4 ms·

How about this. Tonight, when I want to watch a program on BBC Iplayer, I need to switch on the kindle fire stick, wait for it to load, find the iplayer app and

How about this. Tonight, when I want to watch a program on BBC Iplayer, I need to switch on the kindle fire stick, wait for it to load, find the iplayer app and wait for 30 seconds until it loads, search for a channel, with each character I type taking 0.5 seconds to show up on the screen (no kidding), select the channel and wait 10 seconds for it to buffer. When I was a kid, I just used to press one button on the front of the tv and it was on in less than a second. Not sure what my point is really but there’s something not quite right with this situation. Technology has improved choice but made the experience awful.

anderspitman 6y ago
The cool thing is that while it's not easy, there's probably never been an easier time to make good stuff. There's a lot of opportunity out there to make better experiences.
kenjackson 6y ago
You can't just turn on the TV? It seems like all of those other steps allow you more flexibility to do a bunch of stuff you probably couldn't do as a kid, such as watch BBC from any country in the world, or watch something from the BBC that came on earlier, or to pause the BBC so you can get some chips from the pantry. Every once in a while, Netflix will take like 15s to load. But before I cuss out my XBox One, I do try to remember that as a kid I was happy downloading one picture off a 300BPS modem in like 10 minutes from a BBS (which sometimes took 30 minutes to finally get into) back when I was kid.
dmix 6y ago
My android box running pirated streaming and torrent services (or even IPTV occasionally when I want to watch “TV”) seems to work 100x better than your proprietary tech. Plus it runs Prime and Netflix just fine... My $50 Chromecast is still the best thing around for watching movies or streams off my computer. Kodi works but it takes set up times which I don’t like investing. Sounds like you either just have low end tech or bad gov run software services. And I’m not running anything fancy just your typical Android SoC with a decent remote with a keyboard on the back, which I bought for <$100 max off Amazon.
- dave_sid 6y ago
  Think your missing the point. Your average person doesn’t have your setup. They have mine.
gerdesj 6y ago
The first telly I remember was b/w and had three channels and belonged to a neighbour. Provided the dog hadn't recently wazzed on the rubber plant that supported the aerial, in which case ITV was optional and then we only had BBC One and Two. However, old school CRT screens could handle pans and zooms that my modern LG thing can only dream of. Then again the thing I'm watching now is comparatively huge and "waffer theeeen". A ~50" CRT would stick out from the wall about four feet and weigh enough that I'd be using some of the more robust Civil Engineering things I learned at college to fix it to the wall. When I was a child it took a while to tune a TV by hand, channel by channel. Remember portables with the little aerials on the end of a wire? Then finding out that to watch the rugby today involved perching the TV on a chair near a window and the aerial held by long suffering (someone) holding it at a strange angle near the ceiling. You missed half the match faffing around. My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. I recall getting an Epsom FX80 dot matrix printer connected to our C-64 was quite traumatic and involved getting a Centronics (parallel) interface card made up and stuff. I still have the C-64 and it now has a USB interface. Now I press the home button and pick a service on my TV. OK on my TV that isn't one of my RPi driven monsters that uses the MythTV backend. I have an Octo-LNB on my sat dish ... (Sorry about this (twitch) but it's iPlayer and you were a child, not a kid)
- dave_sid 6y ago
  Nah I was a kid and we had a colour tv. Your setup sounds very impressive but you’re not the average viewer, and it’s the average viewer that has an old fire stick like mine that takes 30s to load the iplayer app.
  - iainmerrick 6y ago
    I assume you’re in the UK if you’re using iPlayer. Why not just use Freeview? It’s not quite as fast as analogue TV because it has to acquire and decode the digital signal, but apart from that it’s just as convenient, the quality is better and there are many more channels.
- bscphil 6y ago
  > My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. Not to be too much of a Linux-using stereotype, but it really does seem like the things that have been getting better are those things that are made (usually for free) for users for the benefit of themselves and other users, and not by profit-seeking corporations as closed-source software. The few exceptions to that rule are those areas that are heavily dependent on technological improvements, e.g. music production, gaming, media editing. But that's just because there are still huge profit-wins to be had just by improving the quality of what the user receives. There's no reason to think wins like that won't dry up.
wvenable 6y ago
I can walk over to my TV, it takes a second or two to start up. Maybe another second or two to open an app. And then I can watch any one of tens of thousands of shows. Yes, when I was kid the TV turned on almost instantly but then I was stuck watching whatever minimal content was broadcasted. Can't even pause it! I have the same argument with Jonathan Blow's talk -- he talks about how complex things are now compared to the past but the past was so much less capable. Yes, you can write an OS in 3 weeks as long as it doesn't do very much.
- andredz 6y ago
  It might be helpful to consider the paradox of choice; although I'm not completely sure that it is correct or what its real implications are. Also, this topic made me think a bit of this letter: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_2 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    Prof. Dan Gilbert's studies on Happiness seems to support the paradox of choice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU If we don't have choice, we manufacture happiness. Something we predict will be somehow worse than "real" happiness, but studies show it's not worse. If we have choice, we predict we will be more happy, but studies show we aren't.
bigiain 6y ago
> When I was a kid, I just used to press one button on the front of the tv and it was on ... ... in a little while, after all the vacuum tubes had heated up. (Yeah, 'm old...)
cortesoft 6y ago
> When I was a kid, I just used to press one button on the front of the tv and it was on in less than a second. Yeah, but if you turned it on late at night there was nothing being broadcast
- dave_sid 6y ago
  There’s something nice about that idea.
ryandrake 6y ago
I have to wait many seconds for the "entertainment system" computer in my car to boot in order to simply hear the radio. And when I tune to a different station, it's a touchscreen with UP and DN buttons that I have to tap on to tune ±0.2 MHz, and it takes takes maybe 750ms to lock on to the station. Think about how absurd this is! Compared to my first car made in the early 80s where the radio started as soon as you turned the key, and you had an analog dial that panned through the spectrum instantly with the sound continuously playing.

