7 ms·

Interesting analysis. I find it interesting that so many people spend so much time watching tv in the first place. Growing up, I was one of those people but ab

Interesting analysis. I find it interesting that so many people spend so much time watching tv in the first place. Growing up, I was one of those people but about a decade ago I lost interest in pretty much anything on television. There are certain shows that I will watch on occasion that get me hooked, but I usually struggle to find anything that is actually worth my time and end up just turning the tv off after surfing the streaming options for 10 minutes. It boggles my mind when I hear things like “golden age” of content. Sure there is a ton of content, but it’s all so vapid.

gniv 4y ago
I used to feel the same way. I also kept the cable subscription way too long and not really watching anything, but was reluctant to pay for online streaming services. Then one day we just decided to cut cable and get Netflix to try it out. I remember enjoying Jane The Virgin, The Good Place, and a few other shows they had. Then The Algorithm decided to suggest Mr. Sunshine, a Korean drama. I have now watched 100+ kdramas on various services. Netflix has a particularly rich catalog. I'm not saying you'll like kdramas but you might be surprised of what is available. It was a revelation to me that there are entire "worlds" (for lack of a better word) out there that are so interesting and rich and of which I knew virtually nothing, in this case the Korean culture and their movie/drama output.
ethanbond 4y ago
I think there's so much content that even with a very low hit rate, there's more than enough to entertain yourself to death. For example, the 18 hour Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns is itself enough to burn a month or so of TV time.
- alexilliamson 4y ago
  +1 for Vietnam. And Jazz. And The West. There is something about starting a Ken Burns series that is super relaxing, and releases the pressure to find the "perfect thing" to watch for the next 10-20 hours. Vietnam is particularly amazing. Shout out to the Trent Reznor soundtrack too.
  - slfnflctd 4y ago
    The West is pretty depressing, though, as it's mostly about the horrific treatment of the indigenous people of North America. I've been putting off the Vietnam one for similar reasons. Not exactly what I think of as relaxing. Jazz and Country Music are definitely more digestible, I finished both and was glad I did. Baseball is also actually pretty chill & enjoyable, even for someone who never had more than a passing interest in the sport.
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
I don't watch stuff unless it has ended and is reccomended by someone who watches shows I generally enjoy. Here's my pitch for the golden age of TV, though most of these are from a few years back. Most on HBO. The Wire The Sopranos Generation Kill The Deuce Treme Show me a Hero Luck The Expanse Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field) Mad Men
- loudmax 4y ago
  Obviously any such list is subjective, but I have are a few strong contenders for inclusion. Breaking Bad Narcos Battlestar Galactica And some weaker contenders: Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, Crash and Burn
  - f0e4c2f7 4y ago
    I've never heard of crash and burn I'll check it out! Waiting on stranger things to end I enjoyed Breaking Bad, Narcos, Battlestar, and some of the game of thrones seasons. If you liked Narcos you might also like ZeroZeroZero. It's a miniseries on Amazon with really high production value.
  - cm2012 4y ago
    And I think Better Call Saul is even better than Breaking Bad
    - mywittyname 4y ago
      You are not alone.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    So, I see this and think "ooh, BG, I'd watch that again". Then I think, how do I find it, will I need a new subscription, it's probably not even available in my geographical area ... or I could probably go to a Torrent site and be watching it in 5 minutes (the limitation being the speed of my internet connection). As copyright is system granted by the demos I'd love to force federation by creating a 'most-favoured nation'-type deal where if you offer content to one delivery company you have to make it available to all (maybe after a 1 year exclusivity period) for the same price. Under such a regime everyone gets paid but artificial monopolies are restricted (such monopolies don't help the demos so why allow copyright to be used to create them??). The proliferation of content provider apps is getting silly and we should mould copyright to serve the people.
danielbln 4y ago
Under all that muck, you aren't seeing the nuggets. A great example is Severance which came out just this year (Apple+) and it's a masterpiece, from cinematography to high concept to acting. We live in a golden age because there is something for everyone, but that also means there is a lot of trash. Luckily, there are also more gems available now than ever before.
- nradov 4y ago
  Sure there's good content, but I'm not going to commit to yet another monthly fee. If there was a way to buy a season of a particular show for a one-time fee then I might do that. Amazon offers that option for some shows.
CamelCaseName 4y ago
My belief is that, like any media, there is a massive backlog of good content. When you get through the part of the backlog you enjoy, you have to either wait for content you enjoy to come out (slow!) or explore less enjoyable (to you) content. Back in high school, I felt "behind" in my cultural wisdom, so I spent an entire summer watching a huge list of TV shows and movies. Now, shows I truly enjoy are few and far between, because I've seen so much of the good content in my favorite genres already.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  My belief is that when I am 85 and barely functioning physically, I will have ample time to catch up on the "good content". I hear The Wire is/was a good show. We'll see....
  - 8note 4y ago
    There's one challenge with that. Your eyes might not work very well when you're 85
CapmCrackaWaka 4y ago
