TV is broken • Hacker News Board

Re: TV is broken

#241

Post by eftpotrm » Sat, Feb 25, 2012, 1:40 PM UTC

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…

While you're right in the general sense that children get surprised when they discover a world that isn't like their home, I firmly believe you're wrong in the applicability of that to TV.

Thanks to BBC iPlayer, we've had near-universal internet video on demand in the UK for some years now - and the other broadcasters had to copy to catch up. I largely stopped bothering with TV schedules; I just watch the programs at my convenience, from a menu of content - it's a far superior user experience in almost every way. In browsing UK profiles on dating sites, I've noted huge numbers of people saying they don't have TVs and just use iPlayer.

When I was young I used to react with incredulity to the idea that homes didn't have TVs and cars in the past. I remember the incredulity to which some children reacted when I took a photo on my film SLR and they couldn't see it on the back. Landline phones are already dying - children will react with horror that we used to ring a building and hope a person was in it.

And, within the next ten years, scheduled network broadcast TV will, to all intents and purposes, die. Rolling news and live sports have a reason to be live and I suspect will stay. Otherwise, I expect in 20 years time to be getting baffled looks from children to the idea that we used to have to wait to all watch a program at the exact same time and if we couldn't see it then we didn't see it. They'll all be have grown up with streaming VoD to tablets and TVs and anything else will feel as antiquated as a horse and cart.

Re: TV is broken

#242

Post by _b8r0 » Sat, Feb 25, 2012, 1:49 PM UTC

DanI-S wrote: post #186

SiVal wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some validation: In the UK, the BBC has a pretty fixed budget, a pretty fixed (low) number of channels and a pretty fixed audience. They have continued to produce a high quality output of world-class educational and entertainment TV for a good chunk of the last century. They also managed to build a free streaming service superior to Hulu, and a bunch of great websites. It costs $230 per year ($19 per month). And ther…

Actually the BBC had it's remit massively widened by the last government so that it had to fill sections of DAB, a large amount of Radio channels, Freeview, set up iPlayer and run a whole load of channels that aren't even targeted at the UK (such as BBC Persian), largely to meet the FCO's propaganda needs. Additionally, the dodgy dossier episode has emasculated and distorted large chunks of the BBC's programming leading to some completely bizarre side effects[1].

The BBC still does produce a large amount of quality progamming, but budgets and purposes have been affected. Top Gear for example used to be about cars but is now an entertainment show - a wildly successful entertainment show, but no longer something you'd seriously watch to get an idea of what cars to buy and what to avoid. The BBC is also responsible for the One Show, which one day will be recognised by the UN as a crime against humanity. There's also been considerable dumbing down of shows like the Apprentice and Dragon's Den over time, eschewing quality in favour of personalities and entertainment. The natural history unit still put out good documentaries, but even they're not entirely untarnished[2].

The quality of news has also suffered, particularly thanks to spin doctors in previous administrations, the simon gilligan dodgy dossier affair and other stresses on the BBC. When was the last time you saw a proper debate? The other week I saw Alastair Campbell jogging around forests, talking up the end of civilisation through alcoholic poisoning brought on by drinking at home, demanding minimum pricing as the only way out but completely ignoring the impact of the smoking ban as a factor in home drinking increases. It was a terrible attempt at a documentary and a case study in what's wrong with the BBC at the moment.

I do apologise for getting on my soap box about this, you didn't deserve it for pointing out the good stuff. Still, the BBC is not a perfect organisation and the amount of media it has to produce combined with political interference has meant that quality has dropped, perhaps not as much considering the volume of material it puts out, but it isn't immune.

[1] - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/08/today-pr...

[2] - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8950070/Fr...

Re: TV is broken

#243

Post by franze » Sat, Feb 25, 2012, 2:17 PM UTC

once upon a time i visited my father's house. when he started watching TV my 3 year old ran to the televisionscreen, tried to swipe it, pushed on some things on the screen, even did a two arm multi arm gesture to minimize the current screen - nothing happened - he turned away quite bored, i was very proud.

Re: TV is broken

#244

Post by seabee » Sat, Feb 25, 2012, 2:43 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #224

larrik wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you are referring to, but I would say no. Not like that at all. The ideal climate control interface should never even have to be looked at. It should just know what to do with your heating/cooling equipment to make your house comfortable. A ideal TV interface should help you do a lot of things, and ideally be fast in the process. (The article was down while I was writing this comment, but cable equipment…

>A ideal TV interface should help you do a lot of things, That's kind of a judgement call - there's nothing wrong with a minimal interface that does what you want it to and nothing more . Kind of like Chrome as a browser - Google's big thing with its design was minimal and out of your way, so you can focus on the web page (the reason you're running the browser in the first place).

I think there's room for both. Firefox is pretty popular precisely because of all the things it can do.

In any case, modern TVs suck at doing either of these things. I wouldn't mind which way they go as long as they do one of them.

