9 ms·

This is all my opinion, I've never understood cable television. You are paying for someone to provide you with advertisements. Sure, you get a lot of channels

This is all my opinion, I've never understood cable television. You are paying for someone to provide you with advertisements. Sure, you get a lot of channels and content but how many channels does the average person watch and how often are you just turning on "something" to have on? I've never paid for cable but as soon as Netflix DVD delivery came along I was on board and haven't looked back. Going back to watching television with advertisements is akin to nails on a chalkboard now. Which is odd because I still use free Pandora and have no problems whatsoever with their advertising.

wvenable 9y ago
If you're paying for Internet, you're paying for someone to provide with you advertisements in exactly the same way. Cable is merely the delivery method -- the networks and stations themselves are providing the content separately and using advertising to fund it. If you pay for premium cable channels like HBO then you're actually contributing your money to the production of advertisement-free content.
- staplers 9y ago
  Except Cable is purely an entertainment-consumption medium. Whereas the internet provides tools and services vastly beyond entertainment including creation of content, goods, and services. The value-cost ratio is absurdly better on the internet.
  - wvenable 9y ago
    That's just progress. At the time cable was deployed, the value-cost ratio was quite a bit better. For many people the Internet is deployed to them on the very same cables that were originally laid just for television. A lot of people have cable because they've always had cable and now there's a generation of people coming up who've never had it.
- munk-a 9y ago
  It is (or was, I haven't checked recently) very difficult to actually just pay for HBO. I had wanted to get a subscription for a few different shows they offer and every way to get access to them involved paying for cable channel bundles. I assume cable companies are shoveling money at HBO as fast as they can manage as otherwise it'd be a wise idea for HBO to just begin offering ala carte access to their content and get oodles of free money.
  - crysin 9y ago
    If you're in the US there is HBO Now which is their cable-free subscription service. I believe the actual monthly fees are still being serviced by third parties though, e.g. I pay Apple 15 dollars a month for my HBO subscription, but I get all the content through HBOs website directly.
    - munk-a 9y ago
      Ah yes... if only the walled gardens weren't configured to see we Canadians as an entirely different sort of person. Sadly the HoBOGO is only available up here if you have a cable TV subscription that offers HBO.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    You can get HBO a la Carte through Amazon or even HBO itself.
flying_kangaroo 9y ago
If it helps you understand, originally cable tv was a way to pay for tv (as opposed to free OTA) that then had no ads, almost like how HBO operates today. Of course, that could only last for so long.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  Cable TV was originally a way for communities outside of broadcast OTA TV reception areas to receive TV signals with little signal-degradation. People paid only for the ability to receive channels - not for the channels themselves. Premium TV came later.
  - amyjess 9y ago
    Yes. Here's a little historical tidbit: if you have an older TV, you'll need to put your TV in CATV mode in order to watch cable. CATV stands for "community antenna television", referring to the practice of having one antenna to receive OTA TV and then using cable to distribute it throughout the community.
    - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
      Ahhh I thought it stood for "CAble TV".
  - ghaff 9y ago
    There was also basic cable fairly on. Things like CNN and AMC. When I bought a house in the late 1990s, I couldn’t receive any TV without cable.
malux85 9y ago
I agree - I was staying in a hotel a few weeks ago, and flicked the TV on. I never really thought about it, but it's probably the first time I've watched TV in about 5-8 years - and the number and frequency of ads was just painful. I couldn't understand who the heck would put up with that!
- fao_ 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure that this is (or should be) a classic example of boiled frog effect. Your brain is used to the ads so it tunes them out, the advert makers figure out (using the metric of "how many users complain about advert frequency") how to increase them so that users don't notice. Eventually you end up with a fifteen minute advert block every ten minutes, and you're wondering how it got to that level, but you're still invested in this-one-show-that-nobody-else-has, so you put up with it -- your brain tunes it out the rest of the time so you don't really notice it unless you've had a break from TV long enough. I think that the UK does the right thing. In legislature they mandate that you can have no more than 12 minutes of adverts per hour of television[1]. Apparently in 1980s America a similar agreement was ruled illegal[2]. Sometimes I wonder how the Americans can put up with American courts, given how obviously biased towards corporate interests they are. [1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8341764/TV-films-to-be-interrupted-by-12-minutes-of-adverts.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8341764/TV-fi... [2]: ""Many countries regulate the amount of advertising per hour, but a similar industry agreement in the U.S. was ruled illegal in the 1980s."", from: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-02-06/opinion/ct-perspec-0206-things-20110206_1_tv-commercials-tv-ad-10-second-spot http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-02-06/opinion/ct-per...
6DM 9y ago
It's the sheer volume of advertising, if you ask me. I remember once trying to sit through an old western flick with my grandpa. It felt like it took the entire day but in retrospect it probably was around 4.5 hrs to completion which is still an absurd amount of time. As a result I never paid for cable until it came bundled with the internet recently.
raverbashing 9y ago
It wasn't that bad, let's say, 20 years ago. Also it was one of the main sources of home entertainment.
- munk-a 9y ago
  It was indeed that bad, and 20 years ago there were less regulations about advertisement volume so a lot of the ads ran louder than normal programming to make sure the guy who went to go and get his popcorn could still hear about the wonderful effects of fakedrugalenta.
smacktoward 9y ago
> You are paying for someone to provide you with advertisements. As was the case with newspapers and magazines for hundreds of years, as well as more and more subscription-based sites today. The advertisements defray the cost of the thing you are paying for. If they weren't there, you'd have to pay much more for it.
- dougmany 9y ago
  Is it really much more though? Whenever I see a number for how much an advertiser pays per viewer, it is typically small.
  - froindt 9y ago
    My quick attempt. I'm sure there are better sources of this data. Let's say an average of 30 hours of consumption per week per person. [1] In a household of 4 people, that's 120 hours per week. "[Nielsen says the average commercial minutes per hour] was 16 minutes/8 seconds for cable network programming." [2] Assuming 30 second commercials, that's 32 commercials per hour, or 3,840 impressions per week. Across 30 days, that comes out to be 16,457 impressions. "$24.76 - The average cost of a thousand impressions for a 30-second commercial in broadcast prime time in 2014, down from $25.06 in 2013." [3] $24.76 per mille * 16.457 mille views/month/household = $407. That feels unreasonably high. If the CPM were $2, it would still translate to $40/month. [1] https://www.marketingcharts.com/featured-24817 https://www.marketingcharts.com/featured-24817 [2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/308248/shorter-duration-tv-commercials-on-the-rise.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/308248/shorte... [3] http://adage.com/article/news/costs-ad-prices-tv-mobile-billboards/297928/ http://adage.com/article/news/costs-ad-prices-tv-mobile-bill...
    - hobos_delight 9y ago
      30 hours per person per weeks seems absurdly high to me - that would be one 3 hour program every week-night, two (6 hours) on Saturday and three (9 hours) on Sunday. I would be really keen to see what some actual values are, and the breakdown by age group. I've recently moved into a new place and we haven't even wired up the TV arial, and even with a Netflix subscription, it's mainly for the kids shows - and even then we heavily restrict the amount of time they can watch TV. Consumption for my wife and I now is generally Netflix if they have a show we like, or Plex for specific shows we can't get on Netflix - even then this would top out at _maybe_ a couple of hours a week. Time on reddit/hn is a completely different story...
Feniks 9y ago
In Europe there is public television. They broadcast news and documentairies sans advertising. Commercial TV is trash.

