221–230 of 264 posts
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Man, this job would be great, if it wasn't for the fucking customers!
If all they're doing is taking pictures and leaving, they're not customers.
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Really? I did. - Tapes would get chewed by the player - Took an age to find the right recording (you’d spend an age constantly rewinding) - Tapes would degrade the more you used them - sometimes they wouldn’t even sync vertically with your TV. Requiring all sorts of fun and games tuning your hardware - audio was often muffled and sounded like it was played through a sock - if you shared a household there was always t…
> Really? I did. I was talking about video quality, not that other stuff. > - if you shared a household there was always the risk that someone would tape over your favourite recording This is actually significantly worse now, since most households lack the ability to "tape" anything .
I covered video quality too
> This is actually significantly worse now, since most households lack the ability to "tape" anything.
It’s definitely not worse now. Or at least not in the U.K. Regular broadcasters all have on demand / catch up services (like BBC iPlayer). These services are neatly integrated into nearly all smart TVs via Freeview Play and have been for roughly a decade already.
Then you have purely streamed content that has all of the benefits of the above minus the drawbacks of following a TV schedule. Which is great because the 30 to 50 year olds (yes, I actually know these figures because I’ve worked in broadcasting) generally prefer binge watching content rather than weekly instalments.
Then you have younger generations who prefer streamed content like Twitch and YouTube. Both of which also support rewatching previously live content.
In addition to all that, for households that don’t have good internet, there are still PVRs available free with premium subscription TV like Sky+/Q. And just to be clear, you absolutely do not need a Sky subscription to use a PVR. My mum has one hooked up and she only has access to terrestrial TV (Freeview). Some TVs even have PVR software built in and all thus you need is to plug a USB storage device into in.
Finally, for us nerds, there are a plethora of additional options available like Kodi, Plex, AppleTV plus convenience protocols like DLNA, ChromeCast, AirPlay, etc.
It has literally never been easier to consume video content and catch up on missed TV. And the fact that terrestrial TV viewing figures are dropping rapidly (again, I’ve worked in the industry so have seen the actual statistics on these things) is proof that people are choosing to consume TV in different ways then they did back in the days of VHS. (And there’s literally nothing stopping anyone from still using VHS if they really wanted to).
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Maybe. That wasn’t used by regular VHS rigs though was it (ie PAL or NTSC recordings)? I just remember VHS audio sounding muffled after the tape had been used a few times. To be fair, recording stuff from RF wouldn’t have helped much either.
VHS has a mono track and a stereo track. Some copies have only the mono track, some setups use only the mono track, ever. My Harry Potter 2 copy has a garbled stereo track, so I manually switch to mono when watching that.
Stereo audio, like colour video, was an advancement that came after broadcasting had already been standardised. Which means they had to find room in the signal to squeeze that additional information in (this is why TV sets that aren’t sync with the broadcasting feed go black and white). Stereo was a relatively recent addition, maybe late 80s or early 90s (I remember really clearly when the technology was turned on but can’t recall how old I was) so it wouldn’t surprise me if stereo audio was subject to the same syncing issues as colour video.
VHS HiFi seems to be a different format entirely but which also used the same storage media (like how CDs have a few different storage formats supported by the same hardware optical discs)
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Anecdotally, I recall a brief moment in the late 2000's where the mom and pop shops had a bit of resurgence (or at least a stay on their execution) -- when Netflix DVD's by mail had put most Block Busters out of business, but before every movie was readily available on streaming services. If it was Friday night, and you'd just sent back your netflix disc -- or you were looking to watch something that wasn't at the to…
Feels like even without streaming or even Netflix’s original DVD-by-mail delivery service, Redbox could’ve eaten brick and mortar movie rental stores.
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Theatres were a thing back then. But ye concerning TV you are right. My best example of that is playing Ocarina of Time on a big modern TV ... it was so much more impressive on a small ctr.
For video games, there's another factor: much of the artwork in old-school games was specifically designed to be altered by both CRT scanlines and NTSC composite effects. So many sprites in 2D games and textures in 3D games rely on NTSC effects to antialias the graphics and turn dithering into real gradients and you're missing out on so much with a modern screen. The closest you can get to that experience now is to u…
I am old enough to remember when the wife would call me at work on a Friday and say hey, stop by the video store and get a movie for tonight and I'll stop and get wine and take out. What was special was the "Dave" at the video rental place (it wasn't blockbuster but whatever). I don't recall the guy's name, but he always remembered me and what we liked and had great suggestions and sometimes if you said, nah but how…
dave doesn’t extract the most capital or something like that
If you wanted to pay old Blockbuster prices (adjusted for inflation) for x5 good, and personalised, Netflix recommendations a month, I'm sure what you have left after the subscription itself would find a bunch of movie buffs online happy to earn $20-50/month (I'm too lazy to figure out what a typical old monthly cost was, or would be after inflation) by learning what you've liked in the past and thinking of recommendations based on whichever platform you're subscribed to.
And equally, some shops still exist selling films physically, though relatively few because most people don't want to pay more.
Hey, maybe there's a startup idea there - connecting subscribers with paid individual recommenders. But I'll stick to not paying extra for members of staff I never asked recommendations of, personally.
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today's AI is pretty good It's pretty good at suggesting exactly the same type of movies you've watched before, but not so good at those "but how about something completely different, but something that I'll still like" suggestions, that's where a real human movie buff can help.
I've long pondered building exactly this, an anti-recommendation engine. You'd go through and mark some favorite films or genres, and it'd come back with something great but totally unlike your usual picks. Foreign flicks not your thing? Try Parasite. You don't remember what it's like to be an awkward pre-teen? Eighth Grade will remind you. Not a big action movie person? Maybe you need to watch Die Hard. Kids movies…
Tbh, almost all of the recommendations I follow are word of mouth, so I'd really appreciate such an engine.
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Blockbuster carried the latest movies from all the studios. Everything newest and most desirable. They had a smattering of classics and art house and older genre films, but mostly it was about everything latest and greatest. Netflix streaming seemed like that at first, but better! Now, they have a tiny slice of content. And as a content-producer, they seem willing to throw money at anything B-list. Meanwhile, the stu…
Exactly. Blockbuster had all the movies the average person would be able to know about. Any movie that was advertised and known by the general public could be picked up at blockbuster and watched. It's not like that now. Now I have to Google which streaming service can I stream this or that on and then go to that service. It's as if there was a paramount movie store on one side of town, a Disney one on the other, MGM…
I think you’re confusing stream-all-you-want for a monthly fee vs pay-per-view providers.
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GDPR has proven incredibly useful to me and others in imposing cost on organisations and businesses that want to fuck about with our data. Someone's acting the maggot? No matter where they are, they get a subject access request. Followed by a request to correct or delete data. The ability to legally force companies to correct inaccurate data is incredibly useful.
Facebook and Google didn't announce any harm from the GDPR. There are many companies that announce lower earning expectations from a simple 5 line App Store change by Apple and a one time popup asking you whether you want to be tracked.
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Television that was made on film has held up pretty well. I'm watching ST:TNG at 1080p now and it's visually stunning. Everything else about it is still awesome, too.
Are you watching the original or the remaster? The latter was only possible because it was originally shot in film, yes, but it was also an incredible amount of work. They needed to reassemble every episode from film!