anderspitman 6y ago

The cool thing is that while it's not easy, there's probably never been an easier time to make good stuff. There's a lot of opportunity out there to make better experiences.

kenjackson 6y ago

You can't just turn on the TV? It seems like all of those other steps allow you more flexibility to do a bunch of stuff you probably couldn't do as a kid, such as watch BBC from any country in the world, or watch something from the BBC that came on earlier, or to pause the BBC so you can get some chips from the pantry. Every once in a while, Netflix will take like 15s to load. But before I cuss out my XBox One, I do try to remember that as a kid I was happy downloading one picture off a 300BPS modem in like 10 minutes from a BBS (which sometimes took 30 minutes to finally get into) back when I was kid.

dmix 6y ago

My android box running pirated streaming and torrent services (or even IPTV occasionally when I want to watch “TV”) seems to work 100x better than your proprietary tech. Plus it runs Prime and Netflix just fine... My $50 Chromecast is still the best thing around for watching movies or streams off my computer. Kodi works but it takes set up times which I don’t like investing. Sounds like you either just have low end tech or bad gov run software services. And I’m not running anything fancy just your typical Android SoC with a decent remote with a keyboard on the back, which I bought for <$100 max off Amazon.

dave_sid 6y ago
Think your missing the point. Your average person doesn’t have your setup. They have mine.

gerdesj 6y ago

The first telly I remember was b/w and had three channels and belonged to a neighbour. Provided the dog hadn't recently wazzed on the rubber plant that supported the aerial, in which case ITV was optional and then we only had BBC One and Two. However, old school CRT screens could handle pans and zooms that my modern LG thing can only dream of. Then again the thing I'm watching now is comparatively huge and "waffer theeeen". A ~50" CRT would stick out from the wall about four feet and weigh enough that I'd be using some of the more robust Civil Engineering things I learned at college to fix it to the wall. When I was a child it took a while to tune a TV by hand, channel by channel. Remember portables with the little aerials on the end of a wire? Then finding out that to watch the rugby today involved perching the TV on a chair near a window and the aerial held by long suffering (someone) holding it at a strange angle near the ceiling. You missed half the match faffing around. My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. I recall getting an Epsom FX80 dot matrix printer connected to our C-64 was quite traumatic and involved getting a Centronics (parallel) interface card made up and stuff. I still have the C-64 and it now has a USB interface. Now I press the home button and pick a service on my TV. OK on my TV that isn't one of my RPi driven monsters that uses the MythTV backend. I have an Octo-LNB on my sat dish ... (Sorry about this (twitch) but it's iPlayer and you were a child, not a kid)

dave_sid 6y ago
Nah I was a kid and we had a colour tv. Your setup sounds very impressive but you’re not the average viewer, and it’s the average viewer that has an old fire stick like mine that takes 30s to load the iplayer app.
- iainmerrick 6y ago
  I assume you’re in the UK if you’re using iPlayer. Why not just use Freeview? It’s not quite as fast as analogue TV because it has to acquire and decode the digital signal, but apart from that it’s just as convenient, the quality is better and there are many more channels.
bscphil 6y ago
> My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. Not to be too much of a Linux-using stereotype, but it really does seem like the things that have been getting better are those things that are made (usually for free) for users for the benefit of themselves and other users, and not by profit-seeking corporations as closed-source software. The few exceptions to that rule are those areas that are heavily dependent on technological improvements, e.g. music production, gaming, media editing. But that's just because there are still huge profit-wins to be had just by improving the quality of what the user receives. There's no reason to think wins like that won't dry up.

wvenable 6y ago

I can walk over to my TV, it takes a second or two to start up. Maybe another second or two to open an app. And then I can watch any one of tens of thousands of shows. Yes, when I was kid the TV turned on almost instantly but then I was stuck watching whatever minimal content was broadcasted. Can't even pause it! I have the same argument with Jonathan Blow's talk -- he talks about how complex things are now compared to the past but the past was so much less capable. Yes, you can write an OS in 3 weeks as long as it doesn't do very much.

andredz 6y ago
It might be helpful to consider the paradox of choice; although I'm not completely sure that it is correct or what its real implications are. Also, this topic made me think a bit of this letter: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_2 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  Prof. Dan Gilbert's studies on Happiness seems to support the paradox of choice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU If we don't have choice, we manufacture happiness. Something we predict will be somehow worse than "real" happiness, but studies show it's not worse. If we have choice, we predict we will be more happy, but studies show we aren't.

bigiain 6y ago

> When I was a kid, I just used to press one button on the front of the tv and it was on ... ... in a little while, after all the vacuum tubes had heated up. (Yeah, 'm old...)

cortesoft 6y ago

> When I was a kid, I just used to press one button on the front of the tv and it was on in less than a second. Yeah, but if you turned it on late at night there was nothing being broadcast

dave_sid 6y ago
There’s something nice about that idea.

ryandrake 6y ago

I have to wait many seconds for the "entertainment system" computer in my car to boot in order to simply hear the radio. And when I tune to a different station, it's a touchscreen with UP and DN buttons that I have to tap on to tune ±0.2 MHz, and it takes takes maybe 750ms to lock on to the station. Think about how absurd this is! Compared to my first car made in the early 80s where the radio started as soon as you turned the key, and you had an analog dial that panned through the spectrum instantly with the sound continuously playing.