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.
> TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying.
The worst part is that TV ads are a major part of shared culture. People watch many different channels and many different shows, but the large ad campaigns transcend those boundaries. They squat in the shared mind-space and instruct everyone that 'buying your kids junk-food will make you a happy family' (or more insidiously 'your parents should buy you junk-food, because that's what happy, normal families do'). I actually saw one today which discouraged you from asking your friends for help, apparently it's better to pay the company to do repairs than go through all the hassle of having to repay a favour. These sort of campaigns beggar belief, either they are ineffective, or they must surely do serious collateral damage to shared values.
I have stopped watching tv about 5 years ago, have multiple blockers on my browsers and I learned to intentionally ignore physical adds(magazines/boards).
I'm glad I'm not the only one. But how do you handle situation? My family usually takes offense, and I can see that I would seem arrogant for doing so. I just don't know how to communicate how intrusive and strident the TV is to me.
Just explain that you can't concentrate on what they're saying with all of that noise, and you can see things out of the corner of your eye that distract you.
I don't have the TV on much at all to be honest. I don't understand the people that have it on all of the time, from waking to sleeping. Some people put it on as "background noise" but that doesn't make sense to me - you might as well tune a radio into FM between the stations for background noise or buy a white/pink noise generator and put that on!
The downside is that cable subscribers subsidize the handful of TV shows I actually want to watch. Individually, every person who quits makes a rational decision, but when everyone quits we don't get a lot of good shows.
Maybe Netflix or Amazon or whoever will take up the slack. Or maybe those shows will just go away.
> Maybe Netflix or Amazon or whoever will take up the slack. Or maybe those shows will just go away.
It already is. Netflix is funding a lot of new stuff (House of Cards, Orange is the new Black, lots of standup stuff). Note that this stuff is being received very well by normal consumers and critics alike. They're also funding canceled shows like Arrested Development, Lillyhammer, etc.
They're funding a lot of stuff relative to their perceived size, but they're not funding a lot of stuff relative to the gamut of content that exists. In particular, pilots are something that intuitively I feel like Netflix is going to have trouble speculating on at their size, whereas the networks and cable providers generally green-light a number of pilots per year. Netflix will need to hit on their productions (and have so far, to be sure, but they're betting on the surest of things) and I have a feeling that in the short- and medium-term that's going to result in what they've fielded so far: well-produced but not particularly innovative content with mostly established actors. That's not bad, to be sure, but it's...kind of boring.
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 hundred million $8/month netflix subscriptions and not see a decline in the availability of quality programming?
OK so let's assume we need to pay $200 per person and a typical household is a family of 4. Currently the difference between a broadband internet connection and a typical monthly cable TV with internet bundle is in the $50/month range. This means that the current typical household is paying $600 per year to get content in a ridiculously stupid way, versus the estimate of $800 per family of four just buying their content direct from the producers.
This doesn't seem like an unbridgeable gap to me. And in fact it's in the process of being bridged slowly -- the problem is that existing contractual relationships and infrastructure won't just reform themselves overnight.
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.
> There will always be enough entertainment to meet the demand of viewers.
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.
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.
Fair enough. I'd much rather have 3-4 breaks in an episode to surf around online/make popcorn/whatever instead of stuff like this in every show I watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE
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 service was rock solid, but when they bombard me with a constant deluge of ads offering introductory service at $99 dollars a month (for TV, VOIP and internet), every ten minutes, no matter what channel I'm watching, basically, I expect my bill to be $66 dollars for TV and internet only, AT ALL TIMES.
This is the same psychological process where we rationalize to ourselves that $99 is cognitively less than $100, so it must be a reasonable truth that I'm paying a better price than $100, if I'm only paying $99.
If they know who I am, because they know whether to enable my cable signal, based on whether I've paid my bill, and they show ME advertisements on MY TV, stating that I can get 3 things for a price divisible by three ($99), when we both know I'm only buying 2 things from them, then cognitively, we both know I should be paying 2/3 of what their hellish TV jingle blasts into my ears every 10 minutes.
I'm sitting at work, humming their damned jingle to myself, as I suffer through my 9 to 5 drudgery. Then I come home check the mail box. There are two bills. Cable and Gas/Electric. The cable is more. It's $150 dollars. I'm subscribed to two thirds of their products, and I'm humming their incessant jingle to myself about how all three of their products should cost two thirds of what I'm actually paying for the stinking two thirds of what they offer.
The jingle is thus:
EYE! OH! DIGITAL CABLE!
WATCH A LOTTA CHANNELS!
WHENEVER YOU'RE ABLE!
THE PRICE IS NICE!
LET ME PUT IT ON THE TABLE!
ONLY NINETY NINE DOLLARS WHEN YOU SIGN THE LABEL!!!
There are trains underground, and I can enter and exit their tunnels twice a day, every day for a month, on trips as long as I can tolerate, and I'll pay less for that than cable. Trains underground cost less than cable.
Smart phones might be a secret government program engineered to earn the complicity of the citizenry, in volunteering to carry tracking devices on our person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So what?! It's still cheaper than cable!
Cable doesn't keep me warm in the winter. They don't do anything essential to my survival. They don't deliver perishable food to my door. Cable TV can burn.
What I fear is the invasion of advertisers on the online channels. Youtube is already getting there. I just hope that it doesn't get as bad as TV though.
I've found that some sites (at least Amazon) don't allow HD streaming on PCs, while they do allow it on dedicated devices (Apple TV or PS3, for instance). I was all ready to ditch the Apple TV and use a full-fledged PC and then that happened.
