13 ms·

TV is broken

635 points by rkudeshi 15y ago

ssharp 15y ago
Very interesting anecdotes, but I don't see how it shows that TV is "broken", other than OP's daughter thinking it was broken when first exposed to commercials. Additionally, Hulu / Hulu+ and streaming shows directly from a network's exposes you to as many commercial breaks (albeit shorter) as watching a show on cable.
- VikingCoder 15y ago
  Tomorrow, Hacker News will be discussing a story about a 14 year old boy who discovered that some rats prefer raspberries. If you'd like to discuss something else, try using a different web site, that will also be discussing one and only one story. TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed. People buy devices to mask these problems, but they really don't solve them. Hulu is slightly less broken. Netflix Instant Watch is even LESS broken.
  - mikeryan 15y ago
    TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed. Not sure your market or cable company. But in Berkeley (and SF) with Comcast under on-demand I have a section called "TV Shows", the "All Shows" section lists about 300 TV shows.Each with about 8-20 episodes. All On-Demand all with rewind, pause etc. The exception is it won't let me FF through the limited ads embedded in the streams. Assume this was all current content. How much would you pay for this service? With Ads? Without? Because its not anywhere near the $10 price you're paying now for Netflix or Hulu.
    - VikingCoder 15y ago
      I have money, and I want to watch Season 2, Episode 2 of the West Wing, which my friend just told me is worth watching. I cannot give them my money, to watch it. I could wait a couple days for Netflix to mail me the DVD, but by then the impulse might pass. TV is broken.
      - ChrisLTD 15y ago
        It's not ideal that you have to use a mishmash of services to get what you want when you want it. But there are multiple delivery mechanisms for a lot of popular content. For instance, you could watch the West Wing Season 2 on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/the-west-wing-season-2/id203756198 http://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/the-west-wing-season-2/... Or Amazon Instant Video: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0047N63NE/ref=tmm_aiv_title_1 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0047N63NE/ref=tmm_aiv_titl...
        VikingCoder 15y ago
        ...neat. Substitute another movie or show that you'd like to watch but can't.
      - mbreese 15y ago
        How does this mean that TV is broken? Because you can't get instant access to every show ever created? That's not a TV problem, that's a you problem. That says nothing about TV. It does point to a weakness in distribution, but there are a variety of ways to get legally content these days: over the air, cable, satellite, online streaming (Hulu, Netflix), online purchase (Amazon, iTunes), buy or rent a DVD of a season of a show, etc... all of which can be played on a traditional TV. If you want to make an argument, argue that distribution is broken. TV as a content production industry is still doing okay. BTW - that was a good episode of the West Wing. While it was all done in flashbacks, you get to see the history of how people came to work in the West Wing. Donna's character particularly got more interesting after that episode. But you probably don't want to watch just that episode, it was the second half of a two-parter. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745640/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745640/
    - groby_b 15y ago
      I've got no problem paying $40 for a season pass of a show I like on iTunes. I think I'd be happy to pay that via Comcast too, if they had a decent interface. (I am however _not_ willing to pay $9.99 to watch a 5-year old movie "on demand". Not worth it) The part that the cable companies don't get is that customers don't want a buffet. They want a la carte. And they want pricing that is related to the value of a movie or a show. I don't mind paying premium price for something that's still out in theaters. But once that's gone, drop the price, will ya?
      - RandallBrown 15y ago
        Really? I think the 40 dollar pass is outrageously expensive. If I subscribe to just 2 shows, I've already gone over what I pay for cable. Sure, it's really nice to be able to watch it whenever I want, but 40 dollars is nuts.
        groby_b 15y ago
        If you watch two entire seasons in a month, you have a problem :)
  - mbreese 15y ago
    > TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed. And that is why we have a DVR. It lets you pause, rewind, watch something you missed, and the networked one in my bedroom has every episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse ever broadcast for my son to choose which one he wants. The only "live" TV that we ever watch are sports. The problem isn't that TV is broken. There are still good shows being made that audiences want to see. The problem is that some people still think of TV as something that has to be watched in the moment. With DVRs the subscription is less about delivering live TV and more like a fire-hose of media. The DVR captures what you want, and you can ignore the rest. Hell, I have satellite service, and because I can get east-coast feeds, I often am able to record and watch shows much earlier than people with cable.
    - VikingCoder 15y ago
      With a DVR, you can not watch something you missed. You can watch something that you remember ahead of time to tell your DVR to record for you, or that miraculously it thinks you might be interested in. TV has fundamental flaws, compared to other technologies that exist... It's broken.
      - mbreese 15y ago
        Right, if you miss it, you miss it. It has other flaws too - I have shows recorded on my DVR from last summer that I thought I would watch. They've sat at the bottom of the list since then. But, when you take the subscription for what it is - the best delivery vehicle a wide variety of HD content - then it isn't bad. You just have to live with the limitation. It's not like streaming content online isn't without it's limitations. If I missed an episode of "Top Shot" for example on History, I still couldn't see it on Hulu until the next day.
        VikingCoder 15y ago
        ...the fact that you can't watch it on Hulu until the next day is NOT a technology problem.
- michaelbuckbee 15y ago
  In these contexts "broken" is referring to the general collapse of assumptions and desires underpinning a business model as new forms of communication become prevalent. Think of newspapers and how their business model broke when Craigslist wiped out their classified ads market.
- ryana 15y ago
  Agreed. In a world where the average American watches over 4 hours of TV a day I find it hard to infer a broken system from an article by someone who doesn't even have basic over-the-air stations hooked up. Now that's not to say that the cable industry has it all figured out, or that there isn't room for improvement. But they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves if you assume their job is "get people to watch more tv."
dwc 15y ago
I've had almost identical conversations with my child in the past, which is not surprising since we do not have cable or an antenna. Who would easily accept the broadcast model who was not brought up with it? Perhaps more interesting is my older brother (approaching retirement age), who doesn't stream content but consumes through cable. Even when watching currently playing shows he records to DVR and delays watching long enough that he can skip commercials. It seems to me that the old broadcast model was always awful, but it used to be the only thing going. The first hints of its eventual demise really first appeared with easy access to movie rentals and home video recorders.
- waterside81 15y ago
  The behaviour of your brother is one I see amongst my friends & I. We routinely watch sports on tape-delay (particularly NFL which has an amazing ability to take commercials right when things are getting exciting) just so we can skip through commercials.
  - mbreese 15y ago
    My wife and I try to do the same. We like to try to time things just right so that we could still watch the ending in real-time. Starting a football game at halftime usually works pretty well. This year, I watched all NFL through the RedZone channel. It increased the amount of games that I could follow, but eliminated all the commercials. It does take some of the suspense out of it though, since you don't really get a good flow for a single game. It also helped that I recently moved to CA from Indy and got DirecTV Sunday Ticket to watch Colts games. That was before we knew how bad their season was going to be, so I wasn't too invested in following particular games.
zerostar07 15y ago
Broken as if the internet has no commercials? TV exists cause it's simple: streams of stories at the press of a button. No hours of effort to find good content among the trash. I don't think the commercials are the issue.
- recursive 15y ago
  > No hours of effort to find good content among the trash. I don't think the commercials are the issue. I'm not sure what TV you're watching, but good content is significantly harder for me to find on traditional TV than the internet.
- derrida 15y ago
  Adblock.
- mistercow 15y ago
  > No hours of effort to find good content among the trash. Yes, because there's rarely any good content on in the first place. You're just forced to settle for something mediocre, or not watch TV.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  It doesn't take hours to find stuff on line that is worth watching. Just use Google: http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&ix=hca&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=hurt+locker+torrent http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&ix=hca&sourceid=chr... Or some similar search engine.
  - zerostar07 15y ago
    I still think traditional TV is capitalizing on the lack of good (or overabudance of bad) recommendation engines online. Social recommendations are blurry, popularity is, well, a popularity contest and movie reviews are so subjective. Even with well-intented efforts like boxee you have (a) an anavoidable pile of juvenile nonsense and (b) too many options (and that's a problem). TV offers a simple, dumb stream of mediocre-but-curated programming. Maybe we should have that for online video too. (btw that illegal torrent u suggest is still going to take hours to download)
Craiggybear 15y ago
Perhaps a better title would be "advertising on TV is broken". No one pays any attention to it anymore. And most people I know, like me, don't even have broadcast TV. Or cable. I watch shows, yes, on DVD -- and largely on my own terms. No adverts.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  No it is tv that is broken. I have some channels that don't have ads at all (not even between shows) but I don't watch them, because you have to watch at a particular time, can't really pause them and the movies are years old.
  - Craiggybear 15y ago
    "and the movies are years old." ... and, that's bad? Personally, most of the movies I might want to watch are certainly in black-and-white anyhow.
    - tomjen3 15y ago
      Not everybody is a hipster :) I actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the pretty girl once he is done blowing things up. And recently the explosions have become more awesome, so I prefer the never movies. You keep Casablanca, if you want.
      - Craiggybear 15y ago
