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TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

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Re: TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

#181

Post by coldpie »

anoncow wrote: post #143
cmsmith wrote: post #122

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…

If the eyeballs move to netflix, the billions in ad revenue will move too.

If they bring ads to Netflix, I'm out.

Re: TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

#182

Post by prawks »

interpol_p wrote: post #108
shiftpgdn wrote: post #3

Good riddance. I cut the cord about a year and a half ago and replaced my cable box with a Roku box. There was a brief period where I missed the background noise but now I find broadcast/cable television unbearably grating. Frankly I think the cable companies brought it upon themselves with the constant loud commercial interruptions, the garbage programming, and the utterly miserable cable box interfaces.

I'm in the same position. I cut the cord five years ago and have just been using Apple TV for Netflix. TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying. When I'm visiting my family I just have to turn off the TV, it's impossible to concentrate on conversation otherwise.

In college, when we were hanging out all around a TV watching a game or something, we would mute the TV during the commercials.

It was strange at first for new people, but surprisingly effective.

Re: TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

#183

Post by philwelch »

destroyAllCable wrote: post #166
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sue, but is thus any word than everyone that wants to be a YouTube celebrity?

It's not worse, but prior to the late 90's you didn't see this sprawling degenerative wasteland for what it really was. The oddities were still out there, as a subculture, but no one was actively shoveling them to the forefront of television in hopes of a slight ratings bump at the sheer spectacle of yet another train wreck. TV didn't have to try hard back when the only competition was movie theaters. In the 80's, be…

And now, between 1 and 6 AM they have infomercials targeted towards insomniacs, which is little different.

Re: TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

#184

Post by deaconblues »

coldpie wrote: post #181
anoncow wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the eyeballs move to netflix, the billions in ad revenue will move too.

If they bring ads to Netflix, I'm out.

It'll likely manifest as blatant and ridiculous product placement in the original programming, won't it?

Re: TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

#185

Post by schnable »

chc wrote: post #62
brownbat wrote: post #50

"TV is Dying" isn't the crazy part of this article. It claims people are chucking broadband subscriptions and using tablets and mobile internet, or more often, just free wifi from Starbucks (or neighbors?). Fascinating. If everyone dropped broadband, TV, and phone lines into the home, what's that world look like?

I'm pretty sure that part actually is crazy. They promise a graph showing in hard numbers that broadband subscriptions are down, but never actually provide one. They just provide a graph showing, as best I can tell, that total customers for cable companies are going down. In fact, they confusingly state that customers are moving from cable with broadband to "telco companies like AT&T and Verizon who offer TV as a pac…

Yeah the article is pretty selective in statistics. Time Warner may have lost broadband subscribers, but other cable cos have seen increases in broadband subscribes while television subs decrease. And broadband is MUCH more profitable for cable cos than television because there is no content cost to pay.

On that note, he, and commenters, and saying cable is "killing itself" by raising rates. Subscription rates are actually rising more slowly than the content costs cable cos pay. The content creators are driving this process.

Re: TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

#186

Post by k-mcgrady »

skrause wrote: post #172
k-mcgrady wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "I am in Europe and there is no legal way for me to watch say "The Walking Dead" or any other series." You can't buy the box set anywhere? You can download it from iTunes or another legal service? I'm in Europe too (UK to be specific and can do both of those things). I'm guessing what you really mean is you can't watch it when you want to, you have to wait a little while longer.

In Germany the major problem with on-demand and streaming services is that a lot of content is only available in dubbed versions, of course you don't have the problem with Hollywood content in the UK. If you're like me and don't like dubbed content and have already phased out physical media, there often really is no way of getting the content legally in at least a semi-comfortable way.

>> "If you're like me and don't like dubbed content and have already phased out physical media, there often really is no way of getting the content legally in at least a semi-comfortable way."

I guess this is my point. If it's available on physical media that seems convenient enough to make it morally wrong to pirate. There is a moral argument for piracy when content isn't made available but when it is available in several versions and someone still chooses to pirate it because it isn't available in the version they prefer that seems indefensible to me.

Re: TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

#187

Post by aestra »

mrweasel wrote: post #162

Everyone seems focused on TV shows. I'm not really concerned about TV shows, it's the news I'm interested in. Granted, the news in TV, radio and most newspapers aren't any good as it stands now, but if we keep moving from TV to on-demand services like Netflix, funding serious news broadcasting will become an issue. I'm not sure how it works in the US, but in many European countries, like the UK, Germany and Denmark,…

TV news grates on me.

Here's a good reason:

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/why-tv-news-is-a-waste-of-human-...

Re: TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

#188

Post by normloman »

leoplct wrote: post #173

Do you think that, if there is a tool that scans all channels through looking for something good to watch, things could be better?

We already have that. It's called TiVo Suggestions.

People aren't cord cutting because they can't find anything good on. People are cord cutting because their cable bill is too high.

Re: TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

#189

Post by InclinedPlane »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #160
InclinedPlane wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All of you that lift of YouTube as some foil against "the big bad evil brainwashing junk" that is mainstream media ... seem naive to me. Have you actually seen what is on YouTube? Really?

Have you seen what is in books? Really? Most of it is garbage.

Youtube is the apotheosis of the medium of web video. As a medium it will suffer from all of the usual problems. There's no avoiding Sturgeon's law in any medium. But the existence of, say, Jersey Shore doesn't undercut the existence of The Wire the same way that the existence of Danielle Steel doesn't invalidate Mark Twain or TMZ.com doesn't invalidate wikipedia.

Even today there's a lot of great material on youtube that would not have been accessible before. Especially educational material. I cannot even begin to fathom what I've learned from youtube that I would not have otherwise. And that's just a tiny fraction of its potential.

Re: TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats That Prove It

#190

Post by coldpie »

deaconblues wrote: post #184
coldpie wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they bring ads to Netflix, I'm out.

It'll likely manifest as blatant and ridiculous product placement in the original programming, won't it?

Somehow I don't have a problem with that. What annoys me about ads is how they have nothing to do with what I want to be watching, and try to get in your head. Sing-song commercials and commercials for baby diapers make my blood boil, and that's not what I want when I'm trying to relax.
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