wvenable 9y ago

If you're paying for Internet, you're paying for someone to provide with you advertisements in exactly the same way. Cable is merely the delivery method -- the networks and stations themselves are providing the content separately and using advertising to fund it. If you pay for premium cable channels like HBO then you're actually contributing your money to the production of advertisement-free content.

staplers 9y ago
Except Cable is purely an entertainment-consumption medium. Whereas the internet provides tools and services vastly beyond entertainment including creation of content, goods, and services. The value-cost ratio is absurdly better on the internet.
- wvenable 9y ago
  That's just progress. At the time cable was deployed, the value-cost ratio was quite a bit better. For many people the Internet is deployed to them on the very same cables that were originally laid just for television. A lot of people have cable because they've always had cable and now there's a generation of people coming up who've never had it.
munk-a 9y ago
It is (or was, I haven't checked recently) very difficult to actually just pay for HBO. I had wanted to get a subscription for a few different shows they offer and every way to get access to them involved paying for cable channel bundles. I assume cable companies are shoveling money at HBO as fast as they can manage as otherwise it'd be a wise idea for HBO to just begin offering ala carte access to their content and get oodles of free money.
- crysin 9y ago
  If you're in the US there is HBO Now which is their cable-free subscription service. I believe the actual monthly fees are still being serviced by third parties though, e.g. I pay Apple 15 dollars a month for my HBO subscription, but I get all the content through HBOs website directly.
  - munk-a 9y ago
    Ah yes... if only the walled gardens weren't configured to see we Canadians as an entirely different sort of person. Sadly the HoBOGO is only available up here if you have a cable TV subscription that offers HBO.
- sjg007 9y ago
  You can get HBO a la Carte through Amazon or even HBO itself.

flying_kangaroo 9y ago

If it helps you understand, originally cable tv was a way to pay for tv (as opposed to free OTA) that then had no ads, almost like how HBO operates today. Of course, that could only last for so long.

DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
Cable TV was originally a way for communities outside of broadcast OTA TV reception areas to receive TV signals with little signal-degradation. People paid only for the ability to receive channels - not for the channels themselves. Premium TV came later.
- amyjess 9y ago
  Yes. Here's a little historical tidbit: if you have an older TV, you'll need to put your TV in CATV mode in order to watch cable. CATV stands for "community antenna television", referring to the practice of having one antenna to receive OTA TV and then using cable to distribute it throughout the community.
  - DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
    Ahhh I thought it stood for "CAble TV".
- ghaff 9y ago
  There was also basic cable fairly on. Things like CNN and AMC. When I bought a house in the late 1990s, I couldn’t receive any TV without cable.

malux85 9y ago

I agree - I was staying in a hotel a few weeks ago, and flicked the TV on. I never really thought about it, but it's probably the first time I've watched TV in about 5-8 years - and the number and frequency of ads was just painful. I couldn't understand who the heck would put up with that!

fao_ 9y ago
I'm pretty sure that this is (or should be) a classic example of boiled frog effect. Your brain is used to the ads so it tunes them out, the advert makers figure out (using the metric of "how many users complain about advert frequency") how to increase them so that users don't notice. Eventually you end up with a fifteen minute advert block every ten minutes, and you're wondering how it got to that level, but you're still invested in this-one-show-that-nobody-else-has, so you put up with it -- your brain tunes it out the rest of the time so you don't really notice it unless you've had a break from TV long enough. I think that the UK does the right thing. In legislature they mandate that you can have no more than 12 minutes of adverts per hour of television[1]. Apparently in 1980s America a similar agreement was ruled illegal[2]. Sometimes I wonder how the Americans can put up with American courts, given how obviously biased towards corporate interests they are. [1]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8341764/TV-films-to-be-interrupted-by-12-minutes-of-adverts.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8341764/TV-fi... [2]: ""Many countries regulate the amount of advertising per hour, but a similar industry agreement in the U.S. was ruled illegal in the 1980s."", from: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-02-06/opinion/ct-perspec-0206-things-20110206_1_tv-commercials-tv-ad-10-second-spot http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-02-06/opinion/ct-per...

6DM 9y ago

It's the sheer volume of advertising, if you ask me. I remember once trying to sit through an old western flick with my grandpa. It felt like it took the entire day but in retrospect it probably was around 4.5 hrs to completion which is still an absurd amount of time. As a result I never paid for cable until it came bundled with the internet recently.

raverbashing 9y ago

It wasn't that bad, let's say, 20 years ago. Also it was one of the main sources of home entertainment.

munk-a 9y ago
It was indeed that bad, and 20 years ago there were less regulations about advertisement volume so a lot of the ads ran louder than normal programming to make sure the guy who went to go and get his popcorn could still hear about the wonderful effects of fakedrugalenta.

smacktoward 9y ago

> You are paying for someone to provide you with advertisements. As was the case with newspapers and magazines for hundreds of years, as well as more and more subscription-based sites today. The advertisements defray the cost of the thing you are paying for. If they weren't there, you'd have to pay much more for it.

dougmany 9y ago
Is it really much more though? Whenever I see a number for how much an advertiser pays per viewer, it is typically small.
- froindt 9y ago
  My quick attempt. I'm sure there are better sources of this data. Let's say an average of 30 hours of consumption per week per person. [1] In a household of 4 people, that's 120 hours per week. "[Nielsen says the average commercial minutes per hour] was 16 minutes/8 seconds for cable network programming." [2] Assuming 30 second commercials, that's 32 commercials per hour, or 3,840 impressions per week. Across 30 days, that comes out to be 16,457 impressions. "$24.76 - The average cost of a thousand impressions for a 30-second commercial in broadcast prime time in 2014, down from $25.06 in 2013." [3] $24.76 per mille * 16.457 mille views/month/household = $407. That feels unreasonably high. If the CPM were $2, it would still translate to $40/month. [1] https://www.marketingcharts.com/featured-24817 https://www.marketingcharts.com/featured-24817 [2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/308248/shorter-duration-tv-commercials-on-the-rise.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/308248/shorte... [3] http://adage.com/article/news/costs-ad-prices-tv-mobile-billboards/297928/ http://adage.com/article/news/costs-ad-prices-tv-mobile-bill...
  - hobos_delight 9y ago
    30 hours per person per weeks seems absurdly high to me - that would be one 3 hour program every week-night, two (6 hours) on Saturday and three (9 hours) on Sunday. I would be really keen to see what some actual values are, and the breakdown by age group. I've recently moved into a new place and we haven't even wired up the TV arial, and even with a Netflix subscription, it's mainly for the kids shows - and even then we heavily restrict the amount of time they can watch TV. Consumption for my wife and I now is generally Netflix if they have a show we like, or Plex for specific shows we can't get on Netflix - even then this would top out at _maybe_ a couple of hours a week. Time on reddit/hn is a completely different story...

Feniks 9y ago

In Europe there is public television. They broadcast news and documentairies sans advertising. Commercial TV is trash.