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Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

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Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#61

Post by enneff »

kevinburke wrote: post #50
locopati wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming to think? Here, let me help you along. A mining company or an oil company can ensure highest profits by cutting corners (on worker safety, on disposal of toxic waste, on the rights of those around them). Those profits come at the expense of the workers, the people who live near the facilities, the environment around those facilities. Examples are almost too numerous, so I'll give a few recent ones: Massey Ener…

Oil companies have reputations, and are playing repeated games, not just one off games... in addition they have incentives not to behave this way, such as the large fine and giant loss in shareholder value after BP spilled oil into the Gulf.

Ha ha. Imagine a world where multinationals are held accountable for their mistakes! It took an error the size of the Gulf incident to even draw the public attention. Meanwhile in Nigeria there are hundreds of square kilometres of devastated landscape because of oil company shortcuts. Nobody cares about environmental destruction in far away places. The oil companies have no incentives not to cut corners there.

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#62

Post by pjscott »

JonnieCache wrote: post #26
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do... people... really believe this?

If you believe, clap your hands and say, "I believe in the market economics fairy!"

Hi! I'm the Market Economics Fairy! I help supply and demand equilibriate everywhere! There are a bunch of things that can lead to markets working poorly. For example, transactions are not free. Theoretically, if a rambunctious man could persuade his neighbors to let him blast his stereo at high volume in exchange for a bit of cash, all would be slightly better off -- but since this would require repeated bargaining with a bunch of neighbors, in practice it probably would not happen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_costs

Another problem is that humans and fairies are not omniscient, nor are we perfectly economically rational, no matter how much the sparkles in our hearts may ache with yearning to be so! Perhaps there is a way to replace NBC with something far better, and in order to make it happen, all we need is some hard work and a few billion dollars of investment money, carefully applied. If only we had the foresight to take such a gamble -- but in this imperfect world, none of us have the clarity of foresight needed to make such a huge gamble reasonable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

And that's before we need to worry about ugly stuff like regulatory capture and violent coercion! If you can improve any aspect of this situation, I will shoot abundant glitter out of my wand in your honor, and the world will be improved!

Sincerely, the market economics fairy!

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#63

Post by slowpoke »

bluedanieru wrote: post #48

How about just don't watch the Olympics at all? The IOC is an awful, awful organization.

Can't agree more. There are so many reasons to actively boycott the Olympic games, it's plain ridiculous. They should be abolished, as they have nothing to do with sports anymore (did they ever?). It's just one gigantic corporate whorehouse that has ruined pretty much every locality it ever was held at.

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#64

Post by ramblerman »

slowpoke wrote: post #63
bluedanieru wrote: post #48

How about just don't watch the Olympics at all? The IOC is an awful, awful organization.

Can't agree more. There are so many reasons to actively boycott the Olympic games, it's plain ridiculous. They should be abolished, as they have nothing to do with sports anymore (did they ever?). It's just one gigantic corporate whorehouse that has ruined pretty much every locality it ever was held at.

Interesting sentiments, I don't know the IOC but neither of you are providing any reasoning behind your claims.

Out of curiosity, why the hate?

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#66

Post by mseebach »

notatoad wrote: post #35
dkrich wrote: post #14

Just a thought- NBC is a for-profit company. Because of that they are able to pay hundreds of millions for the rights to cover the Olympics. Because of that, they want the largest viewership. That occurs during primetime. If the tv industry is so "disruptable" as many keep saying, why hasn't it happened? Clearly people want the ability to watch as much shit, wherever, whenever they can, preferably for free. Apparentl…

Yesterday's discussion on HN had the price of broadcast rights at $1.1B, not including production costs. The tv industry is not disruptable. Content is expensive, and margins are not huge. People need to stop saying it is disruptable just because they are unhappy with it. There is a ton of inertia behind the entertainment market.

> The tv industry is not disruptable.

Of course it is, think out of the box. Netflix is already doing it, see the discussion elsewhere in the thread. Apple/Google might buy the Olympics rights and put it in iTunes/Play.

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#67

Post by Negitivefrags »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #47
notJim wrote: post #29

> They’re doing this for a reason: m-o-n-e-y. Uh, yeah. It's something you need in order to run a company. A company that employs people and gives them, guess what? m-o-n-e-y. And how does it do that, and how does it continue doing that? By being profitable, which it does by having (among other things) exclusive content and advertisers who want to be seen alongside that content. But no, NBC should just put all their…

The point is that they are pursuing short-term profit and sacrificing customer satisfaction. That's a terrible way to run a company.

In order to sacrifice customer satisfaction, there is a requirement that the person be your customer.

Not giving something to someone for free just because they demand that they should have it is not sacrificing customer satisfaction.

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#68

Post by slowpoke »

ramblerman wrote: post #64
slowpoke wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't agree more. There are so many reasons to actively boycott the Olympic games, it's plain ridiculous. They should be abolished, as they have nothing to do with sports anymore (did they ever?). It's just one gigantic corporate whorehouse that has ruined pretty much every locality it ever was held at.

Interesting sentiments, I don't know the IOC but neither of you are providing any reasoning behind your claims. Out of curiosity, why the hate?

For a quick insight see this enumeration: http://www.protestlondon2012.com/10reasons.html

The IOC is deeply corrupt, and the olympics have long ceased to be about sports. They are about selling officially branded merchandise from official sponsors and simultaneously squashing local competition with ridiculous, speciallly drafted laws, which cricitically impacts the local economy even after the games are long over. It's akin to a swarm of locusts, really.

Also, the branding police of the IOC puts the MAFIAA to shame - you might have heard about their petty attempts at censorship ("you may not link to our sites if you report negatively about us!!1!1" or banning anyone from using word combinations such as "London 2012" and "Summer Games" - which the internet of course spitefully ignores).

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#69

Post by axefrog »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #67
Dylan16807 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that they are pursuing short-term profit and sacrificing customer satisfaction. That's a terrible way to run a company.

In order to sacrifice customer satisfaction, there is a requirement that the person be your customer. Not giving something to someone for free just because they demand that they should have it is not sacrificing customer satisfaction.

Yes but if your product is the viewer and your decisions cause the number of viewers to decrease over time, you're damaging your product, and that will reduce the value of that product to your customers.

Re: Please Don’t Watch NBC Tonight. Or Any Night

#70

Post by mattacular »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #56
majormajor wrote: post #28

Despite how many people on this site and sites like it don't have some kind of cable or satellite service... we're a pretty small minority. Especially when it comes to the group of people interested in watching sports, where live is king, and the online options suck unless you live out of your teams' TV markets. I'm not surprised they're not going out of their way to cater to us. For all the "the model no longer work…

It's a small minority, but it's growing: http://www.businessinsider.com/uh-oh-new-nielsen-data-says-p... More and more people no longer channel surf, and more and more people no longer watch tv (even if they have it) even at a rate of once per month. Increasingly people are watching other content or consuming tv content differently (through netflix, for example). And just as the trend of going without a landline tele…

Things are in transition, and it is going to be a slow grind. Why would you expect cable companies to start acting before they have to? They're still making plenty o' money on the 'old' model.

They won't change until the absolute last second, if even then.

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