7 ms·

TV May Die Soon

70 points by __xjb__ 10y ago

meddlepal 10y ago
If Net Neutrality goes away TV will thrive. This battle is far from over.
- randomdata 10y ago
  TV may thrive again if they improve the content. The biggest hurdle network TV has right now is that people are leaving because there is nothing to watch.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    i kind of feel the same way about Netflix and Amazon too. I've watched most of what I want to watch. Neflix has never been as good as when they had the Starz deal.
    - randomdata 10y ago
      I agree. I may even suggest that mainstream-geared media is fundamentally flawed, as it has to attract a wide audience, providing great appeal to nobody. We accepted it in the past due to not knowing better, but now that we have a taste of video content tailored to our very specific interests, where producers are happy to have an audience of 1,000 people, it's hard to go back.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    It's the classic death spiral. Fewer viewers means less money from advertisers, which in turn means less money for content.
- rz2k 10y ago
  I think you are absolutely right, and it has a lot to do with what is classified as television. Increasingly, television broadcasts are packet based digital content that is carried like other tcp/ip traffic. With adoption of DOCSIS 3.1, which will increase bandwidth for internet communications by dropping spectrum on coaxial cable devoted exclusively to streaming digital video, the definition of television will be further muddied. Conceptually, why should I have to choose a television package from Comcast or Cox based on which one is operating the cable? It makes some sense if my cablebox is parsing a stream available to everyone on the line, but it doesn't make sense if the box is requesting a stream that has not been multicast. I suspect that this threat to their television business has a lot to do with attacks on net neutrality, and that there is a belief that it is a slippery slope from net neutrality to deciding that they shouldn't have something like a favored provider status for anything that is packet-based.
  - twoodfin 10y ago
    You are dead on. The fight over net neutrality was always about video. Some of the early legislation proposed when the Democrats were running Congress was scarily (for the cable companies at least) close to forcing just the kind of "television unbundling" you describe. As you say, they're all packets in the end.
- wand3r 10y ago
  As an optimist, I hope the NN disappears as a policy and creates the catalyst to enforce it technologically instead. It's a hard problem to solve but I think the pieces are there.
dbcurtis 10y ago
It would be interesting to see some data on recent prices for TV station license transfers. The market value of AM radio station licenses has plummeted in recent years. I suspect the same is happening to TV stations, in particular the little independents that live off of syndicated feeds and Star Trek re-runs. (I've seen TV control rooms far, far, less luxurious than the station in Weird Al's movie "UHF"...)
codingdave 10y ago
"TV" has been undergoing changes for its entire history. Cable brought major changes. The ability to play movies at home changed things. Streaming did, too. And regulatory changes along the way had their impact. I also have to take anyone who talk about "4 networks" a bit less seriously because for a long time there were only 3, and Fox actually making a 4th was also a big deal when it came along. So, sure, if what you mean by "TV" is the original networks, yeah, that may be concluding at some point. But "TV" itself just continues its ongoing evolution.
cwyers 10y ago
AM radio hasn't died yet. Heck, books haven't died yet. New media doesn't always kill old media.
- frik 10y ago
  The following is NOT about USA: Some lobbying very hard in various countries to introduce digital radio. When you look up the implementation details, it would be pretty bad idea to stop analog radio. Now some countries already mandate that radio in new cars and also try to mandate that all new sold radio in those countries are digital radio. It's absurde as people listen less and less radio, and analog radio has a lot better coverage - even in bad signal quality you can actually hear something - something vital in emergency situations. Of course you cannot censor analog radio at all, pirate radio stations were common back then when things went wrong. And we already had a time when certin countries allowed just one type of radio device with just one radio channel.
  - DiabloD3 10y ago
    The biggest issue is, even when you have clear signal conditions, even if you're dialed into a channel that is broadcasting HE-AACv2 (aka HE-ACC+ or eACC+) and your radio decodes it natively as HE-ACCv2... it's still a goddamned 128kbit or less stream. Arguably, this is worse quality than ye olde FM on average. I mean, I could get behind a transition if they were using Opus instead of a nearly decade old hack of an even older codec... but they're not. Thank God we're not making this mistake in the US, and digital radio in this form has been rejected: people instead are either adopting SiriusXM or phones+BT playing mixed online/offline content. TBH I'd rather knock down all the US radio towers, reclaim all of the AM and FM radio space, and deploy 802.16? 802.11ah? something and provide low bandwidth but freeish Internet.
    - CharlesW 10y ago
      > ... it's still a goddamned 128kbit or less stream. Arguably, this is worse quality than ye olde FM on average. I don't claim to be a "golden ears" or anything, but I find 64 kbps HE-AAC to offer better-than-FM quality. (HE-AACv2 benefits really only make sense at 48 kbps or lower.) Hydrogenaudio tests showed that a good HE-AAC encoder does just slightly (imperceptibly) worse than Opus at 64 kbps[1]. [1] http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm
beatpanda 10y ago
There's a huge opportunity for the attentive. Rock and roll got started largely because the major broadcasters moved away from radio and into television, and as a result operating an FM radio station got crazy cheap, leaving lots of room for experimentation. I have had my fingers crossed for years that the same thing is going to happen to terrestrial TV.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Have you seen Me TV? WGN? I think the physical costs are manageable already. I doubt good content will get dramatically cheaper any time soon.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Unlikely. The telcos will pounce to get the spectrum.
- RandomOpinion 10y ago
  Hasn't that effectively already occurred in the form of YouTube? A bit of curation is really all it would take to form a virtual TV station.
- tener 10y ago
  Sorry to ruin your hopes: any free spectrum will be consumed by wireless data transmission systems.
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    As one example, but a big one, that's the plan in the European Union. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-207_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-207_en.htm
nawitus 10y ago
One problem with the TV discourse is that it mixes together different meanings of "TV". One is the actual technology to broadcast video, second is the act of broadcasting video to consumers, and the third is the actual receiver, e.g. physical a television screen. The first one will surely die, and has already died for most(?) young people where I live. But that doesn't really matter much as content can be streamed using the internet.
- majewsky 10y ago
  Anecdote time: I'm nearly the only one in my group of friends who still has a TV, and it's become a tradition for us to gather once a week to watch the "heute-show" (a German copy of The Daily Show, but only broadcasted weekly) at my place, and maybe have some political discussions afterwards. So in this particular case, timeslotted broadcasting actually brings us together.
mnm1 10y ago
I searched the article for "Hulu" and got zero hits. I assume the author simply didn't do any research at all.
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  That's interesting, since Hulu runs Nielsen tracking software. I'm not sure if it's included in DVR+3/+7 ratings, though.
  - mnm1 10y ago
    I'm not sure either, but I do know it's included in the top four networks' and their advertisers' future plans for TV and that an article discussing said companies future without discussing Hulu is incomplete.
DiabloD3 10y ago
We keep getting "TV is dead/dying/will live forever" stories on HN. tl;dr of all of them is essentially: TV, as a non-time-shifted non-live broadcast medium, is dead: Netflix et al, Youtube, Torrent, and at the very least, DVRs, killed it; people watch non-live content how they want, when they want, frequently choosing to just "Netflix binge" it. TV, as a live broadcast medium (eg, emergency news), will never die in that sense: I can watch Presidential addresses via the White House's Youtube channel via Youtube's Live feature as well as many local OTA broadcast channels. TV is both dead and will live forever depending on what you call TV.
- losteric 10y ago
  News papers and radio stations still survive in their own niches, TV will be just fine.
- devoply 10y ago
  You can even claim that the same stuff was available via PPV at exorbitant prices, as in movies not the live stuff. Now it's available for nearly free. Yay capitalism!
  - chicxulub 10y ago
    Blah, capitalism.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  And the article says as much: >"Traditional (linear) TV audiences are declining at a significant rate, and they are practically aged out of key demographics. Cable customers are also declining." Note its qualifying the statement with the word "linear."
  - rhizome 10y ago
    So in other words, more and more people are using DVRs and subscription services?
- cmelbye 10y ago
scarface74 10y ago
One thing that the article gets wrong is the difference between brand advertising and direct response. Consumer products goods will always be about brand awareness and not direct targeting. It's the difference between what Snapchat is trying to do and what FB is trying to do. Coca Cola advertising is never going to be about running an ad an expecting someone to go on a website and buy a Coke right then. Neither is anything sold by companies like P&G. Brand advertising is not about the level of targeting that FB is doing.
rmason 10y ago
Television isn't dying. Over the air TV though is on life support. Just like gas stations someday soon local TV stations will be ancient history.
- Roedou 10y ago
  What's the story with gas stations in the US? Are they dying out / being replaced by something else as well?
  - wand3r 10y ago
    Observationally: No. If parent was referring to less vehicles due to advances in transportation technology and pattern optimizations...I think broadcast TV dies much sooner than gas stations.
  - rdiddly 10y ago
    They're doing fine for now. Electric-car optimists think they'll be replaced by charging stations. Apocalyptic doomsters think they'll be replaced by a place to feed & water your horse (or by nothing at all). Both camps seem to agree petroleum fuels are a temporary thing.
    - joelwilliamson 10y ago
      The number of gas stations declined 25% from 1994 to 2013. I'd hardly call that doing fine. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/06/why_america_s_gas_stations_are_running_out_of_time.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/06/why...
  - mgbmtl 10y ago
    In big cities, I think that between higher fuel efficiency and the small margins that stations make, it's not surprising to see the smaller stations close. (Anecdotally, in my neighbourhood, a few stations closed, our tiny neighbourhood/borough of 60k people had a dozen gas stations, now down to 5)
