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Why TV Lost (2009)

50 points by zuhayeer 5y ago

krallja 5y ago
I bought a new TV about the time this article came out. I think I’ve watched maybe a dozen shows on it via the tuner. Every single other thing has been either optical media, gaming, or streaming. The replacement I bought this year will probably never have anything connected to its coax jack.
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: Why TV Lost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696 - March 2009 (183 comments) Why TV Lost (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010956 - Dec 2010 (24 comments)
- drc500free 5y ago
  Truly enjoying the "this is overblown" vs "this Justin.tv thing is about to steamroll them" comments.
Ensorceled 5y ago
Interesting the focus on piracy in this article. TV was losing it when their customers started needing a DVR to watch their favourite shows because of counter programming and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. Now everyone has an average of two of Netflix/Prime/etc. because it's just eliminating the DVR and all the headaches involved and just getting the shows you want when you want them. TV is still around and will be for a while yet, but it continues to fade.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  > 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. It's a feedback loop. Audiences increasingly switch to streaming, so companies are willing to pay less per a second of advertising. TV stations increase the amount of time dedicated to advertising to compensate, which drives more of the audience into streaming.
  - qnsi 5y ago
    You should really read some introduction to economics to get a good mental model of how those things work. Why wouldnt TV companies do this in the past when TV was in the prime? Just increase number of ads and get more money. Clearly there is some limit as to how many ads to show because I dont believe they want to decrease the viewership numbers
    - wvenable 5y ago
      If there are a limited number of ad spots, the scarcity makes those spots more expensive. And, as you said, the number of ads has a negative effect on viewership which would make those ad spots less valuable as well. That was past. Now that viewership is declining and alternative mass advertising opportunities are available what we're seeing is the death spiral. There's no natural scarcity making TV ad spots more valuable. Viewership is in decline. The only way to even maintain income levels is to increase the number of ads. If there is a formula on the perfect amount of ads, the inputs to that formula have changed.
    - scoopertrooper 5y ago
      I have an advanced degree in economics, but okay :) How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining? I'd say the more likely explanation is that there is a lag between audience loss and advertiser realisation of audience loss. TV stations manage to meet market growth expectations by exploiting this and pumping out overvalued ads to non-existent people. Over time, they've become increasingly reliant on this strategy to keep their heads above water as advertisers catch up to reality. It can't go on forever, so they've now belatedly started their own streaming services to try and keep up.
      - johncessna 5y ago
        > How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining? It seems possible to me that folks who are still watching tv are more accepting of ads, whereas the folks who aren't/weren't moved to something else.
- bartread 5y ago
  > counter programming and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. ^^^This. I basically can't tolerate watching anything on ITV, Sky, or other commercial TV in the UK nowadays, nor for well over a decade, due to the frequency and quantity of ads. I also strongly object to what I presume is audio compression applied to ads to make them louder than surrounding scheduled programming. And counter programming is an obnoxious practice. Let's face it: lots of people have always wanted to watch what they want when they want to. Lots of people don't want to arrange their lives around the TV schedule. Good riddance to it.
  - Kye 5y ago
    A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to normalize audio between what the studio distributes and what the advertiser distributes. Failure to fix something can be innocent or malicious: someone high up can simply not prioritize it, and no one could honestly say it's to serve advertisers without an admission. Some of it is innocent, some isn't. Laws are passed to regulate it, but they find ways past it.
    - Legion 5y ago
      > A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to normalize audio between what the studio distributes and what the advertiser distributes. Weird how this supposed lack of normalization never seems to result in overly quiet commercials...
      - a9h74j 5y ago