I've recently purchased a Roku as well so I can use Netflix. So that combined with Plex + downloaded content means I hardly ever watch broadcast TV any more.
TV still has plenty of life in it. Be careful of those graphs with a non-zero y-axis minimum.
But there is a shift happening. The biggest question to me is whether brand advertising dollars are/can/will shift with it. We need new ad products. Especially ones that will reach younger audiences who avoid current ad products. Maybe opportunities for Snapchat/Twitter.
Also, content production is going to see some challenges without large amounts of ads to support it. I think there's still --on average -- a big gap in budget, revenue, audience, and quality between successful online-only shows better suited for YouTube and near-filler content on niche cable networks that have managed to stay alive with advertising. Cost of content production is still quite expensive. House of Cards had a $100 million budget to produce 13 episodes. Shows need a lot of audience to make the numbers work, and I'm hoping we see some acceleration here.
TV is in its heyday. Dramas are at the highest quality they've ever been.
The protocol, cable (and satellite), is dying. Almost nobody in my age range, or younger (late 20s), has cable. Everyone has Netflix along with some other streaming services combined with iTunes purchases and such. If you want to watch live sports, the NFL is free over the air, you'll just miss out on the NBA (oh well).
Cable television has no reason to exist. Get rid of it and use the bandwidth for streaming. I just bought a TV after not having one for half a year, and briefly considered getting Time Warner. After seeing what they charge for the basic service, along with $16/month for the "equipment rental," why would I bother? Life is better without cable anyways, the garbage on there just stresses me out and makes me hate our society! You do not need CNN, my life is so peaceful not knowing what their talking heads are spewing off about.
> Almost nobody in my age range, or younger (late 20s), has cable.
Are you sure that's not just selection bias? I'm 25 and almost everybody I know around my age does have cable. Some are sports fans (and you miss out on much of MLB, the NBA, and the NHL by cutting cable--the streaming prices for each are extortionate and there are cable-area blackouts for local games), some just really can't be bothered to put up with the delays to get to Netflix or other streaming solutions (for many there is a strong social component to being able to see, and discuss, television programs simultaneously with your peers).
Much of this is true, but I think it's important not to look at the differences just through a lens of production values. Even worse to equation production values with merit or quality of the end product.
There have been several low budget films and tv shows that have become highly successful and well regarded, the same is and will be true in the online realm. Look at Mad Max, which was made for around a third of a million dollars, Primer, or Napoleon Dynamite.
But also it's not just production value or even quality but fundamental differences in character. TV was a different sort of beast than film, and even over the last decade commercial TV has changed a lot. Look at all of the independent content that sprang up on non-network TV channels, especially from HBO. A show like The Wire, or even more so The Corner, was very unlikely to ever be made within the confines of traditional network TV. TV has a different sort of character than film in terms of the sorts of productions that are suited for TV, and online video is different as well, but we haven't seen all of the ways that's so.
One example I'd highlight is the Lizzie Bennet diaries, a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in vlog form of over 100 "episodes" of typical youtube length (~3-5 minutes).
Another example would be Periodic Videos (and related projects). These are educational videos about chemistry but because they don't have the length limits or requirements of traditional TV they can be focused on a single subject without being forced to add in unrelated filler.
Or, there's Lindybeige, who's likes to talk about medieval, classical, and bronze age technology and weapons. It's just a guy expressing his opinions and trying to back them up with experience or logic but it's frequently just as informative and interesting as watching a typical historical tv show.
I think the native advertising trend is taking care of the awful advertising problem. Ads that look and feel just like the product are way more palatable than banners. Only problem now is scaling native ads. The opportunity here is for a native ad network that can work with most of the top Content Management systems of the world
I disagree. Native ads are extremely cynical and turn off users more than regular ads, which at least have the dignity to admit that they are ads. They're far less palatable (which is pretty amazing) because they seem so forced. They're like the uncanny valley of ads. They look close to the real thing, but something is so off it's creepy.
Question is, at what point does traditional TV channels become so unpopular that they're simply not worth operating anymore?
Perhaps the better question is, when does traditional TV become so unpopular those satellites taking up geosynchronous orbit space get dumped into the oceans?
I've been wondering what Direct TV will do with its satellites in 10-20 years when it doesn't make sense to use them for TV anymore. I haven't been able to imagine any significant uses, have you?
There's weather services (for ships and aircraft outside of ground station range), radio (but this is really niche), high latency internet (for, say, cruise ships), maybe some other small niche services. But what's going to replace the $30 billion in revenue they get from TV subscriptions today?
Who is going to buy their multi-billion dollar satellite fleet?
Direct TV's current satellites won't last another 10 or 20 years. They are constantly replacing them with newer technology.
I don't think things are as dire as you suggest, but worst-case DTV simply won't replace the satellites as they wear out.
Orbital slots are valuable, but I don't think those are actually owned by DTV. If they're not using a slot, then someone else is free to ask the FCC for it. Which means that it behooves DTV to find something else to do with the slot. E.g. Internet.
Making me turn on the TV at a specific time and date to watch something is such alien notion to me at this point. All of these shows worry about schedules and what's on other networks, but that's eventually not going to matter at all.
And that's not all! Insane copyright prevents a lot of people from legally watching popular series. I am in Europe and there is no legal way for me to watch say "The Walking Dead" or any other series.
So what do I do when I don't get proper service? Piracy - it gives me on demand HQ content.