skrebbel 10y ago
> FANG is delivering actionable data to advertisers in ways that traditional broadcasters simply can’t. The "N" in that weird acronym stands for Netflix. The day they start selling my data to advertisers is the day I'm back to torrenting. I feel like the author is so ad-focused that she doesn't even see this: the whole article is about ads. Netflix is showing that you can make fantastic, super expensive content, even niche content, without advertising. To me that feels much more profound than "Youtube has more data about you than ABC so advertisers will prefer that".
- hackuser 10y ago
  Data about you is valuable. Netflix can sell it without displaying the ads itself. I'd be surprised if they aren't tracking users and monetizing that information, like seemingly every other business in the world. But maybe someone knows ...
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    I thought Netflix had a whole bunch of product placement deals? There can be advertising without breaking out of the content.
    - philfrasty 10y ago
      Watched Sense8 (over here in Germany) for the last couple of days on NF. Every episode has a disclaimer at the beginning „This show contains product placements“. From first view: Ben & Jerrys, Pepsi (?), Sennheiser
  - brendangregg 10y ago
    I can't provide an official response (I'm an engineer at Netflix), but I noticed to answer the question "How much data does Netflix sell to Third-Party Advertisers?", did have the response[1]: "Hey there, Cliff Edwards, director of corporate communications at Netflix. Wanted to point out that we don't sell ANY data to third-party advertisers. And we provide pretty good support for anyone who wants to learn about our tracking and how to opt out: https://www.netflix.com/cookies" https://www.netflix.com/cookies" That's in line with what I expect too. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2uffl9/how_much_data_does_netflix_sell_to_thirdparty/ https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2uffl9/how_much_da...
gumby 10y ago
This is just an idea, not really even opinion piece, but has some good insight. I was interested that she coined the term FANG and not FANTA (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, youTube, Apple). I am a big fan of Apple but continue to be dumfounded by how tone-deaf they are about the Internet. It's as if they have Jim Sensenbrenner on their board.
Animats 10y ago
Here are the SF Bay Area's current TV broadcast stations: [1] High power stations get a channel for the entire area, while low-power stations share channels. The FCC has a computerized model that takes into consideration antenna height, power, frequency, and terrain to figure out what won't interfere. (There are a large number of low-power religious stations. For people thinking about repurposing "white space" in the TV bands, they're going to have to get rid of some of those Voice of God stations. One God Ministries alone has 17 stations licensed in the Bay Area.) There's more space available now for TV stations because the tuners for digital TV have much better adjacent channel rejection than analog TV tuners did. There used to be restrictions to prevent harmonic interference and such. That's mostly gone, and all the channel slots can be used. If you wanted to set up a broadcast TV station in San Francisco, you probably could. [1] http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/tvq?list=1&dist=100.000%20&dlat2=37&mlat2=45&slat2=35.571600&ns=N&dlon2=122&mlon2=26&slon2=14.612532&ew=W&size=9 http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/tvq?list=1&dist=100.000%20...
taylodl 10y ago
The networks take away FANG's bite with live sports, which are about the only thing I care to watch anymore.
sumoboy 10y ago
TV is declining, just like newspaper empires. Streaming is expanding as it's own empire even though it smells and tastes like TV it's different. Google and Facebook kill with ads so they'll continue to drive "innovation" for eyeballs as again traditional TV attempts to stop the bleeding. Innovation is where newspapers failed. I'm streaming mlb right now and reading HN, TV can't offer that experience easily.
Namrog84 10y ago
As some have already stated. TV is the wrong word here. "Television or TV is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome (black-and-white), or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. " This sounds like everything from traditional broadcast TV to YouTube to twitch to snapchat. You are remotely seeing something on a display. It's technically TV is it not?
madebysquares 10y ago
I've been hearing this targeted audience and advertising for several years. However for as long as I've been watching Hulu, YouTube etc I rarely see ads that interest me. I wish they used that data better.
shalmanese 10y ago
It's taken as a given that more targetability is always better for ads but lately, I've come to believe that lack of targeting ability can, in and of itself, be an asset. The more coarse the targeting, the more humans are able to reason about ad placement. If I see an tv ad on a program, I know that all the people in my region watching the same program are also guaranteed to see the ad. Whereas if I get an ad on Facebook, I have no idea who else might have seen the same ad. I've been mulling this over because Podcasts, by some weird quirk of technological path dependence, got locked early on into a state of extreme ad unsophistication. Despite, or maybe because of this, podcasts have some of the highest ad rates in the business. Take Mailchimp's sponsorship of Serial for example, that sponsorship itself became somewhat of a mild media sensation surrounding the discussion of the story. But that could only happen because of the impossibility of ad targeting in podcasts. Because of that, you knew everyone else listening to serial was hearing the exact same ad as you.