        I'd not think that at 52 I was anything that could be remotely described as a 'hipster'.
        seanp2k2 15y ago
        boop boop boop "I WAS WATCHING MOVIES BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN BORN" so hipster :D
      - awj 15y ago
geophile 15y ago
It's not really TV, it's TV networks that are broken. Hulu (and other online archives) may be even more irritating than broadcast TV. It's difficult to find what you want; you are hit by download limits in the middle of a program; there are still commercials, and it's the same ones over and over and over, and the repetition can drive you nuts; browser crash means starting over sometimes, or if you can go to where you left off, you have to endure skipped commercials. I have an expensive cable package. But I am also a frequent Bittorrent user because the process of finding and watching is far preferable to the online services, and sometimes the cable on-demand service. As a result, I often "steal" via Bittorrent, content I've already paid for. Not sure whether I'll keep that expensive cable package much longer. My kids are older and know what commercials are, but they are growing up knowing that TV networks (via cable or online) are just not usable. They have now, and will expect in the future, a large selection of content, and instant delivery with no interruptions.
- calloc 15y ago
  Hold on ... Hulu has download limits in the middle of watching a program? I've watched Hulu from 5 AM till 5 PM almost uninterrupted, the only interruption is between shows they will say "You've been watching for 3 hours, are you sure you don't want to take a break?". That repeats every two hours or so. Yes, the commercials can be grating, and are still annoying but I think that is a small price to pay for streaming my content when I want. Also they are not NEARLY as long as the commercials on TV and if a TV commercial is really loud (I'm looking at you eHarmony commercial) and you complain they will actually do something about it. Hulu may have its limitations because of stupid studio rules, but overall the experience of watching content online with Hulu is pretty straightforward and easy.
  - seanp2k2 15y ago
    See also: why Netflix is popular while Hulu sucks and is only used as a last resort after you can't find [x] on torrents.
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    I think he's talking about internet bandwidth limits; e.g., you get 50 gigabytes a month, and you hit that limit after watching a few episodes.
jerf 15y ago
I would observe that in some sense this isn't just a "kid growing up with different tech gets it better than the adults" story. My wife and I both feel the exact same way about TV, in our mid-30s. We just have the historical perspective such that we don't have to ask "why". Also it's less cute when we ask why. But otherwise the same.
- seanp2k2 15y ago
  Yup. I've been cable-free for about 2 years now, and I'd never go back. Since Comcast "discounts" cable internet (which, by the way, is my /only/ high-speed option besides 768kbit/sec DSL -- I have the 20mbit package or whatever they're selling it as these days) if you bundle it with basic cable, it only ends up being about $1.50 cheaper to NOT have basic cable. That said, basic cable is seriously not worth $1.50/month to me; it is worth literally less than nothing IMO. In fact, they should be paying me to watch their tripe. I'll take my payments in discounts to my cable internet, TYVM.
  - pixelcort 15y ago
    In some cases and at some times in the past it was actually cheaper to get the internet service when bundled with Cable TV service. In effect, some are or were somewhat paid to get it.
    - tsotha 15y ago
      The cable company pays a per-subscriber charge for come channels (most notably ESPN). For others (like HSN), the broadcaster pays the cable company. If they can get you to sign up for basic cable they're still making a bit of money, since all the ones they pay for are in higher tiers. If you have internet through your cable provider they already have to make sure the signal gets to your house and you're already in the computer, so adding you as a TV subscriber costs them nothing at all. I never watch broadcast TV, but when my internet connection goes down it's a handy troubleshooting tool - when I flip the TV on and see car commercials it means there's no cable break.
  - herge 15y ago
PaulHoule 15y ago
My nine year old has never been entertained by cable or broadcast TV. On broadcast TV there is nothing but the e|i junk that is so unwatchable that the category must have been invented by the author of "four arguments for the elimination of television". On cable there's an amazing number of channels, but the only sure things are Spongebob Squarepants (yuck!) and those live action dramas by Disney about impossibly rich teenagers who have no discernable problems. At least kids in Japan get to watch animated shows about cute girls who beat up the bad guys that are formulaic but have a level of art, writing, and voice acting that make American TV programming look like the stuff I make with a cheap camcorder.
- hweuifhaisuh 15y ago
  >On cable there's an amazing number of channels, but the only sure things are Spongebob Squarepants (yuck!) and those live action dramas by Disney about impossibly rich teenagers who have no discernable problems. >At least kids in Japan get to watch animated shows about cute girls who beat up the bad guys that are formulaic but have a level of art, writing, and voice acting that make American TV programming look like the stuff I make with a cheap camcorder. Weeaboo
TheFuture 15y ago
Almost all my big screen watching is through Roku of mainly Netflix streaming. I cut cable over a year ago and very rarely watch network TV (NFL football games are main thing I watch over the air). I feel like the young girl every time I'm at a friends house and trying to navigate whatever cable/sat guide they have. Seriously, it's 2012 and I'm paging through this endless list of "channels" labeled by NUMBER and a CALLSIGN? 1006 WKOW-HD. 12.1 ABC. Try to watch Jeopardy and get assaulted with denture paste, hearing aides, and adult diaper commercials! What the heck is going on? It is truly astonishing how bad the UI for these set-top boxes is, combined with the process of finding out what and where the correct ESPNx channel (HD or not HD) is to watch the game. Huge potential for serious changes in this industry. I don't like to throw such a vague word like "app" around, but that is the future. ESPN will have an app that will deliver their content in the best way. The closest thing I've seen to this is the work Major League Baseball is doing on mobile and TV. They're able to provide the video/audio, but augment it with other datastream. For sports this makes so much sense.
- mbreese 15y ago
  The best app I've seen for this is HBO Go. It has a huge back catalog of HBO content and a revolving set of movies. It pairs great with an iPad. But, in order to get it, you still need a cable or satellite subscription (and HBO).
  - tissarah 15y ago
    Absolutely agreed - phenomenal. I also have enjoyed the additional content they sometimes add for HBO Go users. Showtime has started doing this thing where you logon to their website while the show is premiering to do/see something but I've never done it because I DVR Showtime shows. Showtime had a press release that they were going to launch their own version of HBO Go but I've not see anything. I'm excited. I think premium channels like this are going to be the change.
PaulHoule 15y ago
The real issue with TV is that the audience is aging and eventually dying off. TV viewership in hours per week is pretty stable because as boomers retire and become disabled and unable to do anything else, they watch more TV. Young people, like under 50, are turning away from TV. Generation X and younger people have been falling out of love with TV for a long time. In my case I remember sharply losing interest in TV around the 1990s. Even around 2000 I felt insulted by advertising that is aimed at people who don't have money -- only medicare benefits they can spend and the hope that they can hire a ambulance chasing lawyer to make a big killing. TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it. Some day the last television viewer will die and the cable companies and networks will turn off the lights. Much like the music industry, the TV industry has been losing it's audience for a long time, and one day they will wake up and realize that their frog has been boiled -- and find somebody else to blame.
- noblethrasher 15y ago
  >TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it. I am curious about what you mean by 'TV for kids'. It seems to me that 'kid shows' have been pretty good since the early nineties (Ducktales, Animaniacs, Gargoyles, the DC Animated universe cartoons). More recently: Kim Possible, Spectacular Spider-Man, Samurai Jack, Sym-Bionic Titan, Transformers Animated, the Avengers and Young Justice have been phenomenal with respect to writing, voice acting and animation. This is one area where I'm a little envious of kids these days. I grew up with cartoons made to sell toys. They get shows made to tell (good) stories. EDIT:Spelling
  - joezydeco 15y ago
    And I would give credit to Disney and Viacom/Nickelodeon for trying to create entertaining sitcoms for kids. It can't be Spongebob and Phineas and Ferb 24 hours a day (although it sure seems like it). You may think it's crap, but go back and watch the sitcoms you watched as a kid (Brady Bunch for me). It's even worse than you remember.
  - 15y ago
silentific 15y ago
Such a good post. Tv is broken.
recoiledsnake 15y ago
Cable TV started out with the premise that it won't have ads and slowly it started adding them. Hulu already has ads. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix started ads soon, since they seem to getting slowly crushed with the high cost of licensing content.
- seanp2k2 15y ago
  ...and as ads increase, so does piracy. People will pay for no ads, but they won't pay for ads for very long, especially my generation.
- J3L2404 15y ago
  I would rather pay three times as much for Netflix than go back to watching commercials, although I may be in the minority.
SideburnsOfDoom 15y ago
And this is why this form of media is losing. Because it's worse, and any 4-year old will notice. Especially a 4-year –old. More and louder commercial won't fix the problem, it will just keep the next generation even further away. Like black-and-white silent films, it lacks basic features that the new generation is taking for granted, around user control, choice and interactivity.
killnine 15y ago
It would make me a proud parent to know that my kid doesn't know what a cable commercial is. Slightly off topic, but the messages, subliminal messages, and methods of targeting these commercials do are sickening. I think some of them and their authors should be tried for criminals. How is it okay that, for example, jewellery commercials basically attempt to trick female minds into defining love and levels of love by the metals and rocks their loved one purchases for them? How is a 5 year old supposed to know better?
TechNewb 15y ago
Bloomberg offers a great iPad app, where you can live stream, or watch episodes on demand. The future of channels are apps. I've never personally ordered cable, and grew up with out it as well.
yabai 15y ago