        Like hospital billing errors always being in favor of the hospital.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      They use psycho-acoustics. It's not actually louder, in the sense of carrying more acoustic energy overall; but the sound-engineer emphasises those parts that we perceive as "loud". Regulators are pwned, and refuse to act. Movie sound-engineers seem to have started doing the same. I really don't understand why annoying ads have't become extinct, in accordance with the Darwin principle. [Edit] And advertisers hire loud, shouty actors to present their ads; it's almost as if they were challenging us to change channel or stick in a DVD.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  > 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. Hmmm. That would be nice. I watched a one-hour show last night (with a 6-minute ad-break) that rolled titles at the 40-minute point. There followed a 10-minute ad-break, and 10 minutes of trailers. All of the ads were low-grade - hearing aids, wills and equity-release, and charity donation pitches.
  - iso1631 5y ago
    > I watched a one-hour show last night Why? In the 80s there wasn't much choice, but today you can watch pretty much whatever you want when you want with no adverts, no catering for the lowest common denominator, and at least in the UK TV viewing has dropped so much that it's no longer needed to be social at work the next day (in the 80s everyone cared who shot dirty den or whatever in eastenders, as pretty much half the country watched it. Not so now)
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      * I don't work (retired) * I was in the mood for a Twilight Zone episode * I wasn't in the mood for that when I scheduled my recordings. I normally only watch news bulletins live. I don't have a feed of $EVERYTHING; I have Freesat and a bunch of basic Sky channels, with catchup services such as iPlayer. I cancelled Netflix. I'd subscribe to a service that offered $EVERYTHING, but it doesn't exist.
      - iso1631 5y ago
        > bunch of basic Sky channels Apparently £276 a year, more than I pay for netflix, amazon, disney and spend on "other" things (like discovery on apple). And for that price you still get adverts forced down your throat. Amazing.
    - MiddleEndian 5y ago
      I've been rewatching random episodes of The Simpsons recently, and I have noticed that without ad breaks, the pacing is a bit off for a lot of episodes. The shows were designed so you had time to digest major plot points during the commercial breaks. Don't get me wrong I don't want to watch ads, but it's a strange and noticeable problem.
- efitz 5y ago
  You nailed it. From the footnotes in the article: “A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience.” The biggest problem, IMO, with copyright in the current age is that the copyright holders want to adopt business models premised on controlling me and my experience. I’m not reluctant to paying for content, but if you make the experience suck I will work around you.
  - verelo 5y ago
    This, 100% this, all the time, every day. Stop making buying your content so hard, impossible, or generally shit that it's easier to get illegally.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    This is a large part, from my observation at least, of the reason why Game of Thrones was so insanely pirated. If you can recall a few years prior another nerd sensation was sweeping the country (Lost) - but by the time GoT came around Netflix and other streaming services were really coming into prominence. HBO Go in that era refused to offer you a la carte access - instead requiring you to have an account with a major cable company to gain the privilege to pay for access. I think the contrast is pretty clear because now we've got a plethora of independent streaming services with their own costs (like Dropout and Nebula) that don't seem to be having trouble attracting customers - even if it's just for a single series or creator (i.e. Dimension 20). The ease of access is a key point for me. I am morally opposed to piracy under normal circumstances - but if you're levying a price that I need to pay with my time or sanity I'm going to table flip and go back to the dark side (or, more likely in the modern day, just not watch your crap since there's plenty of stuff out there).
    - heurisko 5y ago
      I agree. For the last series of GoT I bought a month pass from a streaming service in the UK--"Now TV" or something--to watch it. It was a reasonable price, so I think they were successful there. On the other hand, the last series was garbage.
- athenot 5y ago
  > and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV And now Instagram shows 1 ad every 3 posts/stories, which is getting closer to the ratio on TV.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    There's a reason I don't use instagram - but also a reason I am forever thankful to my pi-hole.
- a4isms 5y ago
  A bajillion years ago in HN time, Joel Spolsky wrote about the then-fashionable peer-to-peer frenzy, that everyone was getting Napster wrong: Nobody cared about peer-to-peer, everyone cared about: “You can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.” My n=1 anecdote: Soon thereafter, I was typing the name of a song into iTunes, buying it for CAD 1.29, and listening to it right away. I spent hundreds of dollars a year on the iTunes Music Store. It wasn’t peer-to-peer that some of us liked, it was making the experience as frictionless as possible. Rightsholders hate that, but they lose this argument every damn time. The winners in content are always those who make it easy. p.s. In the 1950s, TV was the disruptive low-friction experience. You could turn on the set and watch Lucy and Desi right away, without buying tickets, getting dressed, and going to a theatre!