TV May Die Soon

70 points by __xjb__ 10y ago

meddlepal 10y ago

If Net Neutrality goes away TV will thrive. This battle is far from over.

randomdata 10y ago
TV may thrive again if they improve the content. The biggest hurdle network TV has right now is that people are leaving because there is nothing to watch.
- ams6110 10y ago
  i kind of feel the same way about Netflix and Amazon too. I've watched most of what I want to watch. Neflix has never been as good as when they had the Starz deal.
  - randomdata 10y ago
    I agree. I may even suggest that mainstream-geared media is fundamentally flawed, as it has to attract a wide audience, providing great appeal to nobody. We accepted it in the past due to not knowing better, but now that we have a taste of video content tailored to our very specific interests, where producers are happy to have an audience of 1,000 people, it's hard to go back.
- gozur88 10y ago
  It's the classic death spiral. Fewer viewers means less money from advertisers, which in turn means less money for content.
rz2k 10y ago
I think you are absolutely right, and it has a lot to do with what is classified as television. Increasingly, television broadcasts are packet based digital content that is carried like other tcp/ip traffic. With adoption of DOCSIS 3.1, which will increase bandwidth for internet communications by dropping spectrum on coaxial cable devoted exclusively to streaming digital video, the definition of television will be further muddied. Conceptually, why should I have to choose a television package from Comcast or Cox based on which one is operating the cable? It makes some sense if my cablebox is parsing a stream available to everyone on the line, but it doesn't make sense if the box is requesting a stream that has not been multicast. I suspect that this threat to their television business has a lot to do with attacks on net neutrality, and that there is a belief that it is a slippery slope from net neutrality to deciding that they shouldn't have something like a favored provider status for anything that is packet-based.
- twoodfin 10y ago
  You are dead on. The fight over net neutrality was always about video. Some of the early legislation proposed when the Democrats were running Congress was scarily (for the cable companies at least) close to forcing just the kind of "television unbundling" you describe. As you say, they're all packets in the end.
wand3r 10y ago
As an optimist, I hope the NN disappears as a policy and creates the catalyst to enforce it technologically instead. It's a hard problem to solve but I think the pieces are there.