Agreed, I never watch TV unless it's, weirdly enough, a social setting. My wife and I watch TV together all the time, we have shows that we like to enjoy together and talk about. My roommates and I would watch TV together all the time in college, and every now and then there will be a show that I'll go to my friends houses to watch (game of thrones). But now that I think about it, I don't think I've watched a TV show by myself in over 20 years.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
I haven't "watched television" in over 20 years. At the same time, the internet (YouTube to a large degree) has crept in to steal away my time. I am thankful though that YouTube sucked so bad for so long because I spent a lot of time with my kids when they were young, reading to them, biking with them, taking them on road trips. Cutting the cord was the idea when my first daughter was born - to have the kids grow up without television (we would put on over-the-air PBS kid's shows when they were young but it was pretty much only hotels stays when they would see Sponge Bob or whatever, ha ha).
- fullstop 4y ago
  I'm in the same boat, I cut the cord in 2008 and truly feel that my kids had a better experience as youths. Having cable tv in a hotel was a huge deal for them, although they didn't really understand commercials.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Ha ha, yeah my kids were shocked by the repetition and onslaught of commercials. "How does anyone watch this?" they asked. Yeah.
    - joebob42 4y ago
      Strangely my reaction was the opposite. I didn't really have tv, and I LOVED commercials, I would even put on the paid programming channels if left alone.
8fingerlouie 4y ago
I've never been into "flow tv", and about 2 decades ago i simply stopped watching anything but the news, and that only for 30-60 minutes per day, and shortly after that i simply read the news on the internet and completely stopped watching "normal" tv. Since then, i've only had streaming services, and my consumption is somewhere around 3-5 45 minute episodes per week. I have watched maybe 4 normal length movies since i had kids 13 years ago, and zero "extended length" (3 hours'ish) movies. Recently though, i find myself to be even more picky. These days i still watch 3-5 episodes per week, but my viewing is usually done late friday and saturday evening, and the rest of the week i generally prefer a good book instead. In April alone, i've watched 5 x 45 minute episodes in total, and read 3 books of 800 pages or more, so perhaps i'm coming full circle :)
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
I only use Netflix and Prime, and both feel really stale to me. It's all "content" - good to very good production values designed to fill a gap and appeal to a demographic. But very repetitive and production line, with no passion projects, nothing too arty or quirky, nothing outside of the box, no surprises. Some of it is quite watchable, but none of it is exciting or fresh. It's all some combination of stock soapy characters and themes in stock genre settings, usually with some comedy/sex/violence/horror added for stickiness. Netflix could easily throw some money at graduate film makers and say 'Make something no one has seen before.' That might or might not help retention, but it's hard to shake the feeling Netflix are deliberately aiming for the middle of the bell curve as creative policy, and missing opportunities to lead instead of trying to play it safe.
- 10729287 4y ago
  I guess this is the cons of being such a data oriented company. It requires guts to think beyond ROI when you have so much infos about your users and their habits.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Data oriented optimization strategies tend to result in local maximums. Jumping across the solution space from a local maximum to the global maximum requires a visionary leader, and some luck.
- motogpjimbo 4y ago
  Throwing money at graduate filmmakers and telling them to follow their passions would all but guarantee a catalogue full of $CURRENT_DAY political messaging, which would be poison for subscriber retention.
  - 8organicbits 4y ago
    Dont throw all the money there, just some to have some unique, quirky, passionate, fresh content. Surely people can skip titles they don't like.
  - 4y ago
MivLives 4y ago
During quarantine I switched to mostly movies. They require more singular focus (it's harder to watch a movie while doing other things), don't really have the binging problem (2 hour and done instead of just continually extensions of 45 minutes), and are generally higher quality. I've seen some very good (Memories, Son of the White Mare), some very bad (I went through a Bakshi phase), and overall decided I prefer this to watching yet another sitcom or graphic novel adaptation on tv.
- mackrevinack 4y ago
  movies can also better adapt to be a bit shorter or longer depending on whether the story calls for it. something i notice myself thinking after i finish most tv shows i watch is: "that really could have been shorter". it might be some parts of an episode could have been trimmed down or in some cases even multiple episodes of a season. i don't think this is exactly surprising either considering the rigid schedule of most tv shows to fit a story into 45 minutes slot and a set number of episodes per season
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
I'm the opposite of you. From age 20 to about age 45, I did not watch TV at all. Part of that was because I grew up in the UK, and the experience I had with the BBC (and a bit of Channel 4 and very occasionally ITV) made US TV just look stupid to me. Endless stupid ads, laugh tracks, completely unrealistic characters, dumb plots, and more endless stupid ads. Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet! On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu. I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.
stack_framer 4y ago
This is exactly how I feel. Even after years of this, I'm still amazed at how much is available, and how little of it I actually want to watch.