I have given up on most TV - especially cable TV. Almost 3 years ago my wife and I moved and decided to not startup cable TV. I setup an antenna and run MythTV, Boxee and anything else that will run on a browser + flash. I run a virtual machine for Netflix. When we started this experiment, I thought we might go running back to cable. What we discovered is that there is a ton of content available. The Mythbox nicely removes commercials. When people hear that I don't have cable, many are confused that I can receive HD programming over the air. The cable companies have done a brilliant job confusing the public into believing that you must have cable to watch TV and/or access HD content. We couldn't be happier. I challenge anyone to give up paying for cable tv. Good luck!
- revelation 15y ago
  This isn't about cable. It's about the whole model of unidirectional media. Dieing out, if you have not noticed.
  - yabai 15y ago
    I complain about cable television in any conversation about TV!
- jianshen 15y ago
  Good on you! Having spent some time in hospitals with loved ones recently, I think broadcast TV (like cable) will continue to thrive until someone does a fantastic job of making a "channel lineup" application for on-demand media. I tried to set up Netflix for someone who was bed-ridden and the fact that the nurse has to keep going in and selecting the next movie after the previous one is done is just agonizing. I love Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo but at least for people with accessibility issues, "what's on" is still more convenient than "what do I want to watch".
droithomme 15y ago
There are many other things that are broken too. My fancy expensive name-brand digital TV takes a full minute to boot up from a cold start, longer than it took my tube based TV from the 1950s to warm up. Once on, it takes almost a full second to change channels while it rebuffers the stream of the channel being changed to. This prevents quickly flipping through channels to see what is on. As a result I just don't bother most of the time. Which is fine, I watch much less TV. We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.
- stinkytaco 15y ago
  >We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own. This drives me crazy. I have a computer hooked up to my TV (for the same reason as the OP, we basically watch just streaming or my digitized DVD collection) and every time I upgrade the display drivers, and sometimes just randomly, the display goes wonky and I have to fix it by hand. I don't have to do that with my computer monitor...
  - Danieru 15y ago
    For those curious; kernel hacker Matthew Garrett wrote a great post on this subject: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html
  - Raphael 15y ago
    Yeah, I don't know why AMD decided thought digital TVs would be susceptible to under-scan or over-scan.
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  > We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated Since there's nowhere near 720 pixels x 60 frames/sec worth of information being sent to your TV, who cares?
_feda_ 15y ago
The problem with tv for the past 50 years or so is that it has encouraged a passive relationship between culture and its consumers. It kills conversation, discourages activity, its one-sidedness is bad for people. The internet has come to the rescue, allowing people young and old to be more active participants in their own culture. Hopefully this unidirectional mode of content delivery will die off completely within in the next 50 years.
zwieback 15y ago
I think everyone agrees that commercials are annoying but I don't think TV is broken at all. After all, most of the content we stream with other means originated as TV shows or Hollywood movies. So the real question is, once the current younger generation gets older and everyone switched off their cable, how will the production of quality content be financed, other than per-view fees? When I was a kid in Germany there were three channels, all publicly financed, to a large extent via a per-household radio/TV fee. TV was only broadcasting for a few hours a day. The overall quality was very high and commercials were in a block between shows. I'd love to go back to that model but I doubt the general public would agree.
- stinkytaco 15y ago
  >So the real question is, once the current younger generation gets older and everyone switched off their cable, how will the production of quality content be financed, other than per-view fees? This is it. The same as music has been doing for years. It's not like there's not an existing model for this, direct to video movies have existed for a long time (though they were generally considered "low quality" and thus didn't get theater time). Netflix is already in the original content business and I think we'll see more of that. The problem then becomes the translation of content silos to the Internet. I have a Netflix subscription because it has the most stuff. I have no intention of getting a subscription to Hulu Plus or the myriad of content producers individual plans (the future HBO.com, AMC.com, etc.) Hopefully they can find a way to aggregate pay-per-view into a consistent online platform.
huggyface 15y ago
This is akin to saying that the internet is broken because some videos are prefaced by a commercial. Or HN is broken because some of the front-page are hiring ads for YC companies. I use a PVR for all of my "TV" needs (I have two large wall-mounted screens. They are great entertainment devices. I only mention that for consistency with those proudly informing that they only old some small CRT in the corner somewhere). When I get around to watching it has all of the episodes of the shows I care about. Many of them come from ShowTime, HBO, PBS or the Movie Network, having no commercials. Of course I explicitly pay for those channels individually, well outside of PBS. Other channels have a different business model, but strangely neither my children, my wife or I have any mental issue with it -- it's just the way it is. Nor do I have an issue when a play has an intermission, even though really I'd just like them to keep playing through. In some ways this reminds me a bit of this submission from the other day - http://ihnatko.com/2012/02/20/heavy-hangs-the-bandwidth-that-torrents-the-crown/ http://ihnatko.com/2012/02/20/heavy-hangs-the-bandwidth-that...
- rcthompson 15y ago
  The article is saying that for a child raised (mostly) on commercial-free media (Netflix), advertisements are so intrusive and annoying that the child rejects watching TV outright because of the commercials. I wonder if this is the kind of stuff that keeps advertising executives up at night. What would happen if everyone under the age of 20 thought like this (assuming that ad-free media sources still exist)?
  - huggyface 15y ago
    The title "TV" refers to a physical medium. If it meant "the commercial-supported major networks", then perhaps it should have said that. Nonetheless, it is understood that children notice change. If you give your child maple syrup when they're accustomed to Aunt Jemima, they will ask you what it is. They will probably ask for their Aunt Jemima back. Children are not savants supplying higher information (and I say that as a very proud parent of four of them): They are creatures of routine and habit. A day later they would happily enjoy maple syrup, rejecting their old standby. There just isn't anything profound or particularly insightful about that observation. It doesn't merit the "TV is broken" bit.
jpdoctor 15y ago
Folks do not want to pay the amount commercial free TV would cost. Full stop. If the "investment money" ever stops supporting youtube/hulu/(insert profitless service here), then goodbye web substitute. Even The Daily Show has gone into full annoyance mode lately.
- rhizome 15y ago
  Folks are already paying the amount that commercial-free TV would cost, but the money is eaten up by ESPN's multi-channel presence in basic-cable packages. Yes, your cable dollars subsidize ESPN.
  - jpdoctor 15y ago
    > Folks are already paying the amount that commercial-free TV would cost Not even close. Take the entire amount of advertising $$ spent on TV ($100B+) and divide by the folks watching. That is the money that people would have to shell out one way or another.
    - rhizome 15y ago
      By my top-of-head calculations: $100B advertising / ~160MM households = $625/household/year, or about $50/mo. You're right, I wasn't even close. I was way over.
      - jpdoctor 15y ago
        I said people watching. You chose to interpret that as households/year. Good luck.
        rhizome 15y ago
        99% of households have a TV, and that number is probably from the 2000 census. What numbers do you think are more accurate?
    - hythloday 15y ago
mikebracco 15y ago
I'm baffled every time I'm watching broadcast TV and see an ad for something I would never in a million years purchase...and if the advertiser just had a couple pieces of info about me would never bother showing me that ad. I guess this will eventually come with IPTV and ad platforms for broadcast that more closely resemble targeted advertising online. The sheer inefficiency of shotgun approach broadcast advertising is crazy to me.
bicknergseng 15y ago
TV might be broken, but the inability of a child to focus on something for more than a few minutes at a time isn't the best evidence. It definitely brings up some interesting things to think about, though. First, while the attention span of adults is normally quite a bit better than that of kids, the digital age is eroding our ability to focus on one thing http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312119/Facebook-internet-wire-brain-shorten-attention-span.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312119/Faceb.... While this may be a temporary trend as we adapt to the information overload the internet can provide, I think it's fairly safe to say that people 10 years from now will be far less likely to sit patiently watching TV than people 20 years ago. The most obvious implication from this may be that commercial advertising, rather than TV in general, is going to need to adapt. I imagine part of the reason why people under 30 are cutting the cable in increasing numbers is because they aren't willing to sit through loud, irrelevant commercials in order to watch something they don't actually want to watch. The tolerance of the consumer for TV style advertising is shrinking proportionally to the consumer's attention span. This should be good for subscription services like Netflix, and would be good for HBO/Showtime if they didn't for customers to pay for cable/sat in addition to their services.
- justincormack 15y ago
  Do not cite the Daily Mail. It is not a news source or source of information about science.
FredFredrickson 15y ago
So what happens when a kid who is used to TV goes to watch Netflix and the stream gets interrupted (like we all know it would on a typical hotel wi-fi network). If you've watched videos online before, you know it's just buffering, but the tv-oriented kid would do the same thing as this guy's kid did: ask if it's broken, or why we stopped it. I'm not saying that there are no problems with the way TV is presented, but to raise a child in a relatively TV-less environment, marvel at their confusion over how it works, and then come to the conclusion that TV is broken... that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.
- faboo 15y ago
  My 5 year old had a much easier time understanding that Netflix needs to buffer or downgrade sometimes than why there are advertisements on television. I think that's because Netflix buffering has an explanation that directly relates to the activity itself, whereas the explanation for advertisements is a lot more abstract.
doki_pen 15y ago
