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> I think linear TV will still be going in 10 years time, but probably not 30 I think you're probably right, but I'm one of the few millennials who will miss i

> I think linear TV will still be going in 10 years time, but probably not 30 I think you're probably right, but I'm one of the few millennials who will miss it when it's gone. I still like being able to turn on the news or some dumb show as background noise, it's an old habit from my boomer parent upbringing. I'm a bit surprised I haven't really met anyone else around my age with a nostalgic attachment to linear TV. I stream things that I actually want to watch deliberately, but as a replacement for linear TV it's just not the same. It's a lot more effort (paradox of choice, beyond just the UI itself necessitating a lot more "clicks") and there's something nice about knowing that people around the country/world are watching the same thing at the same time as me. I'd like to say it could be a startup opportunity, but I think I might be the only one who cares. Not to mention, currently an antenna will get you much better picture quality than many/most streaming services (definitely true for the BBC News stream available on iPlayer -- that looks like crap to me).

MattPalmer1086 5y ago
I agree with all of that. Streaming is about choice, but linear TV is about an event and/or serendipity. I have a lot of movies on Plex, but when we browse them it's rare for us to select one. On the other hand, we often watch those movies when they're on TV. "We have that on Plex" has become a household joke.
- iso1210 5y ago
  Netflix have a "watch something" button. I've never used it, but I assume it's there to match the serendipity aspect. Amazon I think have a "watch party" feature, but that's not the same as 10 million people all watching Mr Blobby get gunged. There seemed to be a small amount of cultural "togetherness" with the guy doing the PE (Joe Someone?) during lockdown, not sure as I didn't watch it (too busy working). But yes, events (sport, moon landings, etc) are great on linear tv. I suspect that even after most of the spectrum gets removed, there will remain a BBC linear TV channel for events for some time, and most households will have a working antenna for a long time to come.
  - asdff 5y ago
    The problem with the watch something button is that its not truly doing what linear TV did. Linear TV was still programming. You settled on a channel that you knew was going to have decent enough stuff on at the time. You hit "watch something" on netflix and it might pull, best case, stuff from all over my watch history with no particular rhyme or reason, when really what I want is to throw on adult swim for an aqua teen hunger force marathon interspersed with similar content like that. The big advantage of some of these older networks was that I trusted their curation. If a station like MTV saw that Jackass was a popular show, they would give me a four hour Jackass marathon sometime this week and I'd probably have it on. I don't trust netflix's curation on the other hand. I'm honestly on the hunt for some live streams of 2000s era cable channels and watching that.
    - QuercusMax 5y ago
      That seems like an easy problem to solve, if somebody at Netflix wanted to. Make it easy for people to create their own curated playlists / streams, and then you can just turn on "Jimbob23's Stupid Funny Stuff" or "Best of Late Night Cartoons" or something.
      - throwaway287391 5y ago
        I doubt Netflix could (easily) make a product that replicates linear network TV (as much as linear TV itself is kind of a shitty product, which I say as a defender of it here). Here's why: (1) Based on what I've seen from spending many hours scrolling through their available content (or what the algorithm will show me of it, anyway!), I'm not actually sure Netflix could put that content together into a 24/7 program that resembles a linear TV channel, even given how repetitive and often shitty linear TV content is. I could definitely be wrong about this, but I think Netflix lacks both the dynamic breadth and thematic depth of content. On the "dynamic breadth": Linear TV is at least 95% repeats, but if you watch it one day and then watch it again 6 months later, the content in your latter watch will usually be totally disjoint from the first watch. Meanwhile whenever I go on Netflix I swear like 75% of what I'm shown is things they were showing me 2+ years ago. Maybe they could still assemble their content into a 24/7/365 schedule that mimics linear TV programming, but I wouldn't bet on that. (2) A linear TV channel isn't just a bunch of shows concatenated one right after another. At a minimum it has interstitials between shows/segments telling you what's next and what's on later. These are what gives the channel its personality/brand, and I'd assume it takes at least a few full-time staff per 24/7 channel. Think Discovery Channel's "Shark Week". It was mostly a bunch of repeats of shows they already had that happened to be shark-related, but the interstitials for it marketed it into a national event. And, dare I say it...linear TV often has ads. Ads can be a nice part of TV (especially for shitty/campy TV) -- they're when you go to the bathroom, get a snack, and/or chat about what you just watched. Certainly not a required part of linear TV (HBO and BBC are good linear TV channels and don't have ads), but hard for Netflix in particular to recreate if they were aiming to replicate the full linear TV experience.
- function_seven 5y ago
  I don't think I've ever sat down and watched The Shawshank Redeption or Goodfellas. Like, made plans to watch either of those. But I've seen both movies probably a dozen times at this point. It's always been a matter of me stumbling upon it while channel surfing (1990-2005) or "guide scrolling" (2005-2018), landing there to kill a few minutes, and watching through to the end. A couple of times I've gotten lucky and caught the movie at the start, so I can actually say I've seen these movies. But I've seen way more of the middle and end parts than the beginning parts.
  - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
    Recognise that feeling when you watch a movie for the fourth time and go "I don't think I've seen the start of this before"!