dbcurtis 10y ago

It would be interesting to see some data on recent prices for TV station license transfers. The market value of AM radio station licenses has plummeted in recent years. I suspect the same is happening to TV stations, in particular the little independents that live off of syndicated feeds and Star Trek re-runs. (I've seen TV control rooms far, far, less luxurious than the station in Weird Al's movie "UHF"...)

codingdave 10y ago

"TV" has been undergoing changes for its entire history. Cable brought major changes. The ability to play movies at home changed things. Streaming did, too. And regulatory changes along the way had their impact. I also have to take anyone who talk about "4 networks" a bit less seriously because for a long time there were only 3, and Fox actually making a 4th was also a big deal when it came along. So, sure, if what you mean by "TV" is the original networks, yeah, that may be concluding at some point. But "TV" itself just continues its ongoing evolution.

cwyers 10y ago

AM radio hasn't died yet. Heck, books haven't died yet. New media doesn't always kill old media.

frik 10y ago
The following is NOT about USA: Some lobbying very hard in various countries to introduce digital radio. When you look up the implementation details, it would be pretty bad idea to stop analog radio. Now some countries already mandate that radio in new cars and also try to mandate that all new sold radio in those countries are digital radio. It's absurde as people listen less and less radio, and analog radio has a lot better coverage - even in bad signal quality you can actually hear something - something vital in emergency situations. Of course you cannot censor analog radio at all, pirate radio stations were common back then when things went wrong. And we already had a time when certin countries allowed just one type of radio device with just one radio channel.
- DiabloD3 10y ago
  The biggest issue is, even when you have clear signal conditions, even if you're dialed into a channel that is broadcasting HE-AACv2 (aka HE-ACC+ or eACC+) and your radio decodes it natively as HE-ACCv2... it's still a goddamned 128kbit or less stream. Arguably, this is worse quality than ye olde FM on average. I mean, I could get behind a transition if they were using Opus instead of a nearly decade old hack of an even older codec... but they're not. Thank God we're not making this mistake in the US, and digital radio in this form has been rejected: people instead are either adopting SiriusXM or phones+BT playing mixed online/offline content. TBH I'd rather knock down all the US radio towers, reclaim all of the AM and FM radio space, and deploy 802.16? 802.11ah? something and provide low bandwidth but freeish Internet.
  - CharlesW 10y ago
    > ... it's still a goddamned 128kbit or less stream. Arguably, this is worse quality than ye olde FM on average. I don't claim to be a "golden ears" or anything, but I find 64 kbps HE-AAC to offer better-than-FM quality. (HE-AACv2 benefits really only make sense at 48 kbps or lower.) Hydrogenaudio tests showed that a good HE-AAC encoder does just slightly (imperceptibly) worse than Opus at 64 kbps[1]. [1] http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm http://listening-test.coresv.net/results.htm

beatpanda 10y ago

There's a huge opportunity for the attentive. Rock and roll got started largely because the major broadcasters moved away from radio and into television, and as a result operating an FM radio station got crazy cheap, leaving lots of room for experimentation. I have had my fingers crossed for years that the same thing is going to happen to terrestrial TV.

maxerickson 10y ago
Have you seen Me TV? WGN? I think the physical costs are manageable already. I doubt good content will get dramatically cheaper any time soon.
Spooky23 10y ago
Unlikely. The telcos will pounce to get the spectrum.
RandomOpinion 10y ago
Hasn't that effectively already occurred in the form of YouTube? A bit of curation is really all it would take to form a virtual TV station.
tener 10y ago
Sorry to ruin your hopes: any free spectrum will be consumed by wireless data transmission systems.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  As one example, but a big one, that's the plan in the European Union. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-207_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-207_en.htm

nawitus 10y ago

One problem with the TV discourse is that it mixes together different meanings of "TV". One is the actual technology to broadcast video, second is the act of broadcasting video to consumers, and the third is the actual receiver, e.g. physical a television screen. The first one will surely die, and has already died for most(?) young people where I live. But that doesn't really matter much as content can be streamed using the internet.

