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TV is broken

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Re: TV is broken

#101

Post by kbruner »

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?

This is my least favorite argument when talking about removing advertising from my life. Facebook and Google will simply do something else. Why is "ad supported" always considered the only business model?

Re: TV is broken

#102

Post by roc »

huggyface wrote: post #89
rcthompson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> "Nonetheless, it is understood that children notice change."

My own niece certainly notices that records are different than music from my Boxee. But records don't really bother her. She thinks they're weird because they're so big, and you have to find them and put them on the player and be careful with the needle.

But she happily drags out the player, shuffles through the handful of records I have and listens to them from time to time.

Yet she had a very similar reaction to what's described in the article, when she (briefly) saw Shrek on Cable. Her grandmother (the only one in her family who watches broadcast anymore) flipped through the channels and passed Shrek, whereupon my niece convinced her that they should watch it. After the first commercial break she asked if we could just watch it on the Boxee.

So it's not "child notices change". Not entirely. It's mostly "child dismisses interstitial advertising entirely".

Re: TV is broken

#103

Post by absconditus »

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…

There are two reasons why I refuse to pay for Hulu:

1. Subscribing does not remove commercials.

2. A large number of the shows on Hulu cannot be played through a set-top box like a Roku.

Re: TV is broken

#104

Post by FredFredrickson »

So what happens when a kid who is used to TV goes to watch Netflix and the stream gets interrupted (like we all know it would on a typical hotel wi-fi network). If you've watched videos online before, you know it's just buffering, but the tv-oriented kid would do the same thing as this guy's kid did: ask if it's broken, or why we stopped it.

I'm not saying that there are no problems with the way TV is presented, but to raise a child in a relatively TV-less environment, marvel at their confusion over how it works, and then come to the conclusion that TV is broken... that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.

Re: TV is broken

#105

Post by rhizome »

jpdoctor wrote: post #88
rhizome wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By my top-of-head calculations:

$100B advertising / ~160MM households = $625/household/year, or about $50/mo.

You're right, I wasn't even close. I was way over.

Re: TV is broken

#106

Post by jianshen »

yabai wrote: post #51

I have given up on most TV - especially cable TV. Almost 3 years ago my wife and I moved and decided to not startup cable TV. I setup an antenna and run MythTV, Boxee and anything else that will run on a browser + flash. I run a virtual machine for Netflix. When we started this experiment, I thought we might go running back to cable. What we discovered is that there is a ton of content available. The Mythbox nicely r…

Good on you! Having spent some time in hospitals with loved ones recently, I think broadcast TV (like cable) will continue to thrive until someone does a fantastic job of making a "channel lineup" application for on-demand media.

I tried to set up Netflix for someone who was bed-ridden and the fact that the nurse has to keep going in and selecting the next movie after the previous one is done is just agonizing. I love Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo but at least for people with accessibility issues, "what's on" is still more convenient than "what do I want to watch".

Re: TV is broken

#107

Post by ebf »

PaulHoule wrote: post #58
noblethrasher wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Where do you see these? I certainly never see them on cable when I visit friends and family. I saw Kim Possible once a long time ago, and I also was really impressed with Teen Titans, enough to get the box set. Are these on a channel they don't get? On AMZN or Netflix? Or do you just have to get them through BitTorrent? There might be some good stuff, but it's never on. Spongebob Squarepants is always on... I wonder…

Spongebob Squarepants, at least early on, had terrific writing.

Re: TV is broken

#108

Post by fluidcruft »

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.

tvbythenumbers had a link to an analysis somewhere about a year ago (sorry for no source, I was interested but not interested enough to bookmark it or email it to anyone--I think it was adweek) that concluded that in aggregate advertisers pay something like $25/month per viewer.

Re: TV is broken

#109

Post by geophile »

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…

No, Hulu doesn't have limits, but some other web TV archives do have daily limits.

Re: TV is broken

#110

Post by doki_pen »

Thanks for posting this, and thanks everyone for upvoting it. It's even better the 4th time it's made it to #1 on hacker news. I gained some new insight into how TV sucks and the Internet is awesome.
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