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TV is broken

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Re: TV is broken

#61

Post by pavel_lishin »

calloc wrote: post #17
geophile wrote: post #7

It's not really TV, it's TV networks that are broken. Hulu (and other online archives) may be even more irritating than broadcast TV. It's difficult to find what you want; you are hit by download limits in the middle of a program; there are still commercials, and it's the same ones over and over and over, and the repetition can drive you nuts; browser crash means starting over sometimes, or if you can go to where you…

Hold on ... Hulu has download limits in the middle of watching a program? I've watched Hulu from 5 AM till 5 PM almost uninterrupted, the only interruption is between shows they will say "You've been watching for 3 hours, are you sure you don't want to take a break?". That repeats every two hours or so. Yes, the commercials can be grating, and are still annoying but I think that is a small price to pay for streaming…

I think he's talking about internet bandwidth limits; e.g., you get 50 gigabytes a month, and you hit that limit after watching a few episodes.

Re: TV is broken

#62

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

jrwoodruff wrote: post #45
jerf wrote: post #20

I would observe that in some sense this isn't just a "kid growing up with different tech gets it better than the adults" story. My wife and I both feel the exact same way about TV, in our mid-30s. We just have the historical perspective such that we don't have to ask "why". Also it's less cute when we ask why. But otherwise the same.

Same here. I actually just participated in a Nielsen tv ratings survey, which asked about DVD players, VCRs and DVRs connected to the tv. No spot for Roku, Apple tv or Netflix enabled sets.

Hopefully they at least had a comments section where you could mention that?

Re: TV is broken

#63

Post by awj »

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 actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the pretty girl once he is done blowing things up.

Die Hard is "years old" (24 of them, actually) and is an awesome movie in this genre. In fact I am going to preemptively declare you to be an action movie hipster if you like them but not Die Hard.

Being old doesn't make a movie bad. Being bad makes a movie bad. Sometimes that's because the times have changed and the plots are hard to relate to, but usually it's got nothing to do with the age.

Re: TV is broken

#64

Post by PaulHoule »

lbotos wrote: post #50
PaulHoule wrote: post #24

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…

I don't think it is fair to make the comparison between TV and music industries. While they are both being slow and TV is getting outmoded by the internet listening to music is not dying. They are both media industries and we are just seeing the shift from monolithic distribution channels to a more federated internet distribution model. The audience is still there, they just aren't facing the TV set anymore. Their ey…

It's not fair to compare TV 2012 or Movies 2012 with Music 2012, but a comparison with Music 1983 might be fair... And of course, the future trajectory may be quite different.

The movie industry, for one thing, is intelligent about pricing. In particular, if you want to see a movie you've got a choices that range between a 3D theatre ticket, $40 collectors editions, usually several Blu-Ray and DVD editions with different features, $5 bargain disks as well as movie channels, Vudu, Netflix, Redbox and other things.

Now, in the long term it's an interesting question if "TV" is the same medium if you watch it going by on a set or if you watch it prerecorded on your own schedule. There are certainly forms of "TV" like cable news and the weather channel that will dry up and blow away in the digital transition.

Re: TV is broken

#65

Post by stinkytaco »

droithomme wrote: post #57

There are many other things that are broken too. My fancy expensive name-brand digital TV takes a full minute to boot up from a cold start, longer than it took my tube based TV from the 1950s to warm up. Once on, it takes almost a full second to change channels while it rebuffers the stream of the channel being changed to. This prevents quickly flipping through channels to see what is on. As a result I just don't bot…

>We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.

This drives me crazy. I have a computer hooked up to my TV (for the same reason as the OP, we basically watch just streaming or my digitized DVD collection) and every time I upgrade the display drivers, and sometimes just randomly, the display goes wonky and I have to fix it by hand. I don't have to do that with my computer monitor...

Re: TV is broken

#66

Post by zwieback »

I think everyone agrees that commercials are annoying but I don't think TV is broken at all. After all, most of the content we stream with other means originated as TV shows or Hollywood movies.

So the real question is, once the current younger generation gets older and everyone switched off their cable, how will the production of quality content be financed, other than per-view fees?

When I was a kid in Germany there were three channels, all publicly financed, to a large extent via a per-household radio/TV fee. TV was only broadcasting for a few hours a day. The overall quality was very high and commercials were in a block between shows. I'd love to go back to that model but I doubt the general public would agree.

Re: TV is broken

#67

Post by stinkytaco »

PaulHoule wrote: post #24

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…

>TV for kids just sucks these days.

You are clearly not watching excellent kids shows like Dinosaur Train, Sesame Street, or Word Girl. Of course, these are all PBS show... interesting. We don't get cable and only sometimes catch an episode of something else on Netflix, so maybe you're right, but PBS is still putting out top notch stuff.

Re: TV is broken

#68

Post by downx3 »

VikingCoder wrote: post #39
mikeryan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I have money, and I want to watch Season 2, Episode 2 of the West Wing, which my friend just told me is worth watching. I cannot give them my money, to watch it. I could wait a couple days for Netflix to mail me the DVD, but by then the impulse might pass. TV is broken.

Sounds like you want instant gratification!

How about watching something else while you order the DVD?

Re: TV is broken

#69

Post by pixelcort »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #31
jerf wrote: post #20

I would observe that in some sense this isn't just a "kid growing up with different tech gets it better than the adults" story. My wife and I both feel the exact same way about TV, in our mid-30s. We just have the historical perspective such that we don't have to ask "why". Also it's less cute when we ask why. But otherwise the same.

Yup. I've been cable-free for about 2 years now, and I'd never go back. Since Comcast "discounts" cable internet (which, by the way, is my /only/ high-speed option besides 768kbit/sec DSL -- I have the 20mbit package or whatever they're selling it as these days) if you bundle it with basic cable, it only ends up being about $1.50 cheaper to NOT have basic cable. That said, basic cable is seriously not worth $1.50/mon…

In some cases and at some times in the past it was actually cheaper to get the internet service when bundled with Cable TV service. In effect, some are or were somewhat paid to get it.

Re: TV is broken

#70

Post by RandallBrown »

groby_b wrote: post #54
mikeryan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

I've got no problem paying $40 for a season pass of a show I like on iTunes. I think I'd be happy to pay that via Comcast too, if they had a decent interface. (I am however _not_ willing to pay $9.99 to watch a 5-year old movie "on demand". Not worth it) The part that the cable companies don't get is that customers don't want a buffet. They want a la carte. And they want pricing that is related to the value of a movi…

Really? I think the 40 dollar pass is outrageously expensive. If I subscribe to just 2 shows, I've already gone over what I pay for cable. Sure, it's really nice to be able to watch it whenever I want, but 40 dollars is nuts.
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