7 ms·

I need to work and sleep and spend time with friends. TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash. I can't even spend the attention

I need to work and sleep and spend time with friends. TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash. I can't even spend the attention required to watch TV most times. I find myself just leaving it on in the background and then realized that I've paused it because something was more interesting on my laptop. Sometimes it takes me hours just to get through one episode. There is also piracy. I don't have cable but I still watched Walking Dead. Which I've also stopped watching. Live TV just seems so pointless. If a show is good I can just pick it up after like 3 seasons and binge it if I want. Paying $80 a month for TV is just absurd. And paying for sports is even more ridiculous. I like the NBA, and occasionally the NFL during playoffs. But I'll never watch a game live which just spreads 35 minutes of content over 3 hours to maximize ad revenue. TV had it's heyday, the idea that it isn't on a steady downward decline towards some new steady state is delusion. ESPN in its current form is done. The impact on athletes salaries should be interesting though.

tw04 10y ago
It's possible it's completely unrelated - but I wonder if the constant threats to move teams to different cities if people aren't* willing to fund billion dollar stadiums is related? I know for a lot of casual fans, that's a massive turnoff. You see teams making a ransom in profit year after year, but then they expect the public to fund them above and beyond. The whole thing just feels like it's gotten out of control. That's completely ignoring what I can only assume will eventually be massive lawsuits around concussions for the NFL.
- cle 10y ago
  It's completely anecdotal, but so many of my friends are put off by blacked out games which make random games unavailable to watch. So not only do you spend a ridiculous amount of money for a sports subscription, but you don't even know if you'll even be able to watch your team! And when you do, it's a little bit of sports sprinkled in between tons of in-your-face advertising, with ads in between plays, ads on coach's heads, ads scrolling across the bottom of the screen, ads interrupting normal play, etc. It's ridiculous. And it's even more ridiculous that media companies are surprised.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - chipperyman573 10y ago
    Out of curiosity (having never watched sports), what causes these blackouts? Is it contacts with the service providers?
    - peteboyd 10y ago
      2015 and 2015 they suspended having blackouts. The NFL will re-evaluate the rule after going through the season. The blackout policy was instituted in the early 1970s when NFL teams relied primarily on ticket sales to generate revenue. The rule stated that if a game wasn't sold out 72 hours prior to kickoff, they would be blacked out in the local TV markets. It sucked. If your favorite team was bad that year, you ended up being blacked out as no one attended the game. Sure I was a fan of the Dolphins, but I am not going to spend $100+ to watch a 1-16 or 6-10 team some years. I would watch at home in the background.
  - forgetsusername 10y ago
    >but so many of my friends are put off by blacked out games which make random games unavailable to watch. It isn't random; it's an outdated approach to getting butts in seats. Generally, it will be the local team that is "blacked out" in its home market. The blame goes to the team ownership, not the networks. But I agree, it's stupid.
- matwood 10y ago
  I definitely think we are at peak NFL. The head trauma is a big issue, but not because of lawsuits. The NFL has plenty of money and can pay whatever. The real problem is 10-20 years from now when parents have kept their kids out of football because of the head issue, and now you have the best athletes in other sports instead. The NFL has also oversaturated the brand. It used to be Sunday games and then MNF. Each week was an event. TNF ruined the event aspect, and has put on really terrible games showing how thin the league has become. Then there are the games in other countries. For a sport like baseball or basketball 1 game in another country is not a big deal, but the NFL season is only 16 games and losing a home game is a huge deal for the fans, players, and competition aspect. So yeah, I think all those things (and the stadium issue you mention) have added to up to pushing fans away.
  - alistproducer2 10y ago
    The head trauma is what made me stop watching football. I used to watch 8 hours of football every Sunday (on Red Zone). At some point this off season, I began to think about what I was really watching. I also got the sense that the NFL was taking the fans for granted. The major rule changes every year really bugged me, especially when nothing was done (except trying to reduce the amount of returned kickoffs) to alleviate the concussion issue. At some point I just felt like I didn't want to watch old dudes "own" young men while they tried to kill each other for America's entertainment. It started to feel like real life mandingo fighting (from Django Unchained) and I decided that I didn't want to be a part of enriching that.
    - re_todd 10y ago
      Same with me. I'm disgusted that they did not do much about had trauma. I'm also disgusted that it is so difficult for me to watch games I want without paying a lot of money, even when they are in the past. A third think I'm disgusted with is that some of my favorite players will have a few bad games and then get cut from the team.
    - Trill-I-Am 10y ago
      What could they do to alleviate head trauma without essentially neutering the game?
- sliken 10y ago