  - thinkingkong 5y ago
    I think this is also what makes Amazon so succesful. Their primary product is convenience. Not “stuff”.
    - a4isms 5y ago
      With Prime, you can type the name of a product and get it right away.* ——— * For sufficiently next-day values of “right away.”
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
TV really seems to be in its twilight. When I happen to chance to watch it, I'm seeing basically the same 4 commercials and they are all geared toward elderly populations. No one I know has plain broadcast TV on in their home anymore. I wonder at what point will it become unprofitable to operate a TV station. In my location at least half of the OTA channels are religious broadcasting stations. Will non-profits take them over completely at some point?
- gruez 5y ago
  > Will non-profits take them over completely at some point? Can a given market really support multiple PBS-like stations?
  - setpatchaddress 5y ago
    The religious channels are not PBS. "support" is not relevant if the goal is propaganda (religious or political).
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Generally they can barely support one. Also while everyone thinks of Nova and Masterpiece Theater a lot of local PBS content is cheap talking head shows or at least it was historically.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  HBO just announced a new season of "Sex and the City" on HBO Max. It occurred to me that although I've never watched an episode of the original series all the way through, I know all the characters names and their basic story arcs - the show was just part of popular culture when it was new and you couldn't help but hear about it. There's nothing like that now. My kids couldn't even tell you what shows are on - I doubt they could even name the broadcast stations.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    Really? I don’t have that impression—part of popular culture. I tried to watch it once and lasted about four minutes. I’ve heard people refer to it a few times, but know nothing about the characters nor anything else. Contrast the Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends, for examples (the last also dreck that I never watched, but recognize as part of popular culture).
julienchastang 5y ago
TV did not lose (just the opposite). We live in a Golden Era of an incredible abundance of great TV (including a large selection of foreign shows which was never possible before). Moreover it is a better business model and content is higher quality (in general). Also, I still enjoy antenna TV because of high def broadcasts which involve less image compression.
- leephillips 5y ago
  Digital broadcast used to be the best image source available to watch on your TV. As you say, far better than cable or streaming because of the lack of compression. Is that still the case?
- mpalmer 5y ago
  Higher quality in general? No way. There's way, way too many streaming shows that aim for the middle. Tons of reality/competition shows, tons of superhero shows where dialog and plot take a backseat to looking cool. TONS of garbage animation and children's shows. From where I sit, it's way easier today than 5 years ago to find something new to watch, but way harder to find something great.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    It's anecdotal but as a kid we had japanese anime on tv. There was a surprising amount of quality (considering the tech used for production). And some animes like saint seiya, have .. to my half educated ears.. world class OST [0]. Others like Space Adventure Cobra also featured very fancy jazz funk. It's somehow unbelievable that at the time, companies would allocate money for such features. Maybe it was the spirit of the era.. a kind of spiritual drive in the air (new technology, promises of the post war future, rising tv market) making people doing their best. And I can't help thinking that this energy is gone. It's done, known, technology made everything available so there's no real drive needed to try setting up a show and broadcasting (an few iphones could do).
    - nindalf 5y ago
kfarr 5y ago
> The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. But they're still dragging their heels. True, it took them about a decade for legacy TV networks to finally start offering first-party streaming apps (Peacock, CBS All Access, etc.)
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
The question of what TV actually is seems rather central to the issue of whether it "lost" or not, and seems unanswered in TFA. Is it a broadcast medium with a fairly small number of networks? Is it a non-broadcast medium with only 1 or 2 service providers in a given neighborhood/area? Is it a particular format for story-telling, and if so, what is that format? I am guessing there are other fundamental "what is it?" style questions that I'm not thinking of here.
authed 5y ago