gniv 4y ago

I used to feel the same way. I also kept the cable subscription way too long and not really watching anything, but was reluctant to pay for online streaming services. Then one day we just decided to cut cable and get Netflix to try it out. I remember enjoying Jane The Virgin, The Good Place, and a few other shows they had. Then The Algorithm decided to suggest Mr. Sunshine, a Korean drama. I have now watched 100+ kdramas on various services. Netflix has a particularly rich catalog. I'm not saying you'll like kdramas but you might be surprised of what is available. It was a revelation to me that there are entire "worlds" (for lack of a better word) out there that are so interesting and rich and of which I knew virtually nothing, in this case the Korean culture and their movie/drama output.

ethanbond 4y ago

I think there's so much content that even with a very low hit rate, there's more than enough to entertain yourself to death. For example, the 18 hour Vietnam War documentary by Ken Burns is itself enough to burn a month or so of TV time.

alexilliamson 4y ago
+1 for Vietnam. And Jazz. And The West. There is something about starting a Ken Burns series that is super relaxing, and releases the pressure to find the "perfect thing" to watch for the next 10-20 hours. Vietnam is particularly amazing. Shout out to the Trent Reznor soundtrack too.
- slfnflctd 4y ago
  The West is pretty depressing, though, as it's mostly about the horrific treatment of the indigenous people of North America. I've been putting off the Vietnam one for similar reasons. Not exactly what I think of as relaxing. Jazz and Country Music are definitely more digestible, I finished both and was glad I did. Baseball is also actually pretty chill & enjoyable, even for someone who never had more than a passing interest in the sport.

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

I don't watch stuff unless it has ended and is reccomended by someone who watches shows I generally enjoy. Here's my pitch for the golden age of TV, though most of these are from a few years back. Most on HBO. The Wire The Sopranos Generation Kill The Deuce Treme Show me a Hero Luck The Expanse Sillicon Valley (not actually that funny but like a documentary of our field) Mad Men

