their "target audience" isn't you or anyone else who is worried about the technical terminology in a comedy show.

(It's not me, either, but I've seen this show live and don't need to see it again.)

I'm a fan of Judge's so I've been watching the hbo previews and In a couple of the making of's type previews they really stress the number of consultants and research they have done to get it right. I hope they do because if not that will kill it for me.

I think that's a pretty low bar. Hopefully they'll do more than that, and from the previews it seems obvious they will.

I hope they have a laugh track.

Sometimes the only thing differentiating a documentary from a comedy.

Although a comedy without laugh track easily turns into a show with long, awkward silences.

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