Thanks for posting this, and thanks everyone for upvoting it. It's even better the 4th time it's made it to #1 on hacker news. I gained some new insight into how TV sucks and the Internet is awesome.
wpietri 15y ago
Broken for whom? Beatrix isn't the customer. She's the product being sold. TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things. Hopefully young Beatrix is an outlier like her parents and she'll never get hooked. But it could be that, like most adults, she'll get used to sitting there through the commercials, wasting 8 minutes of her life to get 22 minutes of entertainment. Plus, of course, whatever she wastes on buying things that she doesn't need.
- tsotha 15y ago
  >TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things. That's exactly what's happening, though. Most adults don't sit through commercials any more. The percentage of people who don't get their shows through the internet and don't skip over commercials with a DVR is something like 33%. I'd bet my last dollar that demographic skews elderly in a major way, too.
  - wpietri 15y ago
    Interesting. Do you have a source for that? When visiting DVR-using friends, I see them watching some commercials (especially, if it's interesting, the first one of a group). And I know that some people who get their TV over the Internet end up seeing ads (e.g., Hulu, YouTube, network sites). So I suspect that a fair number of ads still get watched, but I can't quickly find any data on how many versus past years.
    - tsotha 15y ago
      I can't find the source, but I think it was on HN within the last year or so.
caycep 15y ago
they're only just now realizing this?
ilaksh 15y ago
TV is outdated, but so are a lot of more important things: cars/transportation, government, "economics", agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure, humans, natural language.
- evincarofautumn 15y ago
  You’re a human, typing in a natural language, on a computer powered by the electrical infrastructure provided by his government. That computer only exists because of the manufacturing capabilities we gained during the industrial revolution 200 years ago, which, in addition to being the source of the modern economy, could not have happened if it weren’t for the rise of totalitarian agriculturalism 10,000 years ago. That 10,000 years is a pittance compared to the millions of years of human history spent focused more on hunting, gathering, and herding than on cultivating crops. The origin of language in humans is hazy, but we’ve only been around in our various forms for a few million out of the billions of years of Earth’s history. How could all of these brand new things possibly be outdated? ;)
  - ilaksh 15y ago
    When is the last time you upgraded your operating system, bought a new computer, or bought a new car? The pace of technological evolution is exponential, not linear. http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns We have to operate on a day-to-day basis, not a cosmological one. We should apply current scientific knowledge on a large scale immediately. * Cars/transportation -- Where Robot Cars (Robocars) Can Really Take Us http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/ http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/ * natural language -- Problems with natural language for requirements specification http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Books/SE9/Web/Requirements/NL-problems.html http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Books/SE9/Web/Requiremen... * government -- Politicians Are Not Trained To Solve Problems http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvoh2vsQSI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvoh2vsQSI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_I9-MJKQ4c&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_I9-MJKQ4c&feature=relat... * economics -- ARE ECONOMICS A SCIENCE OF TRUTH OR AN IDEOLOGY OF POWER? http://www.futuremagazine.net/economicsiencie.html http://www.futuremagazine.net/economicsiencie.html * agriculture -- Urban Farming: Hydroponics in the City http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcBCcSLDlo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcBCcSLDlo * manufacturing -- Hod Lipson on Programmable Matter: Shape of Things to Come http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmPLeQLdfPA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmPLeQLdfPA * humans -- not really quite outdated yet, but soon. Jeopardy! IBM Watson Day 2 (Feb 15, 2011) Part 2/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QYchgv5dMM&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QYchgv5dMM&feature=relat... * infrastructure -- Evacuated Tube Transport http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92dK_yxaKvk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92dK_yxaKvk
somedayme 15y ago
I paid for Directivo for 10+ years, long before HDTV. $100+/month. Now, I have a Samsung 55" LED with a beautiful picture that I bought online for cheap. I plugged an older Macbook Pro into it via hdmi. Couch Potato, Sick Beard, $7/month lifetime unlimited usenet account from a thanksgiving special, mplayer extended to play it all. I haven't seen a commercial in years. As the author says, if it isn't online, I don't watch it. TV isn't broken, cable companies are.
yason 15y ago
This sounds stupid but I always thought there weren't commercials for channels that you actually pay for? That the advertisements were to compensate for channels that didn't cost anything? I haven't really watched tv since the mid 90's and never in the USA so I might miss something obvious here. But where I lived, regular channels were broadcast nationally over the air and they had commercials. I always thought the popularity of cable/satellite subscription was based on you getting rid of the commercials, not paying for seeing more commercials on more channels?
- sedev 15y ago
  Unfortunately, that's incorrect. The cable channels, as mentioned upthread, early on promised "since we can restrict access, unlike broadcast, we can just charge people and we won't show ads." That's not true in 2012. It is extremely, extremely rare to find television without frequent and intrusive advertising. HBO has less toxic advertising practices and better content, which is why you see them mentioned so often in this context. Basically, the main television networks are all double-dipping (cf Marco Arment: http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/double-dipping-ads-in-ipad-magazines http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/double-dipping-ads-in-ipad-m... ).
rogerclark 15y ago
this story seems a bit manufactured. i get that the kid makes the whole thing more endearing and maybe more poignant, but the writing seems inauthentic and intentionally crafted to drive home the obvious point (a point that every tech-savvy person in our modern world already agrees with)
kgo 15y ago
I made nachos for my niece once. Put Doritos on a cookie sheet, smothered them in cheese, and put them in the broiler. She thought they were weird and broken because I didn't use the normal plain-style tortilla chips. Her mom made her a new batch the right way. Young children have a tenancy to think that the rest of the world is exactly like their home, because that home is their world. Then when they experience the outside world things seem strange. Like the above anecdote, I remember thinking it was weird when a neighbor made Taco Salad with Frito's instead of Doritos. I remember how weird my grandmaa's house seemed all around when visiting. The food was different, the board games were different, it was all strange. I think this anecdote is the same. Its not so much a case of the wisdom of the children, but just another example of a child not understanding that the entire world isn't like their sheltered existence. [I don't intend sheltered as a pejorative here.] I'm sure there were plenty of other things on the trip that seemed broken, but none happened to be as evil as commercial TV.
- rmc 15y ago
  That is true in general, but in 30 years time, do you think the majority of people will be using traditional TV schedules, or will it be watch on demand? The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
- tsotha 15y ago
  Wait, you use Doritos to make nachos? Weirdo.
  - sutterbomb 15y ago
    And fritos for taco salad? I'm so very confused.
- SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
  I disagree, in that I also think it's a terrible experience to have to put up with commercials. There's thinking something is bad because it's different, and then there's thinking it's bad because it SUCKS. I grew up on commercial TV. Now I can't stand commercials, and I think HULU is absolutely insane for not having a "no commercial" tier -- and for charging you and STILL running the commercials. I would SO rather pay for my media than have commercials interrupt it. It's not a kid being uncomfortable with an unfamiliar situation; it IS annoying to have your program interrupted. And I'm not even militant about advertising -- I don't run ad blockers, and I even click on ads from time to time. What I can't forgive is people wasting my TIME. I have a finite amount of that (and why am I posting on Hacker News..? sigh...), and people showing me ads for things that I have ABSOLUTELY no interest in is nothing but a waste of my time AND their advertising money. HULU has a little button where you can tell them an ad isn't relevant to you, but it seems as if they ignore it. What a waste...
finnw 15y ago
I'm in the UK. Until a few years ago I didn't really mind ads - I would happily sit through them until my show came back. Then in mid-2009 gocompare.com launched their ad campaign (with Wynne Evans singing.) They pushed it really hard - it was on nearly every show on every channel. The song was so irritating that I got into the habit of muting the TV during the commercial breaks. If I had been a TV network executive, I would have refused to run those ads. They are so awful that they encourage viewers to avoid ads, and I'll bet it has decreased revenue from other advertisers. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_-9QFvhQWo&noredirect=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_-9QFvhQWo&noredirect=1
nessus42 15y ago
I have a TiVo and TV works just fine for me. (It's hard to fathom now, however, how I ever coped with TV before getting a TiVo, which I've had for more than a decade now.)
niels_olson 15y ago
My favorite experience is when the iPad runs out of batteries (blessedly more frequently now) and the kids realize they have nothing to do but read. Throw away your TV? So 2006. You want to take care of your kids? Cancel your streaming video accounts. I like Shiela Ash's question about cigarettes: "Why would you pay for something that goes up in smoke?!" Modified for streaming: "Why would you pay to rot your kids' brains?!"
noahlt 15y ago
I could imagine a similar and opposite article, "Netflix is broken", written from the perpective from an older person instead of a younger one: Why do I need to sign in? Why do I have to choose something to watch – why doesn't it just let me start watching immediately? Why is it so hard to change channels? Why do I have to watch things on my small computer screen instead of my large television screen?
- CraigRood 15y ago
  I'm waiting for the articles on the low bitrate/high resolution video. Going to be the whole MP3 vs FLAC all over again.
- moheeb 15y ago