  Sacramento just got a $$$ stadium. City used it as an excuse to significantly jack up the parking prices, $28 for an evening to pay for the stadium. Of course now the restaurants are seeing a drop in business because not many want to pay $28 to park. Spending so much on stadiums seems insane. In Pittsburgh the Steelers and Pirates lobbied for and got seperate stadiums, despite minimal overlap in seasons.
  - bsder 10y ago
    IIRC, Pittsburgh voted down the stadium several times, but then they pulled some political shenanigans to shove it through. The problem isn't that the Steelers and Pirates should have separate stadiums. That's fine. The problem is that the stadiums should pay for themselves. If a stadium isn't a good enough business proposition to get funded privately, it shouldn't get funded, period.
    - mschuster91 10y ago
      > If a stadium isn't a good enough business proposition to get funded privately, it shouldn't get funded, period. Yeah. In Munich, for example, the Allianz Arena stadium was built for 340M €, which were brought up by FC Bayern and TSV 1860, in cooperation with Allianz insurance which sponsored the name. FC Bayern paid off the entire debt two years ago (after 9.5 years, it was projected to take 25 years to pay off the debt). But I'm not totally against public partial funding/investment - especially in the lower leagues the pitch usually is open to all kinds of sport clubs as well as nearby schools, so it makes sense to fund at least part of the costs via public channels as long as the public gets some value back beyond interest payments. (Anecdata: I'm living across the pitch my former school still uses. It's weird to see lots of the teachers random on the street...)
  - nitelord 10y ago
    Sacramento has a ton of city owned parking garages near the new arena which are typically empty in the evening. The city contributed $212 million to the arena based on future increased parking revenue generated from events at the arena. I've been to several events this year at the Golden1 Center and have spent no more than $10 on parking for the evening. The city did use this as an excuse to increase meter rates and extend hours, but it's only $0.50/hr more.
matwood 10y ago
Right on all points. You touched on it with your laptop comment, but there are also so many other avenues for couch entertainment. There are traditional shows on services like Netflix, but then there is also Twitch, YouTube, etc... that have compelling background content with little to no commercials. Speaking of commercials, this is what is really killing TV. We have more things competing for our time than ever before, and commercials are the first thing to go. In addition to the time wasting, people also start doing the math. $10/month for Netflix commercial free content or cable $80-$100/month for commercial laden content. BTW, AMC and TWD are one of the worst offenders with commercial time vs. show time.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- desireco42 10y ago
  You said something very important here, commercials are really a no-go. I pay $10/mo not to see them on youtube and especially not to be seen by my kids. Just requests for stupid toys are worth $10.
- snarfy 10y ago
  I saw that Star Wars: The Force Awakens was on cable TV the other day while flipping through the guide. I almost clicked on it, but then I saw the run time - 3h40m. It is a 2h15m movie. There is no way I'm sitting through that many commercials.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >There are traditional shows on services like Netflix, but then there is also Twitch, YouTube, etc. This article is about ESPN, which is a live sports network. Cutting the cord is difficult for a sports fan. None of the services you mention are a replacement (yet).
wcummings 10y ago
>TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash. >TV had it's heyday I can tell you don't watch much TV. It's never been better. We're in a golden age of TV, it's just not on ESPN. There have recently been a lot of extremely high quality, hour long dramas, which basically amount to a movie every week. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Wire, arguably Westworld, to name a few.
- friedman23 10y ago
  All of those programs are available on demand on the internet. When people talk about TV in this context they are talking about cable not the content.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - wcummings 10y ago
    The parent comment was discussing the quality of the content.
- superquest 10y ago
  True. And it's easier to watch these on the internet (legally or illegally) than on "TV".
  - wcummings 10y ago
    Whether you watch it on TV or pay HBO (or Netflix or whoever) to stream it they're still TV shows, produced by TV networks. It's the format, not the delivery that matters. The parent comment was obviously about the quality of the content. Nobody cares whether it comes over coax or TCP.
    - superquest 10y ago
      The presence or absence of commercials is a huge element in the "format". It's possible to never see commercials online -- which isn't possible on TV. Also, Shows of this quality are the vast minority, not the "vast majority".
0xcde4c3db 10y ago
Yeah, over the past 10 years or so I've swtiched entirely to DVD sets and on-demand streaming. It's not about lowering the bill, it's that the only real edge TV had -- the only reason to put up with all the ads and scheduling bullshit -- was the size of the library. Now that TV-on-DVD and Hulu have gotten big, that's not a problem anymore.
forgetsusername 10y ago
>And paying for sports is even more ridiculous. Is it a problem that some of us like sports? I bet you have a "ridiculous" hobby or two that's a complete waste of money. And I love the mentality of "TV is trash and I can hardly stand it...but I'll steal it anyway."
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  It's more like TV is a barrel of excrement, with few shiny diamonds floating somewhere in there. You can dig through the excrement to get at them, but then there's this Bay of Pirates nearby, and they give away those same diamonds without fecal matter...