majewsky 10y ago
Anecdote time: I'm nearly the only one in my group of friends who still has a TV, and it's become a tradition for us to gather once a week to watch the "heute-show" (a German copy of The Daily Show, but only broadcasted weekly) at my place, and maybe have some political discussions afterwards. So in this particular case, timeslotted broadcasting actually brings us together.

mnm1 10y ago

I searched the article for "Hulu" and got zero hits. I assume the author simply didn't do any research at all.

ascagnel_ 10y ago
That's interesting, since Hulu runs Nielsen tracking software. I'm not sure if it's included in DVR+3/+7 ratings, though.
- mnm1 10y ago
  I'm not sure either, but I do know it's included in the top four networks' and their advertisers' future plans for TV and that an article discussing said companies future without discussing Hulu is incomplete.

DiabloD3 10y ago

We keep getting "TV is dead/dying/will live forever" stories on HN. tl;dr of all of them is essentially: TV, as a non-time-shifted non-live broadcast medium, is dead: Netflix et al, Youtube, Torrent, and at the very least, DVRs, killed it; people watch non-live content how they want, when they want, frequently choosing to just "Netflix binge" it. TV, as a live broadcast medium (eg, emergency news), will never die in that sense: I can watch Presidential addresses via the White House's Youtube channel via Youtube's Live feature as well as many local OTA broadcast channels. TV is both dead and will live forever depending on what you call TV.

losteric 10y ago
News papers and radio stations still survive in their own niches, TV will be just fine.
devoply 10y ago
You can even claim that the same stuff was available via PPV at exorbitant prices, as in movies not the live stuff. Now it's available for nearly free. Yay capitalism!
- chicxulub 10y ago
  Blah, capitalism.
bogomipz 10y ago
And the article says as much: >"Traditional (linear) TV audiences are declining at a significant rate, and they are practically aged out of key demographics. Cable customers are also declining." Note its qualifying the statement with the word "linear."
- rhizome 10y ago
  So in other words, more and more people are using DVRs and subscription services?
cmelbye 10y ago

scarface74 10y ago

One thing that the article gets wrong is the difference between brand advertising and direct response. Consumer products goods will always be about brand awareness and not direct targeting. It's the difference between what Snapchat is trying to do and what FB is trying to do. Coca Cola advertising is never going to be about running an ad an expecting someone to go on a website and buy a Coke right then. Neither is anything sold by companies like P&G. Brand advertising is not about the level of targeting that FB is doing.

rmason 10y ago

Television isn't dying. Over the air TV though is on life support. Just like gas stations someday soon local TV stations will be ancient history.

Roedou 10y ago
What's the story with gas stations in the US? Are they dying out / being replaced by something else as well?
- wand3r 10y ago
  Observationally: No. If parent was referring to less vehicles due to advances in transportation technology and pattern optimizations...I think broadcast TV dies much sooner than gas stations.
- rdiddly 10y ago
  They're doing fine for now. Electric-car optimists think they'll be replaced by charging stations. Apocalyptic doomsters think they'll be replaced by a place to feed & water your horse (or by nothing at all). Both camps seem to agree petroleum fuels are a temporary thing.
  - joelwilliamson 10y ago
    The number of gas stations declined 25% from 1994 to 2013. I'd hardly call that doing fine. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/06/why_america_s_gas_stations_are_running_out_of_time.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/06/why...
- mgbmtl 10y ago
  In big cities, I think that between higher fuel efficiency and the small margins that stations make, it's not surprising to see the smaller stations close. (Anecdotally, in my neighbourhood, a few stations closed, our tiny neighbourhood/borough of 60k people had a dozen gas stations, now down to 5)

skrebbel 10y ago

> FANG is delivering actionable data to advertisers in ways that traditional broadcasters simply can’t. The "N" in that weird acronym stands for Netflix. The day they start selling my data to advertisers is the day I'm back to torrenting. I feel like the author is so ad-focused that she doesn't even see this: the whole article is about ads. Netflix is showing that you can make fantastic, super expensive content, even niche content, without advertising. To me that feels much more profound than "Youtube has more data about you than ABC so advertisers will prefer that".