  If Netflix had a 'random' button it would be their greatest innovation ever.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    Sometimes I end up picking or asking my girlfriend for random numbers just to shuffle TNG episodes, since that's how I'm used to seeing it.
- Tooluka 15y ago
  Why do I need sign a cable TV contract? On a paper? Requesting some people to make a draft and fetch me it with a decoder, 3 day before I can actually watch anything? What's a decoder anyway? Why do I need to BUY it? Even though I already have a brand new TV? What do you mean a GOOD decoder is 2-3 times more expensive? And it is forever bound to a certain cable provider? Why, it's just some generic hardware? Why is it SD? Do you aware that we have FullHD stuff for a decade already? Oh, you do have HD? 2-4 channels out of 130? And my decoder doesn't apply? What, even GOOD decoder doesn't apply? So I need this card which is more expensive than GOOD decoder? And card only fits about 20% TVs on the market? Etc. etc. The list goes on indefinitely...
chemist 15y ago
Older people might think Netflix is broken, but the fact is they'll be dead soon and with them goes their opinion that the old way of television was better. That being said, most of us probably know both sides of the argument pretty well, and I've got to say that I like the newer, streaming versions of television better.
colonel_panic 15y ago
Nobody's mentioned tiling? And then also tiling. And then tiling and more tiling, and then the good part is coming up and--tiling. And here's the big play and it looks like they might just make a touchdow--tiling. I miss analog.
cenuij 15y ago
Commercial television is a horrible user experience. Public service broadcasting in the UK is slightly less horrible. It's quality is declining as the BBC has tried to spread itself across a multitude of markets at the same time as trying to keep the license fee under control. The bias of the BBC has always been in dispute. The right wing think the BBC is left leaning (because by their simple ratonale anything state funded is). The left wing want to keep the BBC out of the hands of the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The Scots, Welsh and Irish see the BBC as a propaganda machine for Westminster. However, regardless of it's flaws, the BBC is probably the premier broadcaster of quality television on the planet; though I fear too many changes from idealogical government intervention will change this for the worse.
joejohnson 15y ago
I'm sure most of that didn't happen but it's a cute story to drive a tired point.
jrockway 15y ago
Yes it is. The problem with TV is that advertisers have a lot more money than you do, so advertisers get to dictate how TV works. I'm looking forward to a world where people produce content and I give them money to watch it. It works for the porn industry, so why not everything else? (Probably the same reason why our cell phones don't treat voice and data as the bits they are. There is more money to be made for the middlemen by offering "value add" instead of a "dumb pipe". And there's one thing middlemen do well: keeping themselves alive at the expense of everyone else.) In the mean time, I'll just pirate everything. That cuts out the middleman!
pash 15y ago
In the last week or so, it's become clear that Google is planning to offer some sort of IPTV service over its fiber network in Kansas City when it comes online later this year. [0] It will be interesting to see how disruptive their offering will be. Even just selling programming a la carte would be a huge improvement over what the cable companies offer, but I have a feeling Google will (eventually) do more than just that. 0. http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/22/3444862/google-giving-stronger-signal.html http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/22/3444862/google-giving-s...
ericng 15y ago
Some people have mentioned the cable boxes are the issues but no one has mentioned Scientific Atlanta by name. If I'm not mistaken they have been producing horrible boxes for multiple carriers for years! As a Cablevision/Optonline subscriber, I find that using their iOS app is way ahead of using the actual cable box interface. Is it IR that just makes the interface slow or is there some other hardware constraint that?
- jsz0 15y ago
  Most cable set tops have dedicated decryption, video/audio decoding chips so the main CPU available for running the UI is very weak by design. Cisco & Motorola make these set tops pretty much by spec of what the big cable providers want. They don't want a general purpose platform and truly just don't understand why they might want a better user interface. Only in the last year or so have these set tops started to get faster but they are still gimped by the guide software the cable providers use. They usually opt for consistency over quality. The same guide that runs on a 2012 set top needs to work on a 1997 set top.
vacri 15y ago
I then do what I should have simply done in the first place. I hook up the iPad to the free hotel wifi and hand it to her. She fires up the Netflix app, chooses a show, and she is happy. No. You shouldn't have. Thanks for making the free hotel wifi choked for everyone by pulling down a long-term video. What you should have done was bring along some videos of your own.
evo_9 15y ago
Advertising needs to be turned upside in the DVR/Digital streaming era. Imagine if the show you watched ran ad-free, and instead simply had a 'Sponsored By' section on the shows start page (basically a newly designed 'landing page' for each tv show). Then we viewers would simply choose to watch the ad's when we/if we wanted. And even if we didn't watch an ad, just seeing a Tide logo on that page would cause some to buy their product ('cool they sponsor Family Guy...' for example). The thing that advertisers don't seem to understand is that we consumers are actually interested in the right ad's. I would choose to watch the new trailer for Game of Thrones - Season Two for example. Or an add for the new Honda Element, if I were shopping or just curious what the new model looked like. All the sponsored by ads could be google-style customized to the viewer, and the view-rate would likely be higher than it is now where I DVR skip pretty much all ad's since there is no easy way for me to know what is being shown. On top of all that, advertisers would be able to know exactly how many people were actually watching their ads. They could even add in interactive 'like/dislike' voting to further determine the effectiveness of the ad. I thought of all this 5-6 years ago when DVR's really got popular. It seemed to me an obvious way to 'evolve' TV, and I'm pretty surprised something like this hasn't already happend. I guess it's expecting too much from an industry that is used to just shoveling ads at us from all angles, the idea of 'choice' is probably pretty scary/imposible for them. Maybe this is the way Apple intends to crack TV?
charlieok 15y ago
I act just like that four year old now when I'm around a "normal" tv. It had been long enough that I decided to simply go in assuming that tv must be fixed by now, and I can pick a show from a menu, netflix/hulu style, and get what I want immediately. I went through the motions, and had an entertaining exchange with my sister. Something like: Me: "I just selected 'Modern Family'. Why is 'Modern Family' not playing now? I just see a short description and no 'play' button." Her: "Don't you remember how tv works? It's not on right now, this is just a tv guide" Me: "I guess tv is worthless. I hope nobody paid any money for this" I wasn't being deliberately obtuse. I was genuinely surprised at how much it sucked, and I really do not understand why so many people pay so much money for it.
rahim 15y ago
For all the folks that still watch broadcast television (I do): starting in December 2012, the "CALM Act" takes effect, restricting the use of louder than normal commercials. http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-rules-restricting-loud-commercials http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-rules-restricting-lou...
mscrivo 15y ago
It's unfortunate that windows media center hasn't caught on in a bigger way. I use it on my casual home theater and my larger more serious home theater. I have a channel master 4221 antenna that feeds into 2 HD Homerun tuners and clearQAM feeding into a couple more. This gives me the ability to record/watch 4 channels at once from any networked media center in the house. Media center has a fantastic interface that aggregates all the channels available across all tuners and hides the complexity. It allows you to easily record series and find shows across any of the tuners, all while looking beautiful. In addition to the great tv viewing experience, there is the wonderful media browser addon that beautifully indexes your digital movie collection and plugins like showanalyzer to automatically skip commercials in recordings. With TMT 5, I get a blu-ray player built right into media center too. I honestly could not imagine a better setup. The only issue is that the initial setup is way too hard and time consuming. But the result can't be beat right now.
- verisimilitude 15y ago
  That channel master 4221 is an AWESOME antenna. I didn't have a car when I bought mine, so I had to walk with it for 2 miles to my apartment. I set it up in the closet (which is completely not recommended... multipath, etc., etc.) and still got unreal picture quality on my computer.
sfseth 15y ago
i can completely relate. it is a legit challenge to describe advertising-funded media. there was once a concept of an editorial firewall, which seems cute in an antique sense of the word, possibly believable circa 1971. advertising, for one reason or another, seems to have the effect of shaping whatever it funds towards a decreased intellectual stimulus, ie lower curiosity. there's something to think about with respect to Super Bowl ads being the most valuable on TV.
jconley 15y ago
My 3 yr old kids had exactly the same reaction to a nearly identical scenario. Though, we subscribed to cable TV after my father in law threatened to not come visit any more if he couldn't watch his live sports with the clicker... Publishers/networks are broken. The industry needs something to happen to it like Steam, then Facebook, and finally Apple did to video game publishers. Take the (old) middle men out of the loop. Let content producers "sell" directly to consumers.
petermcd 15y ago
Here is how we are trying to fix TV with HTML5 video support, so any video web site can get on TVs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpBZ1xdcC1Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpBZ1xdcC1Q The folks at PandoDaily ran a nice article about us, too: http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/23/nthcode-wants-to-bring-the-internet-to-everything-plugged-into-your-tv/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/23/nthcode-wants-to-bring-the-...
jwr 15y ago
I had exactly the same problem with my daughter (now 3 years old). She grew up playing with an iPhone and an iPad. The TV was broken in two ways: 1. Touching the screen (and swiping) didn't do anything. 2. The concept of having to wait until a specific time to see a show was completely alien. Thank heavens we at least don't have commercial breaks in kids programs (Poland).
franze 15y ago
once upon a time i visited my father's house. when he started watching TV my 3 year old ran to the televisionscreen, tried to swipe it, pushed on some things on the screen, even did a two arm multi arm gesture to minimize the current screen - nothing happened - he turned away quite bored, i was very proud.