tw04 10y ago

It's possible it's completely unrelated - but I wonder if the constant threats to move teams to different cities if people aren't* willing to fund billion dollar stadiums is related? I know for a lot of casual fans, that's a massive turnoff. You see teams making a ransom in profit year after year, but then they expect the public to fund them above and beyond. The whole thing just feels like it's gotten out of control. That's completely ignoring what I can only assume will eventually be massive lawsuits around concussions for the NFL.

cle 10y ago
It's completely anecdotal, but so many of my friends are put off by blacked out games which make random games unavailable to watch. So not only do you spend a ridiculous amount of money for a sports subscription, but you don't even know if you'll even be able to watch your team! And when you do, it's a little bit of sports sprinkled in between tons of in-your-face advertising, with ads in between plays, ads on coach's heads, ads scrolling across the bottom of the screen, ads interrupting normal play, etc. It's ridiculous. And it's even more ridiculous that media companies are surprised.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- chipperyman573 10y ago
  Out of curiosity (having never watched sports), what causes these blackouts? Is it contacts with the service providers?
  - peteboyd 10y ago
    2015 and 2015 they suspended having blackouts. The NFL will re-evaluate the rule after going through the season. The blackout policy was instituted in the early 1970s when NFL teams relied primarily on ticket sales to generate revenue. The rule stated that if a game wasn't sold out 72 hours prior to kickoff, they would be blacked out in the local TV markets. It sucked. If your favorite team was bad that year, you ended up being blacked out as no one attended the game. Sure I was a fan of the Dolphins, but I am not going to spend $100+ to watch a 1-16 or 6-10 team some years. I would watch at home in the background.
- forgetsusername 10y ago
  >but so many of my friends are put off by blacked out games which make random games unavailable to watch. It isn't random; it's an outdated approach to getting butts in seats. Generally, it will be the local team that is "blacked out" in its home market. The blame goes to the team ownership, not the networks. But I agree, it's stupid.
matwood 10y ago
I definitely think we are at peak NFL. The head trauma is a big issue, but not because of lawsuits. The NFL has plenty of money and can pay whatever. The real problem is 10-20 years from now when parents have kept their kids out of football because of the head issue, and now you have the best athletes in other sports instead. The NFL has also oversaturated the brand. It used to be Sunday games and then MNF. Each week was an event. TNF ruined the event aspect, and has put on really terrible games showing how thin the league has become. Then there are the games in other countries. For a sport like baseball or basketball 1 game in another country is not a big deal, but the NFL season is only 16 games and losing a home game is a huge deal for the fans, players, and competition aspect. So yeah, I think all those things (and the stadium issue you mention) have added to up to pushing fans away.
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  The head trauma is what made me stop watching football. I used to watch 8 hours of football every Sunday (on Red Zone). At some point this off season, I began to think about what I was really watching. I also got the sense that the NFL was taking the fans for granted. The major rule changes every year really bugged me, especially when nothing was done (except trying to reduce the amount of returned kickoffs) to alleviate the concussion issue. At some point I just felt like I didn't want to watch old dudes "own" young men while they tried to kill each other for America's entertainment. It started to feel like real life mandingo fighting (from Django Unchained) and I decided that I didn't want to be a part of enriching that.
  - re_todd 10y ago
    Same with me. I'm disgusted that they did not do much about had trauma. I'm also disgusted that it is so difficult for me to watch games I want without paying a lot of money, even when they are in the past. A third think I'm disgusted with is that some of my favorite players will have a few bad games and then get cut from the team.
  - Trill-I-Am 10y ago
    What could they do to alleviate head trauma without essentially neutering the game?
sliken 10y ago
Sacramento just got a $$$ stadium. City used it as an excuse to significantly jack up the parking prices, $28 for an evening to pay for the stadium. Of course now the restaurants are seeing a drop in business because not many want to pay $28 to park. Spending so much on stadiums seems insane. In Pittsburgh the Steelers and Pirates lobbied for and got seperate stadiums, despite minimal overlap in seasons.
- bsder 10y ago
  IIRC, Pittsburgh voted down the stadium several times, but then they pulled some political shenanigans to shove it through. The problem isn't that the Steelers and Pirates should have separate stadiums. That's fine. The problem is that the stadiums should pay for themselves. If a stadium isn't a good enough business proposition to get funded privately, it shouldn't get funded, period.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    > If a stadium isn't a good enough business proposition to get funded privately, it shouldn't get funded, period. Yeah. In Munich, for example, the Allianz Arena stadium was built for 340M €, which were brought up by FC Bayern and TSV 1860, in cooperation with Allianz insurance which sponsored the name. FC Bayern paid off the entire debt two years ago (after 9.5 years, it was projected to take 25 years to pay off the debt). But I'm not totally against public partial funding/investment - especially in the lower leagues the pitch usually is open to all kinds of sport clubs as well as nearby schools, so it makes sense to fund at least part of the costs via public channels as long as the public gets some value back beyond interest payments. (Anecdata: I'm living across the pitch my former school still uses. It's weird to see lots of the teachers random on the street...)
- nitelord 10y ago
  Sacramento has a ton of city owned parking garages near the new arena which are typically empty in the evening. The city contributed $212 million to the arena based on future increased parking revenue generated from events at the arena. I've been to several events this year at the Golden1 Center and have spent no more than $10 on parking for the evening. The city did use this as an excuse to increase meter rates and extend hours, but it's only $0.50/hr more.

