221–230 of 264 posts
Publishers/networks are broken. The industry needs something to happen to it like Steam, then Facebook, and finally Apple did to video game publishers. Take the (old) middle men out of the loop. Let content producers "sell" directly to consumers.
It's unfortunate that windows media center hasn't caught on in a bigger way. I use it on my casual home theater and my larger more serious home theater. I have a channel master 4221 antenna that feeds into 2 HD Homerun tuners and clearQAM feeding into a couple more. This gives me the ability to record/watch 4 channels at once from any networked media center in the house. Media center has a fantastic interface that ag…
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I'd still rather pay for GMail instead of seeing ads. You can; it costs $50/year, though: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/features.html
The (paid for) Google Apps for Business still has a line of Ads at the top of the email listing. No ads down the RHS, though.
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Like climate control in your house
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…
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).
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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…
I have a TV but I am not using it to watch cable broadcast. I have cable but just because it came in a stupid bundle with the internet. So the TV is there but it is used to watch Netflix, Youtube, Amazon and Hulu videos. It is used for games, skype (there is a camera attached to it), also used to browse pictures (since it has a better resolution and color profile than my laptop). And I have noticed the same effect in…
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…
There's thinking something is bad because it's different, and then there's thinking it's bad because it SUCKS. I grew up on commercial TV. Now I can't stand commercials, and I think HULU is absolutely insane for not having a "no commercial" tier -- and for charging you and STILL running the commercials.
I would SO rather pay for my media than have commercials interrupt it. It's not a kid being uncomfortable with an unfamiliar situation; it IS annoying to have your program interrupted.
And I'm not even militant about advertising -- I don't run ad blockers, and I even click on ads from time to time. What I can't forgive is people wasting my TIME. I have a finite amount of that (and why am I posting on Hacker News..? sigh...), and people showing me ads for things that I have ABSOLUTELY no interest in is nothing but a waste of my time AND their advertising money. HULU has a little button where you can tell them an ad isn't relevant to you, but it seems as if they ignore it. What a waste...
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…
>We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, 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 drives me crazy . I have a computer hooked up to my TV (for the same reason as the OP, we basically watch just streaming or my digitized DVD collection) and every…
The folks at PandoDaily ran a nice article about us, too:
http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/23/nthcode-wants-to-bring-the-...
I could imagine a similar and opposite article, "Netflix is broken", written from the perpective from an older person instead of a younger one: Why do I need to sign in? Why do I have to choose something to watch – why doesn't it just let me start watching immediately? Why is it so hard to change channels? Why do I have to watch things on my small computer screen instead of my large television screen?
If Netflix had a 'random' button it would be their greatest innovation ever.
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I listen mostly to NPR. Occasionally (pledge drives, reruns, shows I don't care for) I will turn to traditional radio to fill the void while driving (older car with no MP3 interface). It's amazing to me how many commercials they have! They feel interminable and it feels like at least half the channels have commercials playing at any given time. It really makes me appreciate KQED (local NPR station) and is the reason…
I've been listening to a commercial rock station on HD (KSAN fm on HD2), and it doesn't have any ads or announcements. There are silly "you're listening to station X and it's awesome" announcements every now and then, but that's about it. Everything else is just music. I have no idea why they don't have any talking or ads, but i don't mind. I suspect it's because this is an offshoot station--there is the normal stati…