635 points by rkudeshi 15y ago

Very interesting anecdotes, but I don't see how it shows that TV is "broken", other than OP's daughter thinking it was broken when first exposed to commercials. Additionally, Hulu / Hulu+ and streaming shows directly from a network's exposes you to as many commercial breaks (albeit shorter) as watching a show on cable.

VikingCoder 15y ago
Tomorrow, Hacker News will be discussing a story about a 14 year old boy who discovered that some rats prefer raspberries. If you'd like to discuss something else, try using a different web site, that will also be discussing one and only one story. TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed. People buy devices to mask these problems, but they really don't solve them. Hulu is slightly less broken. Netflix Instant Watch is even LESS broken.
- mikeryan 15y ago
  TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed. Not sure your market or cable company. But in Berkeley (and SF) with Comcast under on-demand I have a section called "TV Shows", the "All Shows" section lists about 300 TV shows.Each with about 8-20 episodes. All On-Demand all with rewind, pause etc. The exception is it won't let me FF through the limited ads embedded in the streams. Assume this was all current content. How much would you pay for this service? With Ads? Without? Because its not anywhere near the $10 price you're paying now for Netflix or Hulu.
  - VikingCoder 15y ago
    I have money, and I want to watch Season 2, Episode 2 of the West Wing, which my friend just told me is worth watching. I cannot give them my money, to watch it. I could wait a couple days for Netflix to mail me the DVD, but by then the impulse might pass. TV is broken.
    - ChrisLTD 15y ago
      It's not ideal that you have to use a mishmash of services to get what you want when you want it. But there are multiple delivery mechanisms for a lot of popular content. For instance, you could watch the West Wing Season 2 on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/the-west-wing-season-2/id203756198 http://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/the-west-wing-season-2/... Or Amazon Instant Video: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0047N63NE/ref=tmm_aiv_title_1 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0047N63NE/ref=tmm_aiv_titl...
      - VikingCoder 15y ago
        ...neat. Substitute another movie or show that you'd like to watch but can't.
    - mbreese 15y ago
      How does this mean that TV is broken? Because you can't get instant access to every show ever created? That's not a TV problem, that's a you problem. That says nothing about TV. It does point to a weakness in distribution, but there are a variety of ways to get legally content these days: over the air, cable, satellite, online streaming (Hulu, Netflix), online purchase (Amazon, iTunes), buy or rent a DVD of a season of a show, etc... all of which can be played on a traditional TV. If you want to make an argument, argue that distribution is broken. TV as a content production industry is still doing okay. BTW - that was a good episode of the West Wing. While it was all done in flashbacks, you get to see the history of how people came to work in the West Wing. Donna's character particularly got more interesting after that episode. But you probably don't want to watch just that episode, it was the second half of a two-parter. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745640/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745640/
  - groby_b 15y ago
    I've got no problem paying $40 for a season pass of a show I like on iTunes. I think I'd be happy to pay that via Comcast too, if they had a decent interface. (I am however _not_ willing to pay $9.99 to watch a 5-year old movie "on demand". Not worth it) The part that the cable companies don't get is that customers don't want a buffet. They want a la carte. And they want pricing that is related to the value of a movie or a show. I don't mind paying premium price for something that's still out in theaters. But once that's gone, drop the price, will ya?
    - RandallBrown 15y ago
      Really? I think the 40 dollar pass is outrageously expensive. If I subscribe to just 2 shows, I've already gone over what I pay for cable. Sure, it's really nice to be able to watch it whenever I want, but 40 dollars is nuts.
      - groby_b 15y ago
        If you watch two entire seasons in a month, you have a problem :)
- mbreese 15y ago
  > TV is "broken," because it doesn't give you the choice to watch what you want to, doesn't let you pause, doesn't let you rewind, doesn't let you watch something you missed. And that is why we have a DVR. It lets you pause, rewind, watch something you missed, and the networked one in my bedroom has every episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse ever broadcast for my son to choose which one he wants. The only "live" TV that we ever watch are sports. The problem isn't that TV is broken. There are still good shows being made that audiences want to see. The problem is that some people still think of TV as something that has to be watched in the moment. With DVRs the subscription is less about delivering live TV and more like a fire-hose of media. The DVR captures what you want, and you can ignore the rest. Hell, I have satellite service, and because I can get east-coast feeds, I often am able to record and watch shows much earlier than people with cable.
  - VikingCoder 15y ago
    With a DVR, you can not watch something you missed. You can watch something that you remember ahead of time to tell your DVR to record for you, or that miraculously it thinks you might be interested in. TV has fundamental flaws, compared to other technologies that exist... It's broken.
    - mbreese 15y ago
      Right, if you miss it, you miss it. It has other flaws too - I have shows recorded on my DVR from last summer that I thought I would watch. They've sat at the bottom of the list since then. But, when you take the subscription for what it is - the best delivery vehicle a wide variety of HD content - then it isn't bad. You just have to live with the limitation. It's not like streaming content online isn't without it's limitations. If I missed an episode of "Top Shot" for example on History, I still couldn't see it on Hulu until the next day.
      - VikingCoder 15y ago
        ...the fact that you can't watch it on Hulu until the next day is NOT a technology problem.
michaelbuckbee 15y ago
In these contexts "broken" is referring to the general collapse of assumptions and desires underpinning a business model as new forms of communication become prevalent. Think of newspapers and how their business model broke when Craigslist wiped out their classified ads market.
ryana 15y ago
Agreed. In a world where the average American watches over 4 hours of TV a day I find it hard to infer a broken system from an article by someone who doesn't even have basic over-the-air stations hooked up. Now that's not to say that the cable industry has it all figured out, or that there isn't room for improvement. But they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves if you assume their job is "get people to watch more tv."