We are heading back toward the "TV" era... Where speech is controlled/censored 98% of the time. Take for example /r/politics where 10-25% of daily front page posts are talking against Trump and anyone going against their ideology will get banned.
- krapp 5y ago
  >We are heading back toward the "TV" era... Where speech is controlled/censored 98% of the time. That's an odd assertion to make when you're talking about Reddit, where anyone can fork a subreddit at any time, or even the web where anyone can launch a website for free or without much expense that can be seen by almost anyone on Earth, or even Donald Trump whose every word and deed still makes headline news and who is currently launching his own multimedia platform. Speaking of which, Trump and his followers have to be the least censored "censored" political group in history. They're constantly shouting from every social media platform and every comment section about how censored they are. It's ridiculous.
  - nverno 5y ago
    Trump is banned from at least Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube- so it's not like Trump supporters have zero basis for their complaints. I think these platforms are generally considered mainstream, so being forced out of them can be pretty impactful censorship. How many platforms have Biden, Obama, or any previous president been banned from? This censorship of major political players is unprecedented in US history afaik.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I presume Trump supporters are all about keeping the government out of private business matters, so they do seem to have zero basis for their complaints.
    - krapp 5y ago
      Trump wasn't banned for his political beliefs, he was banned for violating the TOS. Trump's supporters conveniently forget that he was allowed to run rampant across social media for four years and given far more leniency than anyone else, and of course they're pushing the narrative that his ban was part of some vast leftist conspiracy, but the reason he was banned and Biden, Obama and others weren't is because Trump was raving like a lunatic and seemed like he was about to start a civil war, and Biden and Obama have done nothing of the sort. And what has been the impact been of Trump's ban? He's still perfectly capable of getting his message out. His followers are perfectly willing to move to non-mainstream sites like Parler and Gab, and they're still all over the mainstream sites to boot. He's still the overwhelming favorite for the GOP in 2024, and he's starting a social media platform and possibly a streaming TV deal. Trump simply not being President anymore has had a bigger chilling effect than being deplatformed. As always, the right's hatred of the left has led them to overplay their hand. It's obvious to everyone that neither Trump nor his supporters are oppressed, suppressed or censored in any meaningful way, and certainly not to the degree that they claim.
brightball 5y ago
TiVo took the commercial value out of everything except live programming (mostly sports). Netflix took what was left. It’s the same reason the TV money start pouring into college football contracts around that time.
iso1631 5y ago
Back in 1988, at the height of TV viewing, these scene on Star Trek TNG seemed massively futuristic. Imagine TV ending by 2040 DATA: Is there something wrong? SONNY: Wrong? Only that your computer here fixed about the best martini I have ever had. I just might get to like this place. Let's see if the Braves are on. How do you turn on this teevee? RIKER: TV? SONNY: Yeah, the boob tube. I'd like to see how the Braves are doing after all this time. Probably still finding ways to lose. DATA: I believe he means television, sir. That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year two thousand forty. Yet here we are, 24 years on, with just 18 years to go to that 2040 date, and it looks like it may well work out about right - as in TV as a passive viewing habit (rather than actively seeking out an episode of the Mandalorian or Tom Scott or what-have-you)
- rhacker 5y ago
  I sometimes wonder if someone from the future really did come back to write some of those shows. Look what was predicted for 2024 from DS9 in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp... "Sanctuary Districts" sounds like "Sanctuary City" - very bizarre naming. Not to mention the homelessness situation has started exploding lately.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    2063 is gonna be a crazy year ;)
- rhino369 5y ago
  Seems like Millenials and GenXer still watch a lot of TV, its just on a steaming service instead of cable, and much of it is pretty damn passive. Not sure how GenZ engages, I hear more twitch/youtube/tiktok, but I think they still view a lot of TV shows too.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    > much of it is pretty damn passive. How could it possibly be more passive than "I just leave my TV on Fox News/MSNBC/CNN until I'm outraged about the right things"?
bloat 5y ago
When did TV lose? In the UK the most popular show on a non-traditional channel is in tenth place behind BBC and ITV shows. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/30/squid-game-no-threat-to-traditional-british-tv-hits-finds-barb https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/30/squid-g...