hackuser 10y ago
Data about you is valuable. Netflix can sell it without displaying the ads itself. I'd be surprised if they aren't tracking users and monetizing that information, like seemingly every other business in the world. But maybe someone knows ...
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I thought Netflix had a whole bunch of product placement deals? There can be advertising without breaking out of the content.
  - philfrasty 10y ago
    Watched Sense8 (over here in Germany) for the last couple of days on NF. Every episode has a disclaimer at the beginning „This show contains product placements“. From first view: Ben & Jerrys, Pepsi (?), Sennheiser
- brendangregg 10y ago
  I can't provide an official response (I'm an engineer at Netflix), but I noticed to answer the question "How much data does Netflix sell to Third-Party Advertisers?", did have the response[1]: "Hey there, Cliff Edwards, director of corporate communications at Netflix. Wanted to point out that we don't sell ANY data to third-party advertisers. And we provide pretty good support for anyone who wants to learn about our tracking and how to opt out: https://www.netflix.com/cookies" https://www.netflix.com/cookies" That's in line with what I expect too. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2uffl9/how_much_data_does_netflix_sell_to_thirdparty/ https://www.reddit.com/r/netflix/comments/2uffl9/how_much_da...

gumby 10y ago

This is just an idea, not really even opinion piece, but has some good insight. I was interested that she coined the term FANG and not FANTA (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, youTube, Apple). I am a big fan of Apple but continue to be dumfounded by how tone-deaf they are about the Internet. It's as if they have Jim Sensenbrenner on their board.

Animats 10y ago

Here are the SF Bay Area's current TV broadcast stations: [1] High power stations get a channel for the entire area, while low-power stations share channels. The FCC has a computerized model that takes into consideration antenna height, power, frequency, and terrain to figure out what won't interfere. (There are a large number of low-power religious stations. For people thinking about repurposing "white space" in the TV bands, they're going to have to get rid of some of those Voice of God stations. One God Ministries alone has 17 stations licensed in the Bay Area.) There's more space available now for TV stations because the tuners for digital TV have much better adjacent channel rejection than analog TV tuners did. There used to be restrictions to prevent harmonic interference and such. That's mostly gone, and all the channel slots can be used. If you wanted to set up a broadcast TV station in San Francisco, you probably could. [1] http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/tvq?list=1&dist=100.000%20&dlat2=37&mlat2=45&slat2=35.571600&ns=N&dlon2=122&mlon2=26&slon2=14.612532&ew=W&size=9 http://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/tvq?list=1&dist=100.000%20...

taylodl 10y ago

The networks take away FANG's bite with live sports, which are about the only thing I care to watch anymore.

sumoboy 10y ago

TV is declining, just like newspaper empires. Streaming is expanding as it's own empire even though it smells and tastes like TV it's different. Google and Facebook kill with ads so they'll continue to drive "innovation" for eyeballs as again traditional TV attempts to stop the bleeding. Innovation is where newspapers failed. I'm streaming mlb right now and reading HN, TV can't offer that experience easily.

Namrog84 10y ago

As some have already stated. TV is the wrong word here. "Television or TV is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome (black-and-white), or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. " This sounds like everything from traditional broadcast TV to YouTube to twitch to snapchat. You are remotely seeing something on a display. It's technically TV is it not?

madebysquares 10y ago

I've been hearing this targeted audience and advertising for several years. However for as long as I've been watching Hulu, YouTube etc I rarely see ads that interest me. I wish they used that data better.

shalmanese 10y ago

It's taken as a given that more targetability is always better for ads but lately, I've come to believe that lack of targeting ability can, in and of itself, be an asset. The more coarse the targeting, the more humans are able to reason about ad placement. If I see an tv ad on a program, I know that all the people in my region watching the same program are also guaranteed to see the ad. Whereas if I get an ad on Facebook, I have no idea who else might have seen the same ad. I've been mulling this over because Podcasts, by some weird quirk of technological path dependence, got locked early on into a state of extreme ad unsophistication. Despite, or maybe because of this, podcasts have some of the highest ad rates in the business. Take Mailchimp's sponsorship of Serial for example, that sponsorship itself became somewhat of a mild media sensation surrounding the discussion of the story. But that could only happen because of the impossibility of ad targeting in podcasts. Because of that, you knew everyone else listening to serial was hearing the exact same ad as you.