dwc 15y ago

I've had almost identical conversations with my child in the past, which is not surprising since we do not have cable or an antenna. Who would easily accept the broadcast model who was not brought up with it? Perhaps more interesting is my older brother (approaching retirement age), who doesn't stream content but consumes through cable. Even when watching currently playing shows he records to DVR and delays watching long enough that he can skip commercials. It seems to me that the old broadcast model was always awful, but it used to be the only thing going. The first hints of its eventual demise really first appeared with easy access to movie rentals and home video recorders.

waterside81 15y ago
The behaviour of your brother is one I see amongst my friends & I. We routinely watch sports on tape-delay (particularly NFL which has an amazing ability to take commercials right when things are getting exciting) just so we can skip through commercials.
- mbreese 15y ago
  My wife and I try to do the same. We like to try to time things just right so that we could still watch the ending in real-time. Starting a football game at halftime usually works pretty well. This year, I watched all NFL through the RedZone channel. It increased the amount of games that I could follow, but eliminated all the commercials. It does take some of the suspense out of it though, since you don't really get a good flow for a single game. It also helped that I recently moved to CA from Indy and got DirecTV Sunday Ticket to watch Colts games. That was before we knew how bad their season was going to be, so I wasn't too invested in following particular games.

zerostar07 15y ago

Broken as if the internet has no commercials? TV exists cause it's simple: streams of stories at the press of a button. No hours of effort to find good content among the trash. I don't think the commercials are the issue.

recursive 15y ago
> No hours of effort to find good content among the trash. I don't think the commercials are the issue. I'm not sure what TV you're watching, but good content is significantly harder for me to find on traditional TV than the internet.
derrida 15y ago
Adblock.
mistercow 15y ago
> No hours of effort to find good content among the trash. Yes, because there's rarely any good content on in the first place. You're just forced to settle for something mediocre, or not watch TV.
tomjen3 15y ago
It doesn't take hours to find stuff on line that is worth watching. Just use Google: http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&ix=hca&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=hurt+locker+torrent http://www.google.dk/search?aq=f&ix=hca&sourceid=chr... Or some similar search engine.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  I still think traditional TV is capitalizing on the lack of good (or overabudance of bad) recommendation engines online. Social recommendations are blurry, popularity is, well, a popularity contest and movie reviews are so subjective. Even with well-intented efforts like boxee you have (a) an anavoidable pile of juvenile nonsense and (b) too many options (and that's a problem). TV offers a simple, dumb stream of mediocre-but-curated programming. Maybe we should have that for online video too. (btw that illegal torrent u suggest is still going to take hours to download)

Craiggybear 15y ago

Perhaps a better title would be "advertising on TV is broken". No one pays any attention to it anymore. And most people I know, like me, don't even have broadcast TV. Or cable. I watch shows, yes, on DVD -- and largely on my own terms. No adverts.

tomjen3 15y ago
No it is tv that is broken. I have some channels that don't have ads at all (not even between shows) but I don't watch them, because you have to watch at a particular time, can't really pause them and the movies are years old.
- Craiggybear 15y ago
  "and the movies are years old." ... and, that's bad? Personally, most of the movies I might want to watch are certainly in black-and-white anyhow.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    Not everybody is a hipster :) I actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the pretty girl once he is done blowing things up. And recently the explosions have become more awesome, so I prefer the never movies. You keep Casablanca, if you want.
    - Craiggybear 15y ago
      I'd not think that at 52 I was anything that could be remotely described as a 'hipster'.
      - seanp2k2 15y ago
        boop boop boop "I WAS WATCHING MOVIES BEFORE YOU WERE EVEN BORN" so hipster :D
    - awj 15y ago

geophile 15y ago

It's not really TV, it's TV networks that are broken. Hulu (and other online archives) may be even more irritating than broadcast TV. It's difficult to find what you want; you are hit by download limits in the middle of a program; there are still commercials, and it's the same ones over and over and over, and the repetition can drive you nuts; browser crash means starting over sometimes, or if you can go to where you left off, you have to endure skipped commercials. I have an expensive cable package. But I am also a frequent Bittorrent user because the process of finding and watching is far preferable to the online services, and sometimes the cable on-demand service. As a result, I often "steal" via Bittorrent, content I've already paid for. Not sure whether I'll keep that expensive cable package much longer. My kids are older and know what commercials are, but they are growing up knowing that TV networks (via cable or online) are just not usable. They have now, and will expect in the future, a large selection of content, and instant delivery with no interruptions.

calloc 15y ago
Hold on ... Hulu has download limits in the middle of watching a program? I've watched Hulu from 5 AM till 5 PM almost uninterrupted, the only interruption is between shows they will say "You've been watching for 3 hours, are you sure you don't want to take a break?". That repeats every two hours or so. Yes, the commercials can be grating, and are still annoying but I think that is a small price to pay for streaming my content when I want. Also they are not NEARLY as long as the commercials on TV and if a TV commercial is really loud (I'm looking at you eHarmony commercial) and you complain they will actually do something about it. Hulu may have its limitations because of stupid studio rules, but overall the experience of watching content online with Hulu is pretty straightforward and easy.
- seanp2k2 15y ago
  See also: why Netflix is popular while Hulu sucks and is only used as a last resort after you can't find [x] on torrents.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  I think he's talking about internet bandwidth limits; e.g., you get 50 gigabytes a month, and you hit that limit after watching a few episodes.

jerf 15y ago

I would observe that in some sense this isn't just a "kid growing up with different tech gets it better than the adults" story. My wife and I both feel the exact same way about TV, in our mid-30s. We just have the historical perspective such that we don't have to ask "why". Also it's less cute when we ask why. But otherwise the same.

seanp2k2 15y ago
Yup. I've been cable-free for about 2 years now, and I'd never go back. Since Comcast "discounts" cable internet (which, by the way, is my /only/ high-speed option besides 768kbit/sec DSL -- I have the 20mbit package or whatever they're selling it as these days) if you bundle it with basic cable, it only ends up being about $1.50 cheaper to NOT have basic cable. That said, basic cable is seriously not worth $1.50/month to me; it is worth literally less than nothing IMO. In fact, they should be paying me to watch their tripe. I'll take my payments in discounts to my cable internet, TYVM.
- pixelcort 15y ago
  In some cases and at some times in the past it was actually cheaper to get the internet service when bundled with Cable TV service. In effect, some are or were somewhat paid to get it.
  - tsotha 15y ago
    The cable company pays a per-subscriber charge for come channels (most notably ESPN). For others (like HSN), the broadcaster pays the cable company. If they can get you to sign up for basic cable they're still making a bit of money, since all the ones they pay for are in higher tiers. If you have internet through your cable provider they already have to make sure the signal gets to your house and you're already in the computer, so adding you as a TV subscriber costs them nothing at all. I never watch broadcast TV, but when my internet connection goes down it's a handy troubleshooting tool - when I flip the TV on and see car commercials it means there's no cable break.
- herge 15y ago

PaulHoule 15y ago

My nine year old has never been entertained by cable or broadcast TV. On broadcast TV there is nothing but the e|i junk that is so unwatchable that the category must have been invented by the author of "four arguments for the elimination of television". On cable there's an amazing number of channels, but the only sure things are Spongebob Squarepants (yuck!) and those live action dramas by Disney about impossibly rich teenagers who have no discernable problems. At least kids in Japan get to watch animated shows about cute girls who beat up the bad guys that are formulaic but have a level of art, writing, and voice acting that make American TV programming look like the stuff I make with a cheap camcorder.

hweuifhaisuh 15y ago
>On cable there's an amazing number of channels, but the only sure things are Spongebob Squarepants (yuck!) and those live action dramas by Disney about impossibly rich teenagers who have no discernable problems. >At least kids in Japan get to watch animated shows about cute girls who beat up the bad guys that are formulaic but have a level of art, writing, and voice acting that make American TV programming look like the stuff I make with a cheap camcorder. Weeaboo

TheFuture 15y ago

Almost all my big screen watching is through Roku of mainly Netflix streaming. I cut cable over a year ago and very rarely watch network TV (NFL football games are main thing I watch over the air). I feel like the young girl every time I'm at a friends house and trying to navigate whatever cable/sat guide they have. Seriously, it's 2012 and I'm paging through this endless list of "channels" labeled by NUMBER and a CALLSIGN? 1006 WKOW-HD. 12.1 ABC. Try to watch Jeopardy and get assaulted with denture paste, hearing aides, and adult diaper commercials! What the heck is going on? It is truly astonishing how bad the UI for these set-top boxes is, combined with the process of finding out what and where the correct ESPNx channel (HD or not HD) is to watch the game. Huge potential for serious changes in this industry. I don't like to throw such a vague word like "app" around, but that is the future. ESPN will have an app that will deliver their content in the best way. The closest thing I've seen to this is the work Major League Baseball is doing on mobile and TV. They're able to provide the video/audio, but augment it with other datastream. For sports this makes so much sense.

mbreese 15y ago
The best app I've seen for this is HBO Go. It has a huge back catalog of HBO content and a revolving set of movies. It pairs great with an iPad. But, in order to get it, you still need a cable or satellite subscription (and HBO).
- tissarah 15y ago
  Absolutely agreed - phenomenal. I also have enjoyed the additional content they sometimes add for HBO Go users. Showtime has started doing this thing where you logon to their website while the show is premiering to do/see something but I've never done it because I DVR Showtime shows. Showtime had a press release that they were going to launch their own version of HBO Go but I've not see anything. I'm excited. I think premium channels like this are going to be the change.