Why TV Lost (2009)

50 points by zuhayeer 5y ago

I bought a new TV about the time this article came out. I think I’ve watched maybe a dozen shows on it via the tuner. Every single other thing has been either optical media, gaming, or streaming. The replacement I bought this year will probably never have anything connected to its coax jack.

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: Why TV Lost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696 - March 2009 (183 comments) Why TV Lost (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010956 - Dec 2010 (24 comments)

drc500free 5y ago
Truly enjoying the "this is overblown" vs "this Justin.tv thing is about to steamroll them" comments.

Ensorceled 5y ago

Interesting the focus on piracy in this article. TV was losing it when their customers started needing a DVR to watch their favourite shows because of counter programming and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. Now everyone has an average of two of Netflix/Prime/etc. because it's just eliminating the DVR and all the headaches involved and just getting the shows you want when you want them. TV is still around and will be for a while yet, but it continues to fade.

scoopertrooper 5y ago
> 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. It's a feedback loop. Audiences increasingly switch to streaming, so companies are willing to pay less per a second of advertising. TV stations increase the amount of time dedicated to advertising to compensate, which drives more of the audience into streaming.
- qnsi 5y ago
  You should really read some introduction to economics to get a good mental model of how those things work. Why wouldnt TV companies do this in the past when TV was in the prime? Just increase number of ads and get more money. Clearly there is some limit as to how many ads to show because I dont believe they want to decrease the viewership numbers
  - wvenable 5y ago
    If there are a limited number of ad spots, the scarcity makes those spots more expensive. And, as you said, the number of ads has a negative effect on viewership which would make those ad spots less valuable as well. That was past. Now that viewership is declining and alternative mass advertising opportunities are available what we're seeing is the death spiral. There's no natural scarcity making TV ad spots more valuable. Viewership is in decline. The only way to even maintain income levels is to increase the number of ads. If there is a formula on the perfect amount of ads, the inputs to that formula have changed.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    I have an advanced degree in economics, but okay :) How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining? I'd say the more likely explanation is that there is a lag between audience loss and advertiser realisation of audience loss. TV stations manage to meet market growth expectations by exploiting this and pumping out overvalued ads to non-existent people. Over time, they've become increasingly reliant on this strategy to keep their heads above water as advertisers catch up to reality. It can't go on forever, so they've now belatedly started their own streaming services to try and keep up.
    - johncessna 5y ago
      > How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining? It seems possible to me that folks who are still watching tv are more accepting of ads, whereas the folks who aren't/weren't moved to something else.
bartread 5y ago
> counter programming and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. ^^^This. I basically can't tolerate watching anything on ITV, Sky, or other commercial TV in the UK nowadays, nor for well over a decade, due to the frequency and quantity of ads. I also strongly object to what I presume is audio compression applied to ads to make them louder than surrounding scheduled programming. And counter programming is an obnoxious practice. Let's face it: lots of people have always wanted to watch what they want when they want to. Lots of people don't want to arrange their lives around the TV schedule. Good riddance to it.
- Kye 5y ago
  A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to normalize audio between what the studio distributes and what the advertiser distributes. Failure to fix something can be innocent or malicious: someone high up can simply not prioritize it, and no one could honestly say it's to serve advertisers without an admission. Some of it is innocent, some isn't. Laws are passed to regulate it, but they find ways past it.
  - Legion 5y ago
    > A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to normalize audio between what the studio distributes and what the advertiser distributes. Weird how this supposed lack of normalization never seems to result in overly quiet commercials...
    - a9h74j 5y ago
      Like hospital billing errors always being in favor of the hospital.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    They use psycho-acoustics. It's not actually louder, in the sense of carrying more acoustic energy overall; but the sound-engineer emphasises those parts that we perceive as "loud". Regulators are pwned, and refuse to act. Movie sound-engineers seem to have started doing the same. I really don't understand why annoying ads have't become extinct, in accordance with the Darwin principle. [Edit] And advertisers hire loud, shouty actors to present their ads; it's almost as if they were challenging us to change channel or stick in a DVD.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. Hmmm. That would be nice. I watched a one-hour show last night (with a 6-minute ad-break) that rolled titles at the 40-minute point. There followed a 10-minute ad-break, and 10 minutes of trailers. All of the ads were low-grade - hearing aids, wills and equity-release, and charity donation pitches.
