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TV is broken

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Re: TV is broken

#81

Post by sedev »

noblethrasher wrote: post #43
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. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it. I am curious about what you mean by 'TV for kids'. It seems to me that 'kid shows' have been pretty good since the early nineties (Ducktales, Animaniacs, Gargoyles, the DC Animated universe cartoons). More recently: Kim Possible, Spectacular Spider-Man, Samurai Jack, Sym-Bionic Ti…

Those are good, yes! But there's also a lot of survivor bias there. Sturgeon's Law still holds: for every individual Freakazoid! there's a posse of Dumb & Dumber (yes, real: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_and_Dumber_(TV_series) ).

Re: TV is broken

#82

Post by VikingCoder »

mbreese wrote: post #52
VikingCoder wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does this mean that TV is broken? Because you can't get instant access to every show ever created? That's not a TV problem, that's a you problem. That says nothing about TV. It does point to a weakness in distribution, but there are a variety of ways to get legally content these days: over the air, cable, satellite, online streaming (Hulu, Netflix), online purchase (Amazon, iTunes), buy or rent a DVD of a season…

...the content production industry is not doing okay, because it's working "for hire" for people who are almost exclusively interested in advertising revenue.

If the people who produce TV shows had good contracts, they could also sell me their content directly - with no middle men. Or at least, different middle men. There's no technological reason they couldn't.

I agree that you're right that it's a distribution problem.

But there's a supply of video, and a demand for video, and people standing in the way of that market. The people standing in the way are eventually going to go away.

...that's my belief, anyway. Until then, when I have money and want to watch a show, but can't, TV is broken.

Re: TV is broken

#83

Post by hyperbovine »

cafard wrote: post #77
rickmb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no age limit her. We're in our 40's, we watch a lot of series and movies, but we've rarely seen commercials in the past 10 or so years. Sometimes we start watching a show or movie more or less by accident, but that usually ends at the first commercial break. Both of us find it hard to imagine people can actually tolerate watching TV that way, even though we've done the same for a long time. But imho it's not…

"But imho it's not so much TV that is broken. It's advertising. In today's world of on-demand personalized information, advertising has zero value." What happens to Google & Facebook without advertising?

They start charging? Just shooting from the hip here...

Re: TV is broken

#84

Post by rcthompson »

huggyface wrote: post #73

This is akin to saying that the internet is broken because some videos are prefaced by a commercial. Or HN is broken because some of the front-page are hiring ads for YC companies. I use a PVR for all of my "TV" needs (I have two large wall-mounted screens. They are great entertainment devices. I only mention that for consistency with those proudly informing that they only old some small CRT in the corner somewhere).…

The article is saying that for a child raised (mostly) on commercial-free media (Netflix), advertisements are so intrusive and annoying that the child rejects watching TV outright because of the commercials.

I wonder if this is the kind of stuff that keeps advertising executives up at night. What would happen if everyone under the age of 20 thought like this (assuming that ad-free media sources still exist)?

Re: TV is broken

#85

Post by jrwoodruff »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #62
jrwoodruff wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They did, and I did. I also talked to one of their support people, they said I could record the station/channel as netflix/apple tv. Who knows how that will be processed though...

Re: TV is broken

#86

Post by ricardobeat »

cafard wrote: post #77
rickmb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no age limit her. We're in our 40's, we watch a lot of series and movies, but we've rarely seen commercials in the past 10 or so years. Sometimes we start watching a show or movie more or less by accident, but that usually ends at the first commercial break. Both of us find it hard to imagine people can actually tolerate watching TV that way, even though we've done the same for a long time. But imho it's not…

"But imho it's not so much TV that is broken. It's advertising. In today's world of on-demand personalized information, advertising has zero value." What happens to Google & Facebook without advertising?

Their advertising is less broken.

I'd still rather pay for GMail instead of seeing ads.

Re: TV is broken

#87

Post by lukifer »

rickmb wrote: post #72
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.

There's no age limit her. We're in our 40's, we watch a lot of series and movies, but we've rarely seen commercials in the past 10 or so years. Sometimes we start watching a show or movie more or less by accident, but that usually ends at the first commercial break. Both of us find it hard to imagine people can actually tolerate watching TV that way, even though we've done the same for a long time. But imho it's not…

> It's advertising.

Agreed. It's simply a bad business model; you're the product, not the customer, etc. It also has a hugely distorted effect on content production, incentivizing shows to shoot for safe returns and broad appeal instead of monetizing hardcore fans of innovative niche programming. Put simply, I want businesses to care whether they have my money, not my eyeballs.

I cut most forms of advertising out of my life 7-8 years ago: no radio, no broadcast TV, and FlashBlock+AdBlock. Once you do so, it's hard to go back. (Although YouTube's trend towards more and more video ads is getting frustrating; I wish I could throw $20/month at YouTube Pro or something to make it go away.)

Re: TV is broken

#88

Post by jpdoctor »

rhizome wrote: post #80
jpdoctor wrote: post #75

Folks do not want to pay the amount commercial free TV would cost. Full stop. If the "investment money" ever stops supporting youtube/hulu/(insert profitless service here), then goodbye web substitute. Even The Daily Show has gone into full annoyance mode lately.

Folks are already paying the amount that commercial-free TV would cost, but the money is eaten up by ESPN's multi-channel presence in basic-cable packages. Yes, your cable dollars subsidize ESPN.

> Folks are already paying the amount that commercial-free TV would cost

Not even close. Take the entire amount of advertising $$ spent on TV ($100B+) and divide by the folks watching. That is the money that people would have to shell out one way or another.

Re: TV is broken

#89

Post by huggyface »

rcthompson wrote: post #84
huggyface wrote: post #73

This is akin to saying that the internet is broken because some videos are prefaced by a commercial. Or HN is broken because some of the front-page are hiring ads for YC companies. I use a PVR for all of my "TV" needs (I have two large wall-mounted screens. They are great entertainment devices. I only mention that for consistency with those proudly informing that they only old some small CRT in the corner somewhere).…

The article is saying that for a child raised (mostly) on commercial-free media (Netflix), advertisements are so intrusive and annoying that the child rejects watching TV outright because of the commercials. I wonder if this is the kind of stuff that keeps advertising executives up at night. What would happen if everyone under the age of 20 thought like this (assuming that ad-free media sources still exist)?

The title "TV" refers to a physical medium. If it meant "the commercial-supported major networks", then perhaps it should have said that.

Nonetheless, it is understood that children notice change. If you give your child maple syrup when they're accustomed to Aunt Jemima, they will ask you what it is. They will probably ask for their Aunt Jemima back. Children are not savants supplying higher information (and I say that as a very proud parent of four of them): They are creatures of routine and habit. A day later they would happily enjoy maple syrup, rejecting their old standby.

There just isn't anything profound or particularly insightful about that observation. It doesn't merit the "TV is broken" bit.

Re: TV is broken

#90

Post by potatolicious »

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…

And this is why I groan when Samsung easily dismisses rumors that Apple is about to enter the TV space.

The UX around TVs is horrific right now, and people put up with it because that's how it is. There's enormous room for a dramatic UX improvement and it doesn't seem like the incumbents realize this.

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