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TV is broken

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Re: TV is broken

#171

Post by pash »

In the last week or so, it's become clear that Google is planning to offer some sort of IPTV service over its fiber network in Kansas City when it comes online later this year. [0] It will be interesting to see how disruptive their offering will be. Even just selling programming a la carte would be a huge improvement over what the cable companies offer, but I have a feeling Google will (eventually) do more than just that.

0. http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/22/3444862/google-giving-s...

Re: TV is broken

#172

Post by mark_integerdsv »

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.

IMO there is a strong correlation between the mobile phone landscape circa 2007 iPhone release and the television landscape today. Pretty much the same players, mostly vying for market share based on kitsch features... No true innovation.

Without having read the article I'm guessing Apple will introduce something along the lines of 'Siri TV' dispensing with the remote control as they did with the stylus but instead of substituting it with fingers we'll use another built in human control device that you don't have to lug around or keep track of, your voice. It gets around the issue of needing a keyboard where a TV is web-enabled in so far as you can easily search YouTube or Google for content by voice and it solves the dilemma of the lost or sitting on the other side of the room remote.

Re: TV is broken

#173

Post by rmc »

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…

I don't think advertising will go away, but will change. Companies will still want to attract new customers, i.e. advertise their wares/services. People who have other people's attention will probably still sell it. However advertising will change to cope with the new system.

Re: TV is broken

#174

Post by faboo »

FredFredrickson wrote: post #104

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…

My 5 year old had a much easier time understanding that Netflix needs to buffer or downgrade sometimes than why there are advertisements on television.

I think that's because Netflix buffering has an explanation that directly relates to the activity itself, whereas the explanation for advertisements is a lot more abstract.

Re: TV is broken

#175

Post by brigade »

hythloday wrote: post #160
jpdoctor wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Eh, do you have a citation for it being $100B or more a year? I can only find figures for about $60B: 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.)

Another question is what percentage of that $60B actually funds TV content and how much is spent on producing ads and other advertising-specific overhead that would presumably vanish if we payed for completely ad-free TV.

Re: TV is broken

#176

Post by Retric »

SiVal wrote: post #113
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…

Here's a question for my fellow amateur economists: What happens to the quality of broadcast television when you increase the supply of broadcast channel-hours by a factor of 50 and you don't increase the supply of viewers at all? I used to watch TV, like most people. Then, in the 1990's, the number of channels started increasing. More options, great. Twice as many channels did allow for more specialization, so maybe…

Video games and the internet killed TV.

Going from 3 to 300 channels did not help. What really cut into their budget was a steady drop in viewership over time as new toys simply become more compelling than TV. Reality TV is simply what happened when keep cutting the budget.

PS: Seinfeld reportedly turned down a $5 million per-episode offer to continue the show for a 10th year. You can put on a full season of a reality TV show for that.

Re: TV is broken

#177

Post by mbell »

jpdoctor wrote: post #79
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 Since there's nowhere near 720 pixels x 60 frames/sec worth of information being sent to your TV, who cares?

I'm not really sure what your trying to say but the stream is decompressed at the cable box or at the the over the air HD receiver.

HDMI 1.3 and 1.4 support up to 10.2Gb/sec bandwidth. The video is not compressed, the audio may or may not be. So why would you think that there isn't 720p x 60fps being sent to the tv?

The max video you can get through HDMI is 4096×2160p24 @ 24bit color completely uncompressed which is several times the bandwidth needed for 1280x720p60 @ 24bit color.

Re: TV is broken

#178

Post by rmc »

kgo wrote: post #140

I made nachos for my niece once. Put Doritos on a cookie sheet, smothered them in cheese, and put them in the broiler. She thought they were weird and broken because I didn't use the normal plain-style tortilla chips. Her mom made her a new batch the right way. Young children have a tenancy to think that the rest of the world is exactly like their home, because that home is their world. Then when they experience the…

That is true in general, but in 30 years time, do you think the majority of people will be using traditional TV schedules, or will it be watch on demand?

The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.

Re: TV is broken

#179

Post by mbell »

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…

This is generally not an issue with your TV (unless you using an internal OTA HD tuner) but rather a poorly made cable box. Generally the cable box is responsible for channel changing, buffering for decode and other things. The stream is sent, uncompressed, to the TV over HDMI. Now your TV may be trying to do some processing on the HDMI signal but that should not effect channel changing at all as the TV isn't changing channels, its just processing a stream. If the cable box borks the stream in the process of changing channels, that is the cable box's fault.

This really stems from relative non-existent competition in the cable box industry. The consumer doesn't usually get to choose, its just whoever got the deal with Comcast or whoever.

The solution to this, which has been and will continue to be fought adamantly by cable providers, is allowing CableCARD/M-CARD support. It lets you plug in a little card that will allow any device to decode the cable stream.

Its not a full solution though, most people just don't care and the cablebox is usually 'free', why pay for something better?

Re: TV is broken

#180

Post by brother »

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…

Yo Gabba Gabba is a phenomenal show, too. Plenty of really good cameos (Flaming Lips, Jack Black, Sarah Silverman, etc).
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