I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century. The next network delivers cheap, on demand HD content worldwide will make a ton of money :)
A lot of it isn't exactly copyright, it's contractual obligation, I suspect. In America, the "old guard" networks are still tied to local affiliate stations, which are increasingly anchors rather than efficient distribution points. International distribution has always been a maze of weird contractual obligations, but just like the American local affiliate problem, it's a case of "it made sense at the time." The problem now is that there are still people making money from the way things are and they're going to fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
> I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century.
2016. That sounds glib, but that's my real prediction: my suspicion is that a lot of contracts are going to be coming up for renewal over the next 3-5 years and either they're not going to be renewed or they're going to take vastly different forms.
The big problem is figuring out what "cheap" actually means, of course. Internet users sometimes seem to have kind of unrealistic expectations about pricing.
Good luck getting a contract that bars the other person from showing your content when you don't have the copyright.
It's true there's nothing about "copyright", the legal concept, that implies that there should be no legal way to watch The Walking Dead in Europe... but it's also true that setting up that sort of circumstance is the point of copyright law. Copyright law is what enables the contract clauses you're talking about.
There is a growing chorus saying that piracy is at fault for degrading the services we get in media.
If piracy never existed at all, imagine how insane those restrictions would be now. They would charge per minute, they would charge for pausing, they would charge for recording. It would be state by state, province by province by province, town by town.
>> "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.
> 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.
This is a pedantic restatement of the original point. It's still the fact that there are many cases where the copyright holders choose not to make something available in any form for people who don't live within a certain region or use a specific technology. They might change their minds in the future but until that happens, the only intellectually honest description is “no legal way”.
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.
"I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century. The next network delivers cheap, on demand HD content worldwide will make a ton of money :)"
Direct, worldwide on demand content models will start as soon as they think they will make more money from those models than the current double-dealing, relicensing, government subsidies models they currently use.
>> I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century. The next network delivers cheap, on demand HD content worldwide will make a ton of money :)
The kids of today not tomorrow. At least mine. They are absolutely mystified in the rare event we watch something "live" that Dad can't just fast forward thru the commercials.
The article doesn't break it down by demographics, but everything I've read on the subject shows an enormous generational split. The kids have already abandoned cable, so unless they somehow change their habits the clock is ticking on broadcast television.
Sports are ridiculously sensitive to lag, though. In my former office we tried once to stream the World Cup in our internal network, and it worked fairly well... except for a 1-2 second delay.
The result? You'd hear the screams from the neighboring offices (and it was very easy to differentiate whether the team scored or missed based on those), but in your version the ball was still in play, so the emotion was gone.
Used to have much fun with an ex-neighbor. He was a massive football(the one you play with feet) fan, and when his beloved Liverpool played, I could literally follow the game via his excited, or gutted, out bursts from next door. He watched on Sky Sports. I, however, had the radio on. Sky was delayed by seconds compared to the radio broadcast. So, we realised that we could mess with him knowing that we knew what was happening 2-5 secs before he did, by cheering or groaning at the wrong bits!!!
Turns out, Scousers actually don't have the best sense of humor in the UK.
We have an Apple TV which plays Netflix, Hulu, PBS, Rented Movies, Music and YouTube.
After 2-3 months of us never switching off of the Apple TV HDMI port, I told the kids I was going to cancel cable which they could never find anything of substance to watch anyway and they didn't even put up a fight.
None of us watch sports so there was virtually no reason to keep cable anymore.
What I found slightly disturbing was how hard it is to setup an over-the-air TV setup. It's going to cost about $200 in equipment and another $100 to setup on my roof. It seems almost insane how expensive free TV has become to get. It'll still pay off because we were paying over $100 for TWC; it's just strange to see something that used to be so simple become so complex and I didn't care about it because I thought I would just have cable the rest of my life.
Have you tried using a cheap box and rabbit ears? You probably don't need a fancy setup unless you're in a building that blocks reception or MANY miles from a major city.
My friend who was (recently passed) a telecommunications engineer made one of those "clothes hanger" antennae and stuck it on the side of his house -- not even high up. Worked a charm. And they're a good 25 - 30 miles from most of the broadcast locations.
He sent me a YouTube link to instructions for one. Not hard to do.
Of course, results vary. But perhaps worth looking into.
I just stuck one end of about 3 feet of hookup wire into the antenna port on my TV and it worked fine. I made one of those HDMI antennas from instructions off the internet, and it only works marginally better.
The interesting thing is I could pick up channels over the air that were not on the cable TV lineup.
Over the air has been exceedingly hit or miss for me also. Even after the equipment the actual delivery seems very scattered. I know in my head that the delivery of digital with correction should be better than analog, but the experience simply is not.
I am not a electrical engineer, so can anyone shed light on why the range for channels on digital is so much lower than it was with analog, also is weather much more impeding for digital than analog?
The simplistic answer is that they are cramming a lot more information into less bandwidth. Analog TV resolution was 640 × 480 (approximately)[1] where digital TV is 1920 x 1080 [2]. Digital also aggravates reception issues because it doesn't degrade gracefully. Instead of "snow" and color issues, it goes all blocky and then takes a couple of seconds to resynchronize... if it recovers.
The Shannon–Hartley theorem[3] relates the necessary signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) that is required to cram a given amount if information into a given amount of bandwidth. Digital TV uses a lot of compression to reduce the amount of information that has to be crammed through the pipe and extremely sophisticated encoding to cram a bunch of bits into each symbol (baud[4]), but, at the end of the day, you have to have an adequate S/N ratio (good enough reception) to decode the signal.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC "Each frame is composed of two fields, each consisting of 262.5 scan lines, for a total of 525 scan lines. 483 scan lines make up the visible raster."