Re: TV is broken

#245

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 25, 2012, 3:20 PM UTC

cjrp wrote: post #234

DanI-S wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm British, but I live in California, and I'm eagerly awaiting the day that I can pay monthly for BBC iPlayer (their streaming service). There are sketchy proxy services available, but it feels terrible to be paying a third party and effectively stealing the content.

iPad only, but I guess it's a start: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14322604

[deleted]

Re: TV is broken

#246

Post by demallien » Sat, Feb 25, 2012, 4:20 PM UTC

dmoo wrote: post #237

mbell wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 changin…

I'm guessing that most of the lag is in decrypting the broadcast stream on the fly from nagra 3 or whatever the current version is. For sure in Ireland there was a big business in selling 'dodgy' boxes which could decrypt all channels when you had paid for only a basic subscription to cable. The encryption upgrade a few years ago killed all of them but made the cable boxes run as slowly as treacle when it came to epg…

Well, encryption is certainly part of the story. DVB encryption uses messages called ECMs to distribute the key that is used from the receipt of the ECM through to the receipt of the next ECM. The time between two ECMs is called the crypto period and is generally in the order of a few seconds. The average wait time to get an ECM on changing channels is of course half a crypto period.

The other major source of delay is video compression, as defined by MPEG. MPEG uses bi-directional compression in the time domain, which means that frames are sent out of order, which in turn means that they have to be buffered. Furthermore, a complete frame, known as an I frame, is only sent every 10 or so frames (it depends on the profile of the transmission channel - is it lossy or not for example). As the P and B frames are basically diffs from the base I frame, you can't decode an image until you have received an I frame. This too introduces a delay of typically 0.25 seconds, and is the reason why even unencrypted digital is slower for changing channels than analog.

Re: TV is broken

#247

Post by dpark » Sat, Feb 25, 2012, 5:19 PM UTC

billybob wrote: post #239

dpark wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What business model do you see for Google that doesn't involve advertising but would allow them to continue providing Gmail and search? Yes, they might conceivably charge $15/mo for a while. But then Comcast will come along and say, "Hey, here's a (mediocre) search and email service that we will bundle for 'free'!" and just like that, Google basically stops providing search and email (or provides it only to bundling…

>>>But then Comcast will come along and say, "Hey, here's a (mediocre) search and email service that we will bundle for 'free'!" I don't know about you, but I would pay for Gmail in a heartbeat. It's a great service. I can guarantee that Comcast would make something 1,000 times crappier and that I'd waste hundreds of hours of my life fighting with it. In fact, I'd rather be paying for Gmail so that I'd be their custo…

The question is not what you or I would do, but what the general population would do. How many people consider gmail to be critical enough that they will pay for it?

> You're asserting that Gmail and Google search aren't valuable enough for people to pay for them. If that's true, they shouldn't exist in a free market.

The free market involves advertising. How much entertainment in paid for with advertising? Should none of that exist? Should, e.g., "How I Met Your Mother" be cancelled? I seriously doubt it would exist in an advertisement-free market.

Re: TV is broken

#248

Post by cdh » Sat, Feb 25, 2012, 5:31 PM UTC

DanI-S wrote: post #219

DanBC wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally I don't need a licence but I buy one anyway.

I'm British, but I live in California, and I'm eagerly awaiting the day that I can pay monthly for BBC iPlayer (their streaming service). There are sketchy proxy services available, but it feels terrible to be paying a third party and effectively stealing the content.

On the other hand, they could easily provide paid service internationally but choose not to.

It's disingenuous enough when the word 'stealing' is re-purposed in discussions about copyright infringement, since it is very doubtful that every copy of a shared file resulted in an actual loss.

In this case, though, it seems easy enough to establish that the BBC has provided no way to compensate them for viewing their content from the United States. You might be "stealing" bandwidth in some sense, but I don't think it's fair to characterize the content as stolen in this case. The third party (VPN/proxy provider) is paid for network access just like you pay an ISP, not for the content itself.

Re: TV is broken

#249

Post by llamalife » Sat, Feb 25, 2012, 5:41 PM UTC

naner wrote: post #166

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…

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 is a feature not a bug. Most people don't understand aspect ration and in fact will get upset if a standard def video doesn't fill the HD screen. Actually, it is probably just laziness on the manufacturers part but it works out well for most consumers.

My TV has six different aspect ratio modes. My satellite box has several more on top of that, in addition to choices about what resolutions it'll output in, in different situations.

Personally, I'd like that to drop that down to two options: 'black bars' or 'fill the screen', and use sensible defaults for everything else.

Re: TV is broken

#250

Post by acuozzo » Sat, Feb 25, 2012, 5:59 PM UTC

hweuifhaisuh wrote: post #139

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 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. Proof? >Generation X and younger people have been falling out of love with TV for a long time Proof? >TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids wil…

> Proof?

I don't enjoy feeding trolls often, but I've to ask: would you ask a US WWII veteran for `Proof?' if he were to exclaim, as a matter of fact, that "[his] generation hated the Axis powers before 1941"?

Asking for citations is a poor attempt to discredit another's claims. Why don't you form your own counterargument instead?