matwood 10y ago

Right on all points. You touched on it with your laptop comment, but there are also so many other avenues for couch entertainment. There are traditional shows on services like Netflix, but then there is also Twitch, YouTube, etc... that have compelling background content with little to no commercials. Speaking of commercials, this is what is really killing TV. We have more things competing for our time than ever before, and commercials are the first thing to go. In addition to the time wasting, people also start doing the math. $10/month for Netflix commercial free content or cable $80-$100/month for commercial laden content. BTW, AMC and TWD are one of the worst offenders with commercial time vs. show time.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
desireco42 10y ago
You said something very important here, commercials are really a no-go. I pay $10/mo not to see them on youtube and especially not to be seen by my kids. Just requests for stupid toys are worth $10.
snarfy 10y ago
I saw that Star Wars: The Force Awakens was on cable TV the other day while flipping through the guide. I almost clicked on it, but then I saw the run time - 3h40m. It is a 2h15m movie. There is no way I'm sitting through that many commercials.
forgetsusername 10y ago
>There are traditional shows on services like Netflix, but then there is also Twitch, YouTube, etc. This article is about ESPN, which is a live sports network. Cutting the cord is difficult for a sports fan. None of the services you mention are a replacement (yet).

wcummings 10y ago

>TV just isn't a priority because the vast majority of it is pure trash. >TV had it's heyday I can tell you don't watch much TV. It's never been better. We're in a golden age of TV, it's just not on ESPN. There have recently been a lot of extremely high quality, hour long dramas, which basically amount to a movie every week. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Wire, arguably Westworld, to name a few.

friedman23 10y ago
All of those programs are available on demand on the internet. When people talk about TV in this context they are talking about cable not the content.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- wcummings 10y ago
  The parent comment was discussing the quality of the content.
superquest 10y ago
True. And it's easier to watch these on the internet (legally or illegally) than on "TV".
- wcummings 10y ago
  Whether you watch it on TV or pay HBO (or Netflix or whoever) to stream it they're still TV shows, produced by TV networks. It's the format, not the delivery that matters. The parent comment was obviously about the quality of the content. Nobody cares whether it comes over coax or TCP.
  - superquest 10y ago
    The presence or absence of commercials is a huge element in the "format". It's possible to never see commercials online -- which isn't possible on TV. Also, Shows of this quality are the vast minority, not the "vast majority".

0xcde4c3db 10y ago

Yeah, over the past 10 years or so I've swtiched entirely to DVD sets and on-demand streaming. It's not about lowering the bill, it's that the only real edge TV had -- the only reason to put up with all the ads and scheduling bullshit -- was the size of the library. Now that TV-on-DVD and Hulu have gotten big, that's not a problem anymore.

forgetsusername 10y ago

>And paying for sports is even more ridiculous. Is it a problem that some of us like sports? I bet you have a "ridiculous" hobby or two that's a complete waste of money. And I love the mentality of "TV is trash and I can hardly stand it...but I'll steal it anyway."

TeMPOraL 10y ago
It's more like TV is a barrel of excrement, with few shiny diamonds floating somewhere in there. You can dig through the excrement to get at them, but then there's this Bay of Pirates nearby, and they give away those same diamonds without fecal matter...