Lots of VHF broadcasters switching to UHF as part of the transition? Not all have done so, but "many" have.
All things being equal, an ancient coax cable with X milliliters of water contamination or Y amount of corrosion will have more loss at UHF than VHF. Pretty much everything is more critical at UHF. Even antenna aiming.
The other way its a problem, which is actually pretty funny, is marketing of "HDTV" antennas where HDTV means UHF only, which works great if all your local broadcasters moved to UHF with the transition; As you can imagine a UHF antenna doesn't work so well if you live in an area with one of the few remaining VHF-Lo band transmitters which you "need".
To say this is a local issue would be an understatement. I'm sure you'd get a better answer from a neighbor than HN.
OTA can be tricky because its not as simple as just throwing up an antenna and calling it a day, the system has to be engineered. Check out www.tvfool.com for some great info on properly designing a system. Also, avsforum.com has some great info.
This sort of thing just makes me more upset about youtube. 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.
I just hope that google doesn't destroy their golden goose merely because they are too incompetent to understand its value or importance.
Edit: Unrelated, I was annoyed by the quality of the "net subscriber adds" graph since it's obviously dominated by an annual signal, so I created a smoothed version (the raw data should be accurate to within ~5-10 pixels give or take): http://i.imgur.com/ffBzR8g.png
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 of distribution, network effect, and lower costs.
Also, there are a fair number of kickstarter projects where the end result is the creation of videos on youtube (such as Tropes vs Women). Within the Film & Video category on kickstarter many projects in all sub-categories will release their content on youtube and the webseries sub-category is almost entirely youtube projects. If youtube had better monetization models and improved ability to host paid and unpaid content almost all of those projects would host on youtube.
Consider the many musical acts that have risen to fame through exposure or maturation through youtube. Walk off the Earth, Julia Nunes, Pentatonix, and of course Justin Beiber being just a few examples among many.
Consider that Bon Jovi's song "Living on a Prayer" recently made its way back to #25 on Billboard's charts (27 years after release) almost entirely due to the popularity of a viral video on youtube of a fan at a Celtic's game dancing enthusiastically to the song.
(Edit: also look at the importance of youtube in the most widely heard pop music such as Psy's Gangnam Style, LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem, Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, Gotye's Somebody That I Used To Know, etc. It's clear that youtube is as culturally relevant as MTV ever was, and that's just a tiny fraction of youtube's influence on the world.)
Or consider the veritable ecosystem of new funding platforms springing up to help creators using youtube to monetize and support their work (such as subbable.com, tested.com). Google's idea along these lines is to introduce pay walls, whereas almost every creator prefers to use more of a pledge drive / premium level model.
Google has tackled the technical bits of web video quite well. They built a system that handles video uploads at greater than 6,000x real-time (over 6,000 seconds of video are uploaded to youtube every second).
Youtube alone is responsible for nearly 1/5th of all internet traffic.
Stop and read that again, it's important. 1/5th of the usage of the entire internet is being dedicated to the use of youtube. And that figure is growing by double digit percentages year over year.
Unquestionably people are increasingly spending their video viewing hours watching content on youtube. And creators are increasingly turning to youtube as their distribution platform.
So yes, I'd say it's fair to say that there's a very strong case that youtube is the future of video. And yet google still treats it as a hindrance, as a second class citizen. As mentioned above creators are desperate for tools to help them support and monetize their video making but they have to turn to 3rd party services to do so. Google has the expertise and capability to offer creators everything they need in a one stop shop. They also have the ability to invest in and support video makers to plant a seed of content creators on their site. And they did, but half-heartedly and without sufficient follow through. It's going to take years until more than a handful of people can support themselves through youtube and even longer before we can see the sort of content that a "youtube generation" of artists is capable of creating. In the meantime such creators have to contend with google making arbitrary changes to youtube for their own petty reasons with little thought for the true potential of what they control.
I'm not to sure what you're trying to say but to me it sounds like you're implying that Google owes people who want to create video content a living. That Google should supply tools and a monetisation model to people who want to make a living of making videos. I don't think it works that way. Google does what it thinks is best for them and if the current model is that, than so be it.
You rightfully pointed out some successful acts that have gained notoriety through YouTube, and good on them. They were the top content creators and were awarded for their efforts. YouTube seems to work if the quality of your work is good and outstanding. Personally I think the current model works well. Should all the crap that's being produced be monetizable?
I don't understand the Internet traffic thing. YouTube serves video which naturally takes up a lot more bandwidth than textual content, i.e. Twitter. I understand that YouTube is popular but you can't really measure popularity in bandwidth.
Owes? Hardly. But it's stupid for them not to. Someone who earns a living via their videos is someone who is able to continue to do so, which draws in more viewers and keeps the talent within youtube's purview. Also, the more tools youtube provides for monetization and the more money flowing into creators bank accounts the more money youtube can make by taking a percentage, instead of having to rely solely on ad dollars.
The ad market is huge, but the entertainment market is much larger.
Content on youtube, whether it's "crap" or not, should be monetizable if it's capable of being supported. Currently the basic tool that youtube provides for that is a crappy ad system and a tiny cut of the ad revenues. They could, and should, do so much more. They have the opportunity to make their viewers and their creators not just users but customers. They have the opportunity to take a bite out of the multi-trillion dollar worldwide entertainment budget. They have the opportunity to have works of legitimate value (not just viral videos and pop phenomena) find a home on youtube and for youtube to become to be associated with works of quality instead of works of frivolity.
