TV is increasingly for old people • Hacker News Board

Re: TV is increasingly for old people

#51

Post by Nacraile » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 9:39 PM UTC

tcfunk wrote: post #48

Love when reports use "median" anything...largely a useless statistic. The median age has little to no relationship to the average age of viewers.

Curiously, you can also argue that the mean is a useless statistic, since it tells you very little about the bulk of a distribution with asymmetric outliers (i.e. age, wealth)

Knowing that the youngest person in the oldest half of the TV population is getting older does tell you something interesting, and slightly more specific than what the mean gives you, although I suspect mean and median are fairly close in this case.

Of course it would be nice to have mean, standard deviation, median, and maybe a few other percentiles. Better, a full histogram. But median is hardly useless.

Re: TV is increasingly for old people

#52

Post by Nacraile » Sat, Sep 06, 2014, 9:43 PM UTC

codeflo wrote: post #4

Calculating "percent increases" of the median age of a population doesn't make any sense at all.

Why not? A relative difference in values is a relative difference in values. "The median of this distribution is a bit larger than the median of this other distribution" sure makes sense to me. Sure, comparing two histograms would be more informative, but also much more difficult to discuss concisely.

Re: TV is increasingly for old people

#53

Post by booruguru » Sun, Sep 07, 2014, 2:49 AM UTC

snarkyturtle wrote: post #49

booruguru wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should rip your DVDs and store them on a hard drive connected to a Roku/WDTV/whatever...

That would require more work though. It's like telling someone to rip all your CDs and put it on your phone instead of streaming it from Spotify.

People don't rip CDs anymore? You can't depend on a streaming service to stream your favorite content forever. Also, you don't actually "own" your DRM-riddled digital downloads from Amazon, iTunes, etc. What's more, CDs and Blu-rays offer high resolution content than any streaming service currently offers.

For the HN crowd, I thought ripping would be a no-brainer.

Re: TV is increasingly for old people

#54

Post by dragonwriter » Sun, Sep 07, 2014, 3:11 AM UTC

booruguru wrote: post #53

snarkyturtle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would require more work though. It's like telling someone to rip all your CDs and put it on your phone instead of streaming it from Spotify.

People don't rip CDs anymore? You can't depend on a streaming service to stream your favorite content forever. Also, you don't actually "own" your DRM-riddled digital downloads from Amazon, iTunes, etc. What's more, CDs and Blu-rays offer high resolution content than any streaming service currently offers. For the HN crowd, I thought ripping would be a no-brainer.

> Also, you don't actually "own" your DRM-riddled digital downloads from Amazon, iTunes, etc.

iTunes downloads aren't DRM-riddled (which is why my entire iTunes library is now part of my Google Play Music library.)

> For the HN crowd, I thought ripping would be a no-brainer.

Buy individual tracks and archiving them to your own media is a no-brainer, but ripping CDs isn't necessary to that when the major music download services all are (or allow you to export) portable, DRM-free copies.

Re: TV is increasingly for old people

#55

Post by davidgerard » Sun, Sep 07, 2014, 4:55 PM UTC

Sambdala wrote: post #7

> And he’s part of one camp that believes young professionals and students will eventually become cable subscribers. > “We suspect they will trade up,” Skipper said. The implication here seems to be that cable is the premium/preferred product, and people will switch to it once they can afford a cable subscription. That does not at all strike me as being the case in this day and age. The internet, and piracy, created…

>I think piracy + netflix have probably irreversibly changed people's willingness to sit through commercials, wait for the scheduled time slot, and put up with the other inconveniences associated with the whole process.

I was telling my 7yo about this yesterday. How in the old days, you couldn't just watch videos on YouTube or download whole seasons of Pokemon. No, there were only three channels, and things were shown at one time, and you had to be watching then or you'd miss it, and you couldn't watch it again. And it was horrible!

(Called my dad today, he was most amused too.)

This was provoked by having to explain to her that we couldn't just get all of Season 17 X and Y, because it hasn't all been broadcast yet, that there's just a new one every week. And of course it's unavailable in the UK ... except on the net.

She watches lots of CBeebies/CBBC. So I pay for a TV licence even though we don't have a TV. Because the BBC is worth it.

Re: TV is increasingly for old people

#56

Post by davidgerard » Sun, Sep 07, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

booruguru wrote: post #53

snarkyturtle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would require more work though. It's like telling someone to rip all your CDs and put it on your phone instead of streaming it from Spotify.

People don't rip CDs anymore? You can't depend on a streaming service to stream your favorite content forever. Also, you don't actually "own" your DRM-riddled digital downloads from Amazon, iTunes, etc. What's more, CDs and Blu-rays offer high resolution content than any streaming service currently offers. For the HN crowd, I thought ripping would be a no-brainer.

I have over a terabyte of media here ... and I still play songs I actually own a copy of from YouTube, 'cos it's so much more convenient.

Re: TV is increasingly for old people

#57

Post by davidgerard » Sun, Sep 07, 2014, 5:01 PM UTC

jdonaldson wrote: post #50

You could also say that TV is increasingly for the young. Vice, House of Cards, etc. are great but they're targeting the 20+ crowd. There's an explosion of new shows and programs for kids on cable. Some of them, like Adventure Time, are so well done that I enjoy watching them. In fact, you could call this a bit of a "golden age" for this sort of thing. Watching shows on the internet is great. The acting talent and qu…

And the DVD box, the predecessor to whole series binges on Netflix. The 2005 revival of Dr Who was, IIRC, funded at least partially based on selling lots of boxes of it later.