MattPalmer1086 5y ago

I agree with all of that. Streaming is about choice, but linear TV is about an event and/or serendipity. I have a lot of movies on Plex, but when we browse them it's rare for us to select one. On the other hand, we often watch those movies when they're on TV. "We have that on Plex" has become a household joke.

iso1210 5y ago
Netflix have a "watch something" button. I've never used it, but I assume it's there to match the serendipity aspect. Amazon I think have a "watch party" feature, but that's not the same as 10 million people all watching Mr Blobby get gunged. There seemed to be a small amount of cultural "togetherness" with the guy doing the PE (Joe Someone?) during lockdown, not sure as I didn't watch it (too busy working). But yes, events (sport, moon landings, etc) are great on linear tv. I suspect that even after most of the spectrum gets removed, there will remain a BBC linear TV channel for events for some time, and most households will have a working antenna for a long time to come.
- asdff 5y ago
  The problem with the watch something button is that its not truly doing what linear TV did. Linear TV was still programming. You settled on a channel that you knew was going to have decent enough stuff on at the time. You hit "watch something" on netflix and it might pull, best case, stuff from all over my watch history with no particular rhyme or reason, when really what I want is to throw on adult swim for an aqua teen hunger force marathon interspersed with similar content like that. The big advantage of some of these older networks was that I trusted their curation. If a station like MTV saw that Jackass was a popular show, they would give me a four hour Jackass marathon sometime this week and I'd probably have it on. I don't trust netflix's curation on the other hand. I'm honestly on the hunt for some live streams of 2000s era cable channels and watching that.
  - QuercusMax 5y ago
    That seems like an easy problem to solve, if somebody at Netflix wanted to. Make it easy for people to create their own curated playlists / streams, and then you can just turn on "Jimbob23's Stupid Funny Stuff" or "Best of Late Night Cartoons" or something.
    - throwaway287391 5y ago
      I doubt Netflix could (easily) make a product that replicates linear network TV (as much as linear TV itself is kind of a shitty product, which I say as a defender of it here). Here's why: (1) Based on what I've seen from spending many hours scrolling through their available content (or what the algorithm will show me of it, anyway!), I'm not actually sure Netflix could put that content together into a 24/7 program that resembles a linear TV channel, even given how repetitive and often shitty linear TV content is. I could definitely be wrong about this, but I think Netflix lacks both the dynamic breadth and thematic depth of content. On the "dynamic breadth": Linear TV is at least 95% repeats, but if you watch it one day and then watch it again 6 months later, the content in your latter watch will usually be totally disjoint from the first watch. Meanwhile whenever I go on Netflix I swear like 75% of what I'm shown is things they were showing me 2+ years ago. Maybe they could still assemble their content into a 24/7/365 schedule that mimics linear TV programming, but I wouldn't bet on that. (2) A linear TV channel isn't just a bunch of shows concatenated one right after another. At a minimum it has interstitials between shows/segments telling you what's next and what's on later. These are what gives the channel its personality/brand, and I'd assume it takes at least a few full-time staff per 24/7 channel. Think Discovery Channel's "Shark Week". It was mostly a bunch of repeats of shows they already had that happened to be shark-related, but the interstitials for it marketed it into a national event. And, dare I say it...linear TV often has ads. Ads can be a nice part of TV (especially for shitty/campy TV) -- they're when you go to the bathroom, get a snack, and/or chat about what you just watched. Certainly not a required part of linear TV (HBO and BBC are good linear TV channels and don't have ads), but hard for Netflix in particular to recreate if they were aiming to replicate the full linear TV experience.
function_seven 5y ago
I don't think I've ever sat down and watched The Shawshank Redeption or Goodfellas. Like, made plans to watch either of those. But I've seen both movies probably a dozen times at this point. It's always been a matter of me stumbling upon it while channel surfing (1990-2005) or "guide scrolling" (2005-2018), landing there to kill a few minutes, and watching through to the end. A couple of times I've gotten lucky and caught the movie at the start, so I can actually say I've seen these movies. But I've seen way more of the middle and end parts than the beginning parts.
- MattPalmer1086 5y ago
  Recognise that feeling when you watch a movie for the fourth time and go "I don't think I've seen the start of this before"!