There's already lots of good stuff on youtube, but most of the best stuff is made at a loss. Youtube is perhaps the foremost instructional video publisher in history already, for example, but almost nobody publishing those videos is making a decent RoI on their efforts through youtube.
Web video is a medium and youtube is the apotheosis of that medium. To downplay that medium is as short-sighted as downplaying literature or film. There will be "youtube shakespeares" in the 21st century. There will be web videos that we find as powerful and meaningful as any other form of art (if there aren't already). I can say this with certainty because it relies on the simple fact that humans will always create art in any medium. If you give a man a steel barrel he'll create a steel drum, if you give a man a plastic barrel he'll create STOMP. It's really only a matter of time.
But by the same token, the fewer tools that google puts in the hands of creators and the more difficult it is for creators to make a living off of their creations the more potential will be wasted. Imagine how different the world would be if Elvis or The Beatles couldn't have made a living off of his voice and guitar.
It's funny that you bring this up. The only reason Elvis and The Beatles were able to make money is because of the distribution format of music at the time. This distribution format has drastically changed in the past 10 years. Everyone nowadays pretty much streams (and copies) their music which means that music isn't sold in "units" anymore. Hence why the all so mighty record companies were, and are, in such an uproar.
I think it was Mick Jagger who said something like that the time we've lived in was kinda special. There has been no time in the history of humanity where musicians were able to make such amounts of money and those times are pretty much gone. If you're an emerging artist, whether a musician, movie maker or what ever, you're pretty much to par with the troubadours of the middle ages.
Going back to Google, I think Google pretty well understand the ad market more than anyone else on the planet and if there's money to be made they will and it seems that your view isn't aligned with theirs.
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.
OK, you picked two TV shows in your analogy to show that one "bad" show, I guess, does not discount good shows ... Well, so that is the point I am kind of making .. TV gets berated and YouTube gets lifted up? Why, other than, Internet? This just reiterates my point.
There is a clear attitude that "TV megacorporation junk bad" in the sense that it will "rot your brain" or "it has ads" or something vague and "YouTube good" and that is just naive.
I would be cautious about drawing too many conclusions from that. Younger viewers are also more likely to have school work as kids or college students, and as young adults they spend more time running around exploring the world, seeking a mate, and so on. On the other hand, when they settle down viewing patterns can change. Also, bear in mind that now many current shows are competing with older shows available through services like Netflix; they make less money up front, but the 'long tail' gets fatter for quality or cult shows.
But you can see that the trend is downward in each younger demographic. Also you'll notice that the figures from comparable cohorts stay pretty steady over time. For example, the 2011 18-24 figures are similar to the 2013 25-34 figures, and the 2011 12-17 figures are similar to the 2013 18-24 figures. The data from just that chart is not complete enough to follow a particular group as it ages but still it looks like the chart supports the idea that younger folks simply watch less TV and will continue to do so even as they get older.
I see your point but don't fully agree. There's only 3 data points for each cohort, and the change seems to be within the margin of error, at that. Have you considered that the year-on-year decline might also be correlated with the modest increase in economic growth over the last few years? This occurs to me because I notice that the older two cohorts (which would have the highest number of retirees) actually show a slight increase in viewership for this year over 2012.
I do think TV is in long term decline, though as I explained in a nearby comment I think that's more to do with the model of TV distribution than production. The subheading on the graph actually acknowledges this (saying that streaming video services are disrupting the traditional pay TV audience model), but the headline is misguided - I'm not convinced people are spending that much less time sitting in front of the TV than before.
To be honest, I'm a bit surprised the decline isn't steeper, although I'm basing that partly on changes in my own viewing habits (n=1) as the selection on Netflix improves - Iwatch about 6 hours of news and 4 hours of entertainment on TV in a typical week, but since rescuing a dog has made it hard to go to the movies, over the last few months we've been systematically working our way through every episode of Star Trek instead.
> Also, bear in mind that now many current shows are competing with older shows available through services like Netflix; they make less money up front, but the 'long tail' gets fatter for quality or cult shows.
I don't think services like Amazon or Netflix counts as TV even though they carry a lot of TV episodes
I guess I didn't make myself clear. People may be watching less broadcast and cable TV at time-of-broadcast, but that doesn't necessarily mean less time spent watching entertainment produced specifically for television. Broadcasters (which I'll use here to include cable TV channels like HBO etc.) have services like Hulu through which they capture revenue, and they are also willing to finance the production costs of TV series if they are going to get some of the long-tail revenue from Netflix etc. The lower initial viewership aka TV ratings doesn't necessarily indicate a lower lifetime audience. That's why you don't see the stocks in freefall even though superficially the audience appears to be shrinking.
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 socially accepted dumping ground (at least on a small scale) is in front of a TV. I believe this explains the peculiar claim that 80 year old people "watch" 16 hours per day of TV on average. This does not explain the claims about 50 year olds.
Maybe I'm a contrarian or I see lot of this here on HN for what it is but I find these comments funny and ironic. How do you find time to comment HN with all ths living to do?
By not watching TV, LOL. Supposedly in my age bracket, at least according to ad sales folks trying to peddle their time, its saving me on average 10 hours per day or some bogosity like that.
That's what I mean about bogus stats. I never power my phone off (why would I?) and its got 3G internet everywhere I go, therefore on the graph by the same logic I have 24 hours of mobile use per day.
