151–160 of 197 posts
Comcast: OK... Done. We'll miss you as a Comcast customer. Will there be anything else?
Me: Yes. Please sign me up for internet service. I'm going to watch TV over the internet.
Comcast: OK... Done. We'd like to welcome you as a Comcast customer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an important point that everyone really misses. Cable companies make (50M subscribers * $100 /month * 12 mo/yr)=60B dollars per year. TV advertising is another $80B /year. Overhead and profit might eat up 20-50% of that, but we're still left with a bill, to create the TV we want to watch, of a few hundred dollars per US man, woman, and child. Why would people imagine that we can replace that market with a hun…
Here in NYC with TWC, I threw cable in the garbage when my subscription for TV and internet ( ONLY , no VOIP service) exceeded $150 a month. I didn't even have premium service. This was in 2010, I think. One month I saw the bill and I wanted to punch a hole in the wall. They run a wire to my house, so that the TV reception is better than an aerial antenna. That's what cable is. That's what cable does. The internet se…
So the stats are going up up and up!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like he was also objecting to the character of the ads... I left the U.S. in the '90s. However I do occasionally see some American TV on trips, and it seems different than what I remember, full of creepy bizarre ads for drugs and the like. TV ads in the old days obviously weren't great art, and were often annoying, but there seems something palpably ... wrong with the state of things now. "Creepy" seems the…
HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD! HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD! HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD! Sadly, most recent commercials lack even the charm of that. I have an OTA antenna just for occasional live sports, but TV is just abject now. One time I found like three celebrity gossip shows on at the same time, on broadcast networks! The networks used to be more dignified than that. So just to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like he was also objecting to the character of the ads... I left the U.S. in the '90s. However I do occasionally see some American TV on trips, and it seems different than what I remember, full of creepy bizarre ads for drugs and the like. TV ads in the old days obviously weren't great art, and were often annoying, but there seems something palpably ... wrong with the state of things now. "Creepy" seems the…
HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD! HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD! HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD! Sadly, most recent commercials lack even the charm of that. I have an OTA antenna just for occasional live sports, but TV is just abject now. One time I found like three celebrity gossip shows on at the same time, on broadcast networks! The networks used to be more dignified than that. So just to…
Just after TV realized that O.J. Simpson, and Amy Fisher, and Nancy Kerrigan could feed a news cycle for months, if not years, TV lost a lot of charm. It was the popularity of the O.J. Simpson case that spawned the Court TV channel.
Right around the time when the constantly scrolling, but nigh-unreadable news ticker showed up on all of the news channels, TV mutated into this hideous disease that vomited itself into my living room.
Somewhere amidst the election ads and the telephone ads, the Big Pharma ads came along, with Montel Williams and Rikki Lake and Jerry Springer, and then Realty TV exploded for beyond the already intolerable spectacle of MTV's The Real World. Vapid scummy channels like E! spewed forth with shallow, narcissistic tabloid hopelessness. MTV itself devolved into TRL and Britney Spears and then 9/11 and Iraq blew all the gaskets open.
With every celebrity fearing for their pathetic career, at the very premise of disagreeing with a "Wartime President", that very chilling effect of self censorship attenuated all intelligence on TV.
The internet, meanwhile, was uncensored, unfiltered virgin wilderness to explore. Hard core pornography and gore sites were immediately available, and you didn't have to skulk around the adult section of the video store for Faces Of Death or Debbie Does Dallas. You also didn't have to pay extra to get a glipse of tits or hear some curse words on HBO. TV knows this, and has grown even creepier still, in an attempt to compete with the total lack of boundries found on the internet, to the point where it feels disturbingly questionable that Cialis ads are directly juxtaposed with Honey Boo Boo episodes.
The rationale for Court TV finally died about a decade and a half after the O.J. Simpson case, and by then it had transformed itself into a dumping ground for re-runs of To Catch A Predator and COPS, and then rebranded as TRU TV, and now also includes shows about repo men harassing irresponsible poor people.
At these times scales of ten to fifteen years for a complete life cycle of a trend like the one caused by O.J. Simpson, I shudder to think what TV will be like when the 9/11, Iraq War, Fox News trend cycle wraps up. The current trend feels like it still needs about ten more years to fully play itself out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in NYC with TWC, I threw cable in the garbage when my subscription for TV and internet ( ONLY , no VOIP service) exceeded $150 a month. I didn't even have premium service. This was in 2010, I think. One month I saw the bill and I wanted to punch a hole in the wall. They run a wire to my house, so that the TV reception is better than an aerial antenna. That's what cable is. That's what cable does. The internet se…
I feel like you might be insane ... Is this correct?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that is not the full story though... I expect older people to watch more TV. All my grand parents basically sit in front of the TV all day... I would expect I would watch a lot more if I was older currently, even simply because I would have a lot more free time.
As an older guy I can assure you personally that when I have free time, the last thing I want to do with it is watch TV. Too much living to do. I do agree with your observation about old people and TV in that my experience with elderly ancestors is an extremely high correlation between watching TV all day and death within the next couple years. When you can't do anything anymore physically but open your eyes, the soc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD! HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD! HEAD-ON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD! Sadly, most recent commercials lack even the charm of that. I have an OTA antenna just for occasional live sports, but TV is just abject now. One time I found like three celebrity gossip shows on at the same time, on broadcast networks! The networks used to be more dignified than that. So just to…
There was a serious change in the nature of TV after the late 90's. Just after TV realized that O.J. Simpson, and Amy Fisher, and Nancy Kerrigan could feed a news cycle for months, if not years, TV lost a lot of charm. It was the popularity of the O.J. Simpson case that spawned the Court TV channel. Right around the time when the constantly scrolling, but nigh-unreadable news ticker showed up on all of the news chann…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an important point that everyone really misses. Cable companies make (50M subscribers * $100 /month * 12 mo/yr)=60B dollars per year. TV advertising is another $80B /year. Overhead and profit might eat up 20-50% of that, but we're still left with a bill, to create the TV we want to watch, of a few hundred dollars per US man, woman, and child. Why would people imagine that we can replace that market with a hun…
There will always be enough entertainment to meet the demand of viewers. What we have now is a deluge of crap to meet the demands of advertisers wanting to sell eyeballs.
This seems likely, but the idea that it will be cheaper than cable is pretty specious. The reason you can get TV programming so cheap for just the cost of a Roku and Netflix is because hidden in that content is the millions of dollars that already came from traditional TV.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google has the future of video in the palm of their hands but they don't understand and don't care. Typical of a bloated empire. A little more reasoning would be appreciated.
Maybe I'll actually write something more substantive on the subject, there's a lot of depth to it. For now I'll just point out that many young creators in video are falling into the youtube sphere of influence. A lot of independent video producers have switched from using their own proprietary video distribution systems to merely hosting their videos on youtube. The monetization difficulties are made up by the ease o…