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TV is broken

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Re: TV is broken

#21

Post by PaulHoule »

My nine year old has never been entertained by cable or broadcast TV.

On broadcast TV there is nothing but the e|i junk that is so unwatchable that the category must have been invented by the author of "four arguments for the elimination of television".

On cable there's an amazing number of channels, but the only sure things are Spongebob Squarepants (yuck!) and those live action dramas by Disney about impossibly rich teenagers who have no discernable problems.

At least kids in Japan get to watch animated shows about cute girls who beat up the bad guys that are formulaic but have a level of art, writing, and voice acting that make American TV programming look like the stuff I make with a cheap camcorder.

Re: TV is broken

#22

Post by VikingCoder »

ssharp wrote: post #13

Very interesting anecdotes, but I don't see how it shows that TV is "broken", other than OP's daughter thinking it was broken when first exposed to commercials. Additionally, Hulu / Hulu+ and streaming shows directly from a network's exposes you to as many commercial breaks (albeit shorter) as watching a show on cable.

Tomorrow, Hacker News will be discussing a story about a 14 year old boy who discovered that some rats prefer raspberries.

If you'd like to discuss something else, try using a different web site, that will also be discussing one and only one story.

TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed.

People buy devices to mask these problems, but they really don't solve them.

Hulu is slightly less broken. Netflix Instant Watch is even LESS broken.

Re: TV is broken

#23

Post by TheFuture »

Almost all my big screen watching is through Roku of mainly Netflix streaming. I cut cable over a year ago and very rarely watch network TV (NFL football games are main thing I watch over the air).

I feel like the young girl every time I'm at a friends house and trying to navigate whatever cable/sat guide they have. Seriously, it's 2012 and I'm paging through this endless list of "channels" labeled by NUMBER and a CALLSIGN? 1006 WKOW-HD. 12.1 ABC. Try to watch Jeopardy and get assaulted with denture paste, hearing aides, and adult diaper commercials! What the heck is going on? It is truly astonishing how bad the UI for these set-top boxes is, combined with the process of finding out what and where the correct ESPNx channel (HD or not HD) is to watch the game.

Huge potential for serious changes in this industry. I don't like to throw such a vague word like "app" around, but that is the future. ESPN will have an app that will deliver their content in the best way. The closest thing I've seen to this is the work Major League Baseball is doing on mobile and TV. They're able to provide the video/audio, but augment it with other datastream. For sports this makes so much sense.

Re: TV is broken

#24

Post by PaulHoule »

The real issue with TV is that the audience is aging and eventually dying off.

TV viewership in hours per week is pretty stable because as boomers retire and become disabled and unable to do anything else, they watch more TV. Young people, like under 50, are turning away from TV.

Generation X and younger people have been falling out of love with TV for a long time. In my case I remember sharply losing interest in TV around the 1990s. Even around 2000 I felt insulted by advertising that is aimed at people who don't have money -- only medicare benefits they can spend and the hope that they can hire a ambulance chasing lawyer to make a big killing.

TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it.

Some day the last television viewer will die and the cable companies and networks will turn off the lights. Much like the music industry, the TV industry has been losing it's audience for a long time, and one day they will wake up and realize that their frog has been boiled -- and find somebody else to blame.

Re: TV is broken

#25

Post by Craiggybear »

tomjen3 wrote: post #15
Craiggybear wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and the movies are years old." ... and, that's bad? Personally, most of the movies I might want to watch are certainly in black-and-white anyhow.

Not everybody is a hipster :) I actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the pretty girl once he is done blowing things up. And recently the explosions have become more awesome, so I prefer the never movies. You keep Casablanca, if you want.

I'd not think that at 52 I was anything that could be remotely described as a 'hipster'.

Re: TV is broken

#27

Post by recoiledsnake »

Cable TV started out with the premise that it won't have ads and slowly it started adding them. Hulu already has ads.

I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix started ads soon, since they seem to getting slowly crushed with the high cost of licensing content.

Re: TV is broken

#28

Post by zerostar07 »

w1ntermute wrote: post #18
zerostar07 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think traditional TV is capitalizing on the lack of good (or overabudance of bad) recommendation engines online. Social recommendations are blurry, popularity is, well, a popularity contest and movie reviews are so subjective. Even with well-intented efforts like boxee you have (a) an anavoidable pile of juvenile nonsense and (b) too many options (and that's a problem). TV offers a simple, dumb stream of medi…

> (btw that illegal torrent u suggest is still going to take hours to download) I think you need to double-check your math. I just found a Bluray rip of the Hurt Locker on a torrent site that is 3.78 GB. Using my 24 Mbps fiber connection ($55/month, in America), it would take: 3.78 GB * (1024 MB/GB) * (8 MB/Mb) * (1 s/24 Mb) * (1 min/60 s) = 21.5 mins Hardly the "hours" that you suggested. And considering that the ad…

out of curiosity are you getting the full 24Mbps when downloading torrents? Also, what about the illegal factor?

Re: TV is broken

#29

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

And this is why this form of media is losing. Because it's worse, and any 4-year old will notice. Especially a 4-year –old. More and louder commercial won't fix the problem, it will just keep the next generation even further away. Like black-and-white silent films, it lacks basic features that the new generation is taking for granted, around user control, choice and interactivity.

Re: TV is broken

#30

Post by mikeryan »

VikingCoder wrote: post #22
ssharp wrote: post #13

Very interesting anecdotes, but I don't see how it shows that TV is "broken", other than OP's daughter thinking it was broken when first exposed to commercials. Additionally, Hulu / Hulu+ and streaming shows directly from a network's exposes you to as many commercial breaks (albeit shorter) as watching a show on cable.

Tomorrow, Hacker News will be discussing a story about a 14 year old boy who discovered that some rats prefer raspberries. If you'd like to discuss something else, try using a different web site, that will also be discussing one and only one story. TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed…

TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed.

Not sure your market or cable company. But in Berkeley (and SF) with Comcast under on-demand I have a section called "TV Shows", the "All Shows" section lists about 300 TV shows.Each with about 8-20 episodes. All On-Demand all with rewind, pause etc. The exception is it won't let me FF through the limited ads embedded in the streams.

Assume this was all current content. How much would you pay for this service? With Ads? Without? Because its not anywhere near the $10 price you're paying now for Netflix or Hulu.

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