Same here! I don't even have kids and I can barely fit in 8-10 hours per week. For my demographic, they're claiming 30+ hours per week. Next time my friends with kids complain about "not enough time in the day," I think I'm going to smack them!
I think most of the networks stream their shows for a short time on their web sites. At this point I just wonder, why not just cut out the middle-man and get on with it? I'll pay for subscriptions, but not for endless commercials and 490 of 500 channels that I don't even watch. Not for TV shows that have stupid animations in the corner every five minutes. Since the cable and satellite companies refuse to give us the choice we want, we simply choose to opt-out. Once communities start installing their own low-cost fiber and free wi-fi en-mass without the litigation, the last hope of Time Warner and such fossils will be gone. TV isn't dying, it is dead and just too stupid to realize it.
"The old way of watching TV" is dying, and TV itself is just aging, and finding its place among Internet options it seems. It's now just another option among many, but I don't see that as meaning it will "die".
I subscribe to Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Cable TV.
This way of getting entertainment is actually frustratingly expensive.
And to make things even dumber, sometime NONE of these services have what I want without an additional convenience fee. So my wife and I will stop at a Red Box and get a movie for about $1/2, LOL. It's crazy.
When 3 or 4 more $10 per month options pop-up, and everyone is watching some great show exclusive to that service, then what? Things get WAY worse.
Someone needs to start a company where I pay $80-$100 per month, and I get EVERY one of these services streamed through 1 site to every room in my house :) Someone get started, make the deals, get this going, OK. Good luck.
Sadly that's still not enough to completely replace cable (the HBO series don't show up there). And even with Netflix and a cable TV subscription, I still find myself torrenting certain things. Sadly, torrenting is just so much easier than most of the legit ways to get shows.
The total number of hours watching video is still increasing through. You also have to consider that the cost of production is dropping, and the number of big players in the TV market is still tiny. The huge players are (Disney/ABC, NBCU/Comcast, Time Warner, Fox/Newscorp, CBS/Viacom) and they own an enormous percentage of TV Networks and TV production, both domestically and internationally.
So individual shows rating may be dropping and rating for networks may be going down, but they are spreading their revenues across a lot of the more niche properties. They also make a huge amount from Cable licenses for the whole package of networks to ensure they have as many channels available to viewers as possible.
They are now learning to monetize their properties across digital media, and you will see that growth into online media and consolidation there soon.
I work with major media groups helping them with social media and the growing time-shifted audience, so I've heard a lot of the plans for the future. They see the writing on the wall, and while broadcast and cable might be shrinking, the content creation and advertising around video entertainment will keep growing, of that I am certain.
"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?
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 package with high-speed internet access."
From the description, this apparently isn't referring to mobile Internet, but AT&T U-verse and the like. So high-speed Internet from AT&T doesn't count as broadband on the grounds that they're a telco.
My best guess is that when this whole article is founded on the strange understanding that TV through a cable provider is the only real TV while getting the same content through satellite or what-have-you is "mobile," and cable Internet is "broadband" while anything from a "telco" like AT&T is a totally different thing. A rise of alternative providers is an interesting story, but it's a pretty different story from the one they're trying to tell here where everybody is just taking their iPads to Starbucks and watching cat videos.
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.
> Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, "The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever." All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn't sound like a huge deal — but it includes internet subscribers, too.
Except the source is another BI article, and _its_ source mentions nothing about Internet subscribers:
Ha, yeah, fair point and reasonable analysis. The dozen misleading graphs that don't quite support his point are looking more suspicious by the minute.
I kind of want to call Jim Edwards and tell him this is an interesting direction for a story, but he should probably chuck this rough draft and start from scratch before someone accidentally puts this on BI's site.
I cut the cable TV cord three years ago, when it was costing me over $100 a month. I don't miss it one bit. In fact, when I go over to a friend's house and watch some TV I feel like it's just grating noise.
I have broadband Internet at $35 a month (about 20mbps), Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and Netflix, and I have more than I need. I spend a lot less time wasting time flipping channels and watching commercials. I total about 3-4 hours a week of watching anything on TV.
It is in your best interest to care, because otherwise these commons get mighty tragic. You are getting content without paying a representative cost of that content. Which is good for you! For now. But be prepared for that to change, and probably sooner than you'd like.
I've found content on Youtube by independent productions to be far better than what is on Netflix, so perhaps it is not that tragic. My tastes are probably not representative, but those types of productions are bound to improve as mainstream production quality declines, kind of like we've seen with music.
The begged question that mainstream music quality has declined is one of the more curious things I have read in quite some time, to say nothing of the implication that the same will happen with, say, dramatic content.
You may not like, say, Miley Cyrus (I don't), but artists and groups like Daft Punk and Radiohead are quite mainstream, quite successful, and quite good as well. The broadening of what is "mainstream" has added a lot of choice for pretty much everyone and a lot of it is quite good.
Who needs stats... my teenage kids pretty much ignore 200 satellite channels and instead watch youtube, read forums and IM their friends.
When they were growing up I allowed them to be bombarded with information - TV on, web access, phones from an early age - and they've developed the ability to filter it quite well and just ignore things that don't interest them.
The only down side is:
"awww dad I didn't get anything done today"
"why, son?"
"some Internet happened"
I don't think TV will ever die because when your kids will be bored with forums, or have nothing on their watch list they will switch on their TV. When TV came, people thought it was an end to the film industry but nothing like that happened. Though, statistically speaking the future seems obscure for television and usage is declining but I am sure something for it will come up that may revive it.
