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TV is broken

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Re: TV is broken

#91

Post by nollidge »

lukifer wrote: post #87
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…

> 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…

> no radio

There's definitely quality non-profit radio stations (NPR affiliates, for example) depending on where you live. At worst you get the fund drives that are annoying (but understandable) for a week.

EDIT: This assumes you're in the U.S., though.

Re: TV is broken

#92

Post by groby_b »

RandallBrown wrote: post #70
groby_b wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you watch two entire seasons in a month, you have a problem :)

Re: TV is broken

#93

Post by supirman »

stinkytaco wrote: post #67
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.

My two year old loves Word World on PBS.

Re: TV is broken

#94

Post by blogimus »

potatolicious wrote: post #90
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.

Like climate control in your house

Re: TV is broken

#95

Post by bicknergseng »

TV might be broken, but the inability of a child to focus on something for more than a few minutes at a time isn't the best evidence. It definitely brings up some interesting things to think about, though.

First, while the attention span of adults is normally quite a bit better than that of kids, the digital age is eroding our ability to focus on one thing http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312119/Faceb.... While this may be a temporary trend as we adapt to the information overload the internet can provide, I think it's fairly safe to say that people 10 years from now will be far less likely to sit patiently watching TV than people 20 years ago.

The most obvious implication from this may be that commercial advertising, rather than TV in general, is going to need to adapt. I imagine part of the reason why people under 30 are cutting the cable in increasing numbers is because they aren't willing to sit through loud, irrelevant commercials in order to watch something they don't actually want to watch. The tolerance of the consumer for TV style advertising is shrinking proportionally to the consumer's attention span. This should be good for subscription services like Netflix, and would be good for HBO/Showtime if they didn't for customers to pay for cable/sat in addition to their services.

Re: TV is broken

#96

Post by J3L2404 »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #27

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.

I would rather pay three times as much for Netflix than go back to watching commercials, although I may be in the minority.

Re: TV is broken

#97

Post by [deleted] »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #61
calloc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: TV is broken

#98

Post by Danieru »

stinkytaco wrote: post #65
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…

For those curious; kernel hacker Matthew Garrett wrote a great post on this subject: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html

Re: TV is broken

#99

Post by mbreese »

stinkytaco wrote: post #67
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.

PBS kids also has a good iPad app. Between that and Netflix, my son discovered Sid the Science Kid and Curious George all on his own.

Re: TV is broken

#100

Post by PaulHoule »

stinkytaco wrote: post #67
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.

He's nine now so he's a little past that.

Back when he was young (three) I could never get him to sit still in front of that stuff.

From my point of view, all of that e/i stuff on broadcast was invented by some liberals who want to turn off the next generation to TV.

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