- iso1631 5y ago
  > I watched a one-hour show last night Why? In the 80s there wasn't much choice, but today you can watch pretty much whatever you want when you want with no adverts, no catering for the lowest common denominator, and at least in the UK TV viewing has dropped so much that it's no longer needed to be social at work the next day (in the 80s everyone cared who shot dirty den or whatever in eastenders, as pretty much half the country watched it. Not so now)
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    * I don't work (retired) * I was in the mood for a Twilight Zone episode * I wasn't in the mood for that when I scheduled my recordings. I normally only watch news bulletins live. I don't have a feed of $EVERYTHING; I have Freesat and a bunch of basic Sky channels, with catchup services such as iPlayer. I cancelled Netflix. I'd subscribe to a service that offered $EVERYTHING, but it doesn't exist.
    - iso1631 5y ago
      > bunch of basic Sky channels Apparently £276 a year, more than I pay for netflix, amazon, disney and spend on "other" things (like discovery on apple). And for that price you still get adverts forced down your throat. Amazing.
  - MiddleEndian 5y ago
    I've been rewatching random episodes of The Simpsons recently, and I have noticed that without ad breaks, the pacing is a bit off for a lot of episodes. The shows were designed so you had time to digest major plot points during the commercial breaks. Don't get me wrong I don't want to watch ads, but it's a strange and noticeable problem.
efitz 5y ago
You nailed it. From the footnotes in the article: “A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience.” The biggest problem, IMO, with copyright in the current age is that the copyright holders want to adopt business models premised on controlling me and my experience. I’m not reluctant to paying for content, but if you make the experience suck I will work around you.
- verelo 5y ago
  This, 100% this, all the time, every day. Stop making buying your content so hard, impossible, or generally shit that it's easier to get illegally.
- munk-a 5y ago
  This is a large part, from my observation at least, of the reason why Game of Thrones was so insanely pirated. If you can recall a few years prior another nerd sensation was sweeping the country (Lost) - but by the time GoT came around Netflix and other streaming services were really coming into prominence. HBO Go in that era refused to offer you a la carte access - instead requiring you to have an account with a major cable company to gain the privilege to pay for access. I think the contrast is pretty clear because now we've got a plethora of independent streaming services with their own costs (like Dropout and Nebula) that don't seem to be having trouble attracting customers - even if it's just for a single series or creator (i.e. Dimension 20). The ease of access is a key point for me. I am morally opposed to piracy under normal circumstances - but if you're levying a price that I need to pay with my time or sanity I'm going to table flip and go back to the dark side (or, more likely in the modern day, just not watch your crap since there's plenty of stuff out there).
  - heurisko 5y ago
    I agree. For the last series of GoT I bought a month pass from a streaming service in the UK--"Now TV" or something--to watch it. It was a reasonable price, so I think they were successful there. On the other hand, the last series was garbage.
athenot 5y ago
> and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV And now Instagram shows 1 ad every 3 posts/stories, which is getting closer to the ratio on TV.
- munk-a 5y ago
  There's a reason I don't use instagram - but also a reason I am forever thankful to my pi-hole.
a4isms 5y ago
A bajillion years ago in HN time, Joel Spolsky wrote about the then-fashionable peer-to-peer frenzy, that everyone was getting Napster wrong: Nobody cared about peer-to-peer, everyone cared about: “You can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.” My n=1 anecdote: Soon thereafter, I was typing the name of a song into iTunes, buying it for CAD 1.29, and listening to it right away. I spent hundreds of dollars a year on the iTunes Music Store. It wasn’t peer-to-peer that some of us liked, it was making the experience as frictionless as possible. Rightsholders hate that, but they lose this argument every damn time. The winners in content are always those who make it easy. p.s. In the 1950s, TV was the disruptive low-friction experience. You could turn on the set and watch Lucy and Desi right away, without buying tickets, getting dressed, and going to a theatre!
- thinkingkong 5y ago
  I think this is also what makes Amazon so succesful. Their primary product is convenience. Not “stuff”.
  - a4isms 5y ago
    With Prime, you can type the name of a product and get it right away.* ——— * For sufficiently next-day values of “right away.”