My 8 year old has only experienced real-time broadcast television when staying at a hotel, where he was frustrated and perplexed that we couldn't rewind it (he has no clue where the concept of rewinding really comes from). He has always experienced media he can control on YouTube or Netflix. I can't imagine he'd ever subscribe to something like cable in the future. Maybe if TV could associate itself with Minecraft somehow they could reach this cohort, but I suspect it's a lost cause.
I went to see the last Batman franchise film last year, which I found horribly boring. I actually had a moment where my hands reached out in the dark for the fast-forward button, which took me by surprise as to how used I am to having those controls now. I'm well into my 30s so I can only imagine how reactive it is for young kids to not have this ability.
That's the exact reason why I love the movie theater: no one has any control at all outside of walking out, so everyone pushes their ADHD to the side and commits to the movie for two hours. Once the movie is over, you might still think it was shitty and a waste of time, but at least you gave it a fair shot.
Try watching a slow movie like Gattaca at home, with a dozen devices and apps competing to take your attention away, and see how many people drift off and watch it from the corner of an eye or don't even finish it at all. Does the movie deserve that? Maybe; if only short-form content or frenetic Avengers-like action can hold people's attention from start to finish, then that's how it is. But I, for one, appreciate immensely when people commit fully to something, the way it was intended to, for better or for worse.
I completely agree. For just a short time in your life, you can let go and trust the author with your mind. Having said that, when it comes to Batman 3 my mind was very annoyed (and would have left if it weren't for friends).
Well, movie theaters don't really force you to commit to the film; my friend and I walked out of the Tree of Life, for example.
That said, and for all the love I have for computers and even for my Nexus tablet, I fear I'll become an anti-smartphones curmudgeon soon. I already feel uncomfortable when everyone takes theirs out right after lunch, killing any possibility of a conversation.
When we stayed in a hotel and my preschool kids were subjected to cable, they were confused and angry. Why couldn't they choose the program they wanted? And on e they found a program that was acceptable, why did it keep stopping? They actually thought we were punishing them with commercials and could not figure out what they were doing wrong. Interesting to see it through their eyes.
These were preschool kids right? Confused and angry ... Is that uncommon for preschool aged kids? What other kinds of things can we learn about the world based on these data points ... ? I feel like there is a Malcolm Gladwell book here ...
Good at lying with statistics. The plots don't say what the text does. Non-zero y axis makes tiny effects look big. Worst culprit are the age plots, which show retirees watching more tv than young'uns. It doesn't change over time, but text claims youngsters do not do tv.
Yet its is important to bring this up. The MAFIAA/government will always manipulate this argument to give the illusion that content and culture is dying. Thus the MAFIAA gets to keep its propaganda monopoly and the government its censorship.
Sorry, and on a more serious note, I should hope this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone.
Moving out a few years ago I ordered a 25/25 fiber line and completely dropped any form of cable/satellite package.
Norway, similar to the UK and probably many other countries, has a "TV Licence" which I still gladly pay, even though by law I am not required to do so as I don't technically have any TV channels in my house. NRK (Norwegian "BBC") provides a fantastic internet service on par with BBC's player, that does not require me to handle the archaic technology that is decoders and their 1990's era hardware running millennium software.
Of course it is dying, and I'm glad it is. TV is one of the most obnoxious formats of distributing information, shoving adds in your face without giving you a chance to turn them off or skip them and forcing its schedule onto your limited time.
I'd say the opposite is happening,
depending whether you use the definition of "old tv" or "new tv".
Old TV is passive video broadcast from a central source. New TV is screen video of any size from watch to theater wall.
People are spending more time than ever glued to their new screens of any type - old tv, movie theater, game boxes, smartphones, tablets, and newest wearable screens. It is said children are spending less time than ever in history playing outdoors or in sports.
The cable and phone companies need to realize that they are ip providers only in the future. Either get with that picture or die. TV is moving to internet distribution (has moved for many) and mobile phones are computers with a voice modem that's not really needed. Just compare the audio quality of facetime audio to a phone call to appreciate the difference.
Mind you, what do i know, I gave up TV in 1991 - there's just for more to do on the internet.
Shh ... We are supposed to believe no one goes to the theatre any more because that's the lamestream media or something ... Right, that's the correct echo chamber view?
This is why it baffles me, day in and day out without fail everyone speculates Apple are going to revolutionise TV with Apple TV. Television is a dying medium, I download and consume all of my media on my phone and computer. The only time I ever use my TV is when I want to watch downloaded content on a larger screen and copy it to a USB drive to watch on my TV. Good riddance.
Another interesting aspect of the discussion, not discussed much, is what will the new purpose be for TV?
What I'm getting at is people used to go to movies to see a movie. But thats technologically obsolete and frankly with all the previews and ads and hyper expensive junk food its too offensive to experience. However, movie theaters currently exist, and will exist in the future, solely for younger teens dating / makeout sessions, a social party atmosphere, that kind of stuff. And thats apparently a lower level yet stable and mostly constant line of business.
So what will the TV analogy be after most people no longer watch TV? My guess is sport fanatics (despite the stats showing dramatic declines in watching pro sports). Also I think mindless shovelware while people eat. Propaganda such as religious shows or news reporting? Imagine a world with only three cable channels remain, EWTN, ESPN, and Foxnews.