loudmax 4y ago
Obviously any such list is subjective, but I have are a few strong contenders for inclusion. Breaking Bad Narcos Battlestar Galactica And some weaker contenders: Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, Crash and Burn
- f0e4c2f7 4y ago
  I've never heard of crash and burn I'll check it out! Waiting on stranger things to end I enjoyed Breaking Bad, Narcos, Battlestar, and some of the game of thrones seasons. If you liked Narcos you might also like ZeroZeroZero. It's a miniseries on Amazon with really high production value.
- cm2012 4y ago
  And I think Better Call Saul is even better than Breaking Bad
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    You are not alone.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  So, I see this and think "ooh, BG, I'd watch that again". Then I think, how do I find it, will I need a new subscription, it's probably not even available in my geographical area ... or I could probably go to a Torrent site and be watching it in 5 minutes (the limitation being the speed of my internet connection). As copyright is system granted by the demos I'd love to force federation by creating a 'most-favoured nation'-type deal where if you offer content to one delivery company you have to make it available to all (maybe after a 1 year exclusivity period) for the same price. Under such a regime everyone gets paid but artificial monopolies are restricted (such monopolies don't help the demos so why allow copyright to be used to create them??). The proliferation of content provider apps is getting silly and we should mould copyright to serve the people.

danielbln 4y ago

Under all that muck, you aren't seeing the nuggets. A great example is Severance which came out just this year (Apple+) and it's a masterpiece, from cinematography to high concept to acting. We live in a golden age because there is something for everyone, but that also means there is a lot of trash. Luckily, there are also more gems available now than ever before.

nradov 4y ago
Sure there's good content, but I'm not going to commit to yet another monthly fee. If there was a way to buy a season of a particular show for a one-time fee then I might do that. Amazon offers that option for some shows.

CamelCaseName 4y ago

My belief is that, like any media, there is a massive backlog of good content. When you get through the part of the backlog you enjoy, you have to either wait for content you enjoy to come out (slow!) or explore less enjoyable (to you) content. Back in high school, I felt "behind" in my cultural wisdom, so I spent an entire summer watching a huge list of TV shows and movies. Now, shows I truly enjoy are few and far between, because I've seen so much of the good content in my favorite genres already.

JKCalhoun 4y ago
My belief is that when I am 85 and barely functioning physically, I will have ample time to catch up on the "good content". I hear The Wire is/was a good show. We'll see....
- 8note 4y ago
  There's one challenge with that. Your eyes might not work very well when you're 85

CapmCrackaWaka 4y ago

Agreed, I never watch TV unless it's, weirdly enough, a social setting. My wife and I watch TV together all the time, we have shows that we like to enjoy together and talk about. My roommates and I would watch TV together all the time in college, and every now and then there will be a show that I'll go to my friends houses to watch (game of thrones). But now that I think about it, I don't think I've watched a TV show by myself in over 20 years.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

I haven't "watched television" in over 20 years. At the same time, the internet (YouTube to a large degree) has crept in to steal away my time. I am thankful though that YouTube sucked so bad for so long because I spent a lot of time with my kids when they were young, reading to them, biking with them, taking them on road trips. Cutting the cord was the idea when my first daughter was born - to have the kids grow up without television (we would put on over-the-air PBS kid's shows when they were young but it was pretty much only hotels stays when they would see Sponge Bob or whatever, ha ha).

fullstop 4y ago
I'm in the same boat, I cut the cord in 2008 and truly feel that my kids had a better experience as youths. Having cable tv in a hotel was a huge deal for them, although they didn't really understand commercials.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Ha ha, yeah my kids were shocked by the repetition and onslaught of commercials. "How does anyone watch this?" they asked. Yeah.
  - joebob42 4y ago
    Strangely my reaction was the opposite. I didn't really have tv, and I LOVED commercials, I would even put on the paid programming channels if left alone.