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

TV really seems to be in its twilight. When I happen to chance to watch it, I'm seeing basically the same 4 commercials and they are all geared toward elderly populations. No one I know has plain broadcast TV on in their home anymore. I wonder at what point will it become unprofitable to operate a TV station. In my location at least half of the OTA channels are religious broadcasting stations. Will non-profits take them over completely at some point?

gruez 5y ago
> Will non-profits take them over completely at some point? Can a given market really support multiple PBS-like stations?
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  The religious channels are not PBS. "support" is not relevant if the goal is propaganda (religious or political).
- ghaff 5y ago
  Generally they can barely support one. Also while everyone thinks of Nova and Masterpiece Theater a lot of local PBS content is cheap talking head shows or at least it was historically.
commandlinefan 5y ago
HBO just announced a new season of "Sex and the City" on HBO Max. It occurred to me that although I've never watched an episode of the original series all the way through, I know all the characters names and their basic story arcs - the show was just part of popular culture when it was new and you couldn't help but hear about it. There's nothing like that now. My kids couldn't even tell you what shows are on - I doubt they could even name the broadcast stations.
- leephillips 5y ago
  Really? I don’t have that impression—part of popular culture. I tried to watch it once and lasted about four minutes. I’ve heard people refer to it a few times, but know nothing about the characters nor anything else. Contrast the Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends, for examples (the last also dreck that I never watched, but recognize as part of popular culture).

julienchastang 5y ago

TV did not lose (just the opposite). We live in a Golden Era of an incredible abundance of great TV (including a large selection of foreign shows which was never possible before). Moreover it is a better business model and content is higher quality (in general). Also, I still enjoy antenna TV because of high def broadcasts which involve less image compression.

leephillips 5y ago
Digital broadcast used to be the best image source available to watch on your TV. As you say, far better than cable or streaming because of the lack of compression. Is that still the case?
mpalmer 5y ago
Higher quality in general? No way. There's way, way too many streaming shows that aim for the middle. Tons of reality/competition shows, tons of superhero shows where dialog and plot take a backseat to looking cool. TONS of garbage animation and children's shows. From where I sit, it's way easier today than 5 years ago to find something new to watch, but way harder to find something great.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  It's anecdotal but as a kid we had japanese anime on tv. There was a surprising amount of quality (considering the tech used for production). And some animes like saint seiya, have .. to my half educated ears.. world class OST [0]. Others like Space Adventure Cobra also featured very fancy jazz funk. It's somehow unbelievable that at the time, companies would allocate money for such features. Maybe it was the spirit of the era.. a kind of spiritual drive in the air (new technology, promises of the post war future, rising tv market) making people doing their best. And I can't help thinking that this energy is gone. It's done, known, technology made everything available so there's no real drive needed to try setting up a show and broadcasting (an few iphones could do).
  - nindalf 5y ago

kfarr 5y ago

> The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. But they're still dragging their heels. True, it took them about a decade for legacy TV networks to finally start offering first-party streaming apps (Peacock, CBS All Access, etc.)