> "What I'm getting at is people used to go to movies to see a movie. But thats technologically obsolete and frankly with all the previews and ads and hyper expensive junk food its too offensive to experience"
Yes, no one goes to a movie theatre to see a movie any more. You definitely know what the world is like. Good job not being simplistic and simply assuming the world fits in whatever bias you have ... :)
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, the public are required to pay for public broadcasting). This in part is suppose to pay for news and journalists... In reality it pays for crappy talentshows.
Still what's the model for serious news broadcasting going to be in the future? The models that seems to "work" is having a rich sheikh pay (Al Jazeera) or government funded (RT.TV / Press TV / France 24). This doesn't give you the best of news, but then again neither does ad funded news live CNN.
Heh, we got rid of cable years ago (in favor of Netflix, Amazon, and more and more Hulu+) and when we do see cable, the only channel we seem to watch is International House Hunters on HGTV. It's certainly not worth $60 / month.
I am not too worried about the cable companies. They've made the shift from television to Internet and phone just fine.
Television, however, is going through the same metamorphosis that music, retail sales and newspapers are enduring.
I'm not worried about the music industry. They've made the shift from vinyl to cassette to CD to digital, and may owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jobs.
However, newspapers and brick & mortar retail have been decimated.
So the question is, will TV go the way of music? Or newspapers?
I wonder if switching from Analog signals to Digital has contributed to this...
Not only do you have to buy the receiver box, which craps out and has a separate remote and interface, but Digital TV has really really terrible reception. I live in a large metro area and even we have tons of problems with reception, I can't image what it's like for people who live out further.
I've gotten the impression that the reverse has been happening: broadcast digital TV removed quality and reduced number of channels as a reason for sticking with cable. I know a number of people here (Washington DC) who've talked about dropping cable TV because they really only used it for live things (e.g. the Olympics, disasters, etc.) and a $20 antenna works well enough for that to make paying an additional $50+ per month completely unappealing.
I'd love to see a correlation between this data and the advent of reality TV. I wouldn't even be surprised if part of this decline is due to the incredibly amount of garbage, Kardashian sisters and Honey Boo Boos on air.
Hm, you may be onto something. It might just be the overall negative tone that TV brings into the home. Negative news, scare techniques, negative culture, negative morals. If people feel like TV is making them unhappy or destroying their family values they're obviously going to leave TV. Same thing goes for the internet.
A tiny minority of TV viewers were relying on broadcast both before and after the transition to digital. Those that were, also aren't the same demographic that are not "cutting the cord."
With the NBA and NFL starting to allow online streaming of their games, I am seeing less and less reasons to keep my cable. Netflix, Hulu, NBA League Pass, and NFL Sunday Ticket would cover 90% of my cable consumption. The other 10%, HBO, is rumored to be considering a standalone subscription service.
The bit at the end about people "cutting the cord" on broadband and going to free wifi rings... not just false, really, but simply ridiculous. To a reasonable approximation, nobody is relying on Starbucks (or whatever) for their Internet access - that's simply not a substitute.
I think the idea there is people would rather see ads than pay the mi h larger sum that would be required to fund those shows without ads ... Funny thing, economics.
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 best description.
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 protect my will to live, I always change my tuner to the Mexican station before I turn the TV off. Not that Mexican TV is any better, but my intelligence is that much less insulted when I don't understand what they're saying, and it is ever so slightly more surreal to watch than the Chinese stations and occasionally has soccer highlights.
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 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.
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, before cable became a fashionable norm, some television stations could still rationalize "going off the air" between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m.
I used to watch a fair amount of TV, now I have three young kids and watch less than an hour per month. I wonder what I actually got out of those 30+ hours a week of watching television. What a waste of life. how many people on their death bed say... I wish I had watched more television. Some people are going to spend 1/4 of their life watching television. Seriously? think of what you could have done with that time.
Online gaming is becoming as much of a time drain. It at least does not have as much of a social, political and interpersonal agenda as television (though it does warp you mind in other ways) but still, what a waste of precious life.
What would the world look like if television was gone tomorrow. No more marketers and hidden agenda writers and directors programming your mind subtlety.
What happened to board games? getting together with family and friends to socialize? I would like to see numbers on what television, media, and gaming has replaced (as far as time spent). Eventually, humans won't even act like traditional humans. All social skills and collaboration, perhaps even empathy one day will be far diminished or lost. Our very humanity.
One truism of humanity is if you free a person, they try to enslave themselves as hard as they can. Sounds dumb, but its a wise observation of an older guy. Applied thru all aspects of life.
Anyway the relevance to this discussion is as TV dies out, what will be the analogy of the Janet Jackson superbowel half time show? Who will legions of mindless drones mail (email?) complaints to, regarding reddits gonewild showing about 3 square inches more of flesh than you'd see at a beach or the mall? Who will the super-conformists conform to if their holy altar of worship, the TV, goes away?
I guess what I'm saying is a darling of the censored neutered content biz is dying, but that doesn't mean weirdos (or prudes or whatever you want to call them) are going away any time soon.
So aside from this interesting and overlooked observation, whats the likely result of the final death of government censorship? Or will it be the final death...
It will be interesting to watch, for sure. Informing weirdos and prudes that their opinions are irrelevant and they don't matter is one of 4chans specialities. So I'm definitely looking forward to it 20 years down the road.
The tide seems to be that, all things considered, the internet will have free speech. Actual, real free speech.
"Informing weirdos and prudes that their opinions are irrelevant and they don't matter is one of 4chans specialities."
Its hard to imagine politicians not pandering to the prude weirdos or neopuritans or whatever they call themselves and instead embracing 4chan or reddit (or HN?) culture, but maybe its inevitable?