8fingerlouie 4y ago

I've never been into "flow tv", and about 2 decades ago i simply stopped watching anything but the news, and that only for 30-60 minutes per day, and shortly after that i simply read the news on the internet and completely stopped watching "normal" tv. Since then, i've only had streaming services, and my consumption is somewhere around 3-5 45 minute episodes per week. I have watched maybe 4 normal length movies since i had kids 13 years ago, and zero "extended length" (3 hours'ish) movies. Recently though, i find myself to be even more picky. These days i still watch 3-5 episodes per week, but my viewing is usually done late friday and saturday evening, and the rest of the week i generally prefer a good book instead. In April alone, i've watched 5 x 45 minute episodes in total, and read 3 books of 800 pages or more, so perhaps i'm coming full circle :)

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

I only use Netflix and Prime, and both feel really stale to me. It's all "content" - good to very good production values designed to fill a gap and appeal to a demographic. But very repetitive and production line, with no passion projects, nothing too arty or quirky, nothing outside of the box, no surprises. Some of it is quite watchable, but none of it is exciting or fresh. It's all some combination of stock soapy characters and themes in stock genre settings, usually with some comedy/sex/violence/horror added for stickiness. Netflix could easily throw some money at graduate film makers and say 'Make something no one has seen before.' That might or might not help retention, but it's hard to shake the feeling Netflix are deliberately aiming for the middle of the bell curve as creative policy, and missing opportunities to lead instead of trying to play it safe.

10729287 4y ago
I guess this is the cons of being such a data oriented company. It requires guts to think beyond ROI when you have so much infos about your users and their habits.
- nradov 4y ago
  Data oriented optimization strategies tend to result in local maximums. Jumping across the solution space from a local maximum to the global maximum requires a visionary leader, and some luck.
motogpjimbo 4y ago
Throwing money at graduate filmmakers and telling them to follow their passions would all but guarantee a catalogue full of $CURRENT_DAY political messaging, which would be poison for subscriber retention.
- 8organicbits 4y ago
  Dont throw all the money there, just some to have some unique, quirky, passionate, fresh content. Surely people can skip titles they don't like.
- 4y ago

MivLives 4y ago

During quarantine I switched to mostly movies. They require more singular focus (it's harder to watch a movie while doing other things), don't really have the binging problem (2 hour and done instead of just continually extensions of 45 minutes), and are generally higher quality. I've seen some very good (Memories, Son of the White Mare), some very bad (I went through a Bakshi phase), and overall decided I prefer this to watching yet another sitcom or graphic novel adaptation on tv.

mackrevinack 4y ago
movies can also better adapt to be a bit shorter or longer depending on whether the story calls for it. something i notice myself thinking after i finish most tv shows i watch is: "that really could have been shorter". it might be some parts of an episode could have been trimmed down or in some cases even multiple episodes of a season. i don't think this is exactly surprising either considering the rigid schedule of most tv shows to fit a story into 45 minutes slot and a set number of episodes per season

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

I'm the opposite of you. From age 20 to about age 45, I did not watch TV at all. Part of that was because I grew up in the UK, and the experience I had with the BBC (and a bit of Channel 4 and very occasionally ITV) made US TV just look stupid to me. Endless stupid ads, laugh tracks, completely unrealistic characters, dumb plots, and more endless stupid ads. Then ... Netflix arrived. I started watching a few of the shows that people raved about from their days on network TV, and I realized that the biggest problem was ... endless stupid ads. Which Netflix did not have. I became willing to try out HBO from time to time, got in Battlestar Galactica, and of course in 2014, True Detective showed up on HBO. In 2019, I discovered Deadwood (at that point nearly a decade old), a more or less Shakespearian epic of 19th century US history. Over the past decade, I've discovered so many truly worth shows - and I haven't event started on The Wire yet! On top of that, Netflix has given me access to several UK shows (Luther, for example, but also Grand Designs (now, thankfully, on Youtube)) that have rounded out the menu. I understand that aesthetic choices with TV shows are very personal, but I can honestly say that I now absolutely believe that "TV" (ala the new streaming services and/or their presentation of material without ads) can be a medium for stellar story telling. I would like it if we had a few more defined "limited series" where there's a story already known, with a beginning, middle and end (True Detective and Mare of Eastttown are great examples of this (as long as they do not ruin Mare by making a sequel). And sure, there are some TV series that really would have been better as a film. Nevertheless, the ability to spend 8-16 hours with compelling characters is big positive to me.

stack_framer 4y ago

This is exactly how I feel. Even after years of this, I'm still amazed at how much is available, and how little of it I actually want to watch.