151–160 of 264 posts
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.
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…
For HDMI connections, this isn't the TV's fault (actually I think my TV doesn't even let you change the aspect ratio for HDMI inputs.) For SD component/composite, there is no aspect ratio information in the signal so the TV cannot determine it correctly and generally defaults to assuming 16:9 because most people stupidly prefer 4:3 content to be stretched to 16:9.
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…
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).…
Youtube showing mandatory, non-skippable video commercials before the video you want to watch is the single most annoying thing that happened on the Internet in the last few years. I still haven't figured out how to get rid of them, but if I ever find out, I won't hesitate to do so.
I miss analog.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their advertising is less broken. I'd still rather pay for GMail instead of seeing ads.
I'd still rather pay for GMail instead of seeing ads. You can; it costs $50/year, though: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html
disclosure: I have no affiliation with Fastmail.fm other than being a longtime customer.
I could imagine a similar and opposite article, "Netflix is broken", written from the perpective from an older person instead of a younger one: Why do I need to sign in? Why do I have to choose something to watch – why doesn't it just let me start watching immediately? Why is it so hard to change channels? Why do I have to watch things on my small computer screen instead of my large television screen?
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.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-07-07/tech/30048336...
(The UK's is about $2.5B, despite it having around 20% of the US's population. Quite a stark difference.)