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

The question of what TV actually is seems rather central to the issue of whether it "lost" or not, and seems unanswered in TFA. Is it a broadcast medium with a fairly small number of networks? Is it a non-broadcast medium with only 1 or 2 service providers in a given neighborhood/area? Is it a particular format for story-telling, and if so, what is that format? I am guessing there are other fundamental "what is it?" style questions that I'm not thinking of here.

authed 5y ago

We are heading back toward the "TV" era... Where speech is controlled/censored 98% of the time. Take for example /r/politics where 10-25% of daily front page posts are talking against Trump and anyone going against their ideology will get banned.

krapp 5y ago
>We are heading back toward the "TV" era... Where speech is controlled/censored 98% of the time. That's an odd assertion to make when you're talking about Reddit, where anyone can fork a subreddit at any time, or even the web where anyone can launch a website for free or without much expense that can be seen by almost anyone on Earth, or even Donald Trump whose every word and deed still makes headline news and who is currently launching his own multimedia platform. Speaking of which, Trump and his followers have to be the least censored "censored" political group in history. They're constantly shouting from every social media platform and every comment section about how censored they are. It's ridiculous.
- nverno 5y ago
  Trump is banned from at least Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube- so it's not like Trump supporters have zero basis for their complaints. I think these platforms are generally considered mainstream, so being forced out of them can be pretty impactful censorship. How many platforms have Biden, Obama, or any previous president been banned from? This censorship of major political players is unprecedented in US history afaik.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I presume Trump supporters are all about keeping the government out of private business matters, so they do seem to have zero basis for their complaints.
  - krapp 5y ago
    Trump wasn't banned for his political beliefs, he was banned for violating the TOS. Trump's supporters conveniently forget that he was allowed to run rampant across social media for four years and given far more leniency than anyone else, and of course they're pushing the narrative that his ban was part of some vast leftist conspiracy, but the reason he was banned and Biden, Obama and others weren't is because Trump was raving like a lunatic and seemed like he was about to start a civil war, and Biden and Obama have done nothing of the sort. And what has been the impact been of Trump's ban? He's still perfectly capable of getting his message out. His followers are perfectly willing to move to non-mainstream sites like Parler and Gab, and they're still all over the mainstream sites to boot. He's still the overwhelming favorite for the GOP in 2024, and he's starting a social media platform and possibly a streaming TV deal. Trump simply not being President anymore has had a bigger chilling effect than being deplatformed. As always, the right's hatred of the left has led them to overplay their hand. It's obvious to everyone that neither Trump nor his supporters are oppressed, suppressed or censored in any meaningful way, and certainly not to the degree that they claim.

brightball 5y ago

TiVo took the commercial value out of everything except live programming (mostly sports). Netflix took what was left. It’s the same reason the TV money start pouring into college football contracts around that time.

iso1631 5y ago

Back in 1988, at the height of TV viewing, these scene on Star Trek TNG seemed massively futuristic. Imagine TV ending by 2040 DATA: Is there something wrong? SONNY: Wrong? Only that your computer here fixed about the best martini I have ever had. I just might get to like this place. Let's see if the Braves are on. How do you turn on this teevee? RIKER: TV? SONNY: Yeah, the boob tube. I'd like to see how the Braves are doing after all this time. Probably still finding ways to lose. DATA: I believe he means television, sir. That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year two thousand forty. Yet here we are, 24 years on, with just 18 years to go to that 2040 date, and it looks like it may well work out about right - as in TV as a passive viewing habit (rather than actively seeking out an episode of the Mandalorian or Tom Scott or what-have-you)

rhacker 5y ago
I sometimes wonder if someone from the future really did come back to write some of those shows. Look what was predicted for 2024 from DS9 in 1995: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp... "Sanctuary Districts" sounds like "Sanctuary City" - very bizarre naming. Not to mention the homelessness situation has started exploding lately.
- Izkata 5y ago
  2063 is gonna be a crazy year ;)
rhino369 5y ago
Seems like Millenials and GenXer still watch a lot of TV, its just on a steaming service instead of cable, and much of it is pretty damn passive. Not sure how GenZ engages, I hear more twitch/youtube/tiktok, but I think they still view a lot of TV shows too.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  > much of it is pretty damn passive. How could it possibly be more passive than "I just leave my TV on Fox News/MSNBC/CNN until I'm outraged about the right things"?

bloat 5y ago

When did TV lose? In the UK the most popular show on a non-traditional channel is in tenth place behind BBC and ITV shows. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/30/squid-game-no-threat-to-traditional-british-tv-hits-finds-barb https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/30/squid-g...