PaulHoule 15y ago

The real issue with TV is that the audience is aging and eventually dying off. TV viewership in hours per week is pretty stable because as boomers retire and become disabled and unable to do anything else, they watch more TV. Young people, like under 50, are turning away from TV. Generation X and younger people have been falling out of love with TV for a long time. In my case I remember sharply losing interest in TV around the 1990s. Even around 2000 I felt insulted by advertising that is aimed at people who don't have money -- only medicare benefits they can spend and the hope that they can hire a ambulance chasing lawyer to make a big killing. TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it. Some day the last television viewer will die and the cable companies and networks will turn off the lights. Much like the music industry, the TV industry has been losing it's audience for a long time, and one day they will wake up and realize that their frog has been boiled -- and find somebody else to blame.

noblethrasher 15y ago
>TV for kids just sucks these days. The audience isn't kids, it's grandparents who imagine that their grandkids will be entertained by it. I am curious about what you mean by 'TV for kids'. It seems to me that 'kid shows' have been pretty good since the early nineties (Ducktales, Animaniacs, Gargoyles, the DC Animated universe cartoons). More recently: Kim Possible, Spectacular Spider-Man, Samurai Jack, Sym-Bionic Titan, Transformers Animated, the Avengers and Young Justice have been phenomenal with respect to writing, voice acting and animation. This is one area where I'm a little envious of kids these days. I grew up with cartoons made to sell toys. They get shows made to tell (good) stories. EDIT:Spelling
- joezydeco 15y ago
  And I would give credit to Disney and Viacom/Nickelodeon for trying to create entertaining sitcoms for kids. It can't be Spongebob and Phineas and Ferb 24 hours a day (although it sure seems like it). You may think it's crap, but go back and watch the sitcoms you watched as a kid (Brady Bunch for me). It's even worse than you remember.
- 15y ago

silentific 15y ago

Such a good post. Tv is broken.

recoiledsnake 15y ago

Cable TV started out with the premise that it won't have ads and slowly it started adding them. Hulu already has ads. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix started ads soon, since they seem to getting slowly crushed with the high cost of licensing content.

seanp2k2 15y ago
...and as ads increase, so does piracy. People will pay for no ads, but they won't pay for ads for very long, especially my generation.
J3L2404 15y ago
I would rather pay three times as much for Netflix than go back to watching commercials, although I may be in the minority.

SideburnsOfDoom 15y ago

And this is why this form of media is losing. Because it's worse, and any 4-year old will notice. Especially a 4-year –old. More and louder commercial won't fix the problem, it will just keep the next generation even further away. Like black-and-white silent films, it lacks basic features that the new generation is taking for granted, around user control, choice and interactivity.

killnine 15y ago

It would make me a proud parent to know that my kid doesn't know what a cable commercial is. Slightly off topic, but the messages, subliminal messages, and methods of targeting these commercials do are sickening. I think some of them and their authors should be tried for criminals. How is it okay that, for example, jewellery commercials basically attempt to trick female minds into defining love and levels of love by the metals and rocks their loved one purchases for them? How is a 5 year old supposed to know better?

TechNewb 15y ago

Bloomberg offers a great iPad app, where you can live stream, or watch episodes on demand. The future of channels are apps. I've never personally ordered cable, and grew up with out it as well.

yabai 15y ago

I have given up on most TV - especially cable TV. Almost 3 years ago my wife and I moved and decided to not startup cable TV. I setup an antenna and run MythTV, Boxee and anything else that will run on a browser + flash. I run a virtual machine for Netflix. When we started this experiment, I thought we might go running back to cable. What we discovered is that there is a ton of content available. The Mythbox nicely removes commercials. When people hear that I don't have cable, many are confused that I can receive HD programming over the air. The cable companies have done a brilliant job confusing the public into believing that you must have cable to watch TV and/or access HD content. We couldn't be happier. I challenge anyone to give up paying for cable tv. Good luck!

revelation 15y ago
This isn't about cable. It's about the whole model of unidirectional media. Dieing out, if you have not noticed.
- yabai 15y ago
  I complain about cable television in any conversation about TV!
jianshen 15y ago
Good on you! Having spent some time in hospitals with loved ones recently, I think broadcast TV (like cable) will continue to thrive until someone does a fantastic job of making a "channel lineup" application for on-demand media. I tried to set up Netflix for someone who was bed-ridden and the fact that the nurse has to keep going in and selecting the next movie after the previous one is done is just agonizing. I love Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo but at least for people with accessibility issues, "what's on" is still more convenient than "what do I want to watch".

droithomme 15y ago

There are many other things that are broken too. My fancy expensive name-brand digital TV takes a full minute to boot up from a cold start, longer than it took my tube based TV from the 1950s to warm up. Once on, it takes almost a full second to change channels while it rebuffers the stream of the channel being changed to. This prevents quickly flipping through channels to see what is on. As a result I just don't bother most of the time. Which is fine, I watch much less TV. We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.

stinkytaco 15y ago
>We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own. This drives me crazy. I have a computer hooked up to my TV (for the same reason as the OP, we basically watch just streaming or my digitized DVD collection) and every time I upgrade the display drivers, and sometimes just randomly, the display goes wonky and I have to fix it by hand. I don't have to do that with my computer monitor...
- Danieru 15y ago
  For those curious; kernel hacker Matthew Garrett wrote a great post on this subject: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html
- Raphael 15y ago
  Yeah, I don't know why AMD decided thought digital TVs would be susceptible to under-scan or over-scan.
jpdoctor 15y ago
> We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated Since there's nowhere near 720 pixels x 60 frames/sec worth of information being sent to your TV, who cares?

_feda_ 15y ago

The problem with tv for the past 50 years or so is that it has encouraged a passive relationship between culture and its consumers. It kills conversation, discourages activity, its one-sidedness is bad for people. The internet has come to the rescue, allowing people young and old to be more active participants in their own culture. Hopefully this unidirectional mode of content delivery will die off completely within in the next 50 years.

zwieback 15y ago

I think everyone agrees that commercials are annoying but I don't think TV is broken at all. After all, most of the content we stream with other means originated as TV shows or Hollywood movies. So the real question is, once the current younger generation gets older and everyone switched off their cable, how will the production of quality content be financed, other than per-view fees? When I was a kid in Germany there were three channels, all publicly financed, to a large extent via a per-household radio/TV fee. TV was only broadcasting for a few hours a day. The overall quality was very high and commercials were in a block between shows. I'd love to go back to that model but I doubt the general public would agree.

stinkytaco 15y ago
>So the real question is, once the current younger generation gets older and everyone switched off their cable, how will the production of quality content be financed, other than per-view fees? This is it. The same as music has been doing for years. It's not like there's not an existing model for this, direct to video movies have existed for a long time (though they were generally considered "low quality" and thus didn't get theater time). Netflix is already in the original content business and I think we'll see more of that. The problem then becomes the translation of content silos to the Internet. I have a Netflix subscription because it has the most stuff. I have no intention of getting a subscription to Hulu Plus or the myriad of content producers individual plans (the future HBO.com, AMC.com, etc.) Hopefully they can find a way to aggregate pay-per-view into a consistent online platform.

huggyface 15y ago

This is akin to saying that the internet is broken because some videos are prefaced by a commercial. Or HN is broken because some of the front-page are hiring ads for YC companies. I use a PVR for all of my "TV" needs (I have two large wall-mounted screens. They are great entertainment devices. I only mention that for consistency with those proudly informing that they only old some small CRT in the corner somewhere). When I get around to watching it has all of the episodes of the shows I care about. Many of them come from ShowTime, HBO, PBS or the Movie Network, having no commercials. Of course I explicitly pay for those channels individually, well outside of PBS. Other channels have a different business model, but strangely neither my children, my wife or I have any mental issue with it -- it's just the way it is. Nor do I have an issue when a play has an intermission, even though really I'd just like them to keep playing through. In some ways this reminds me a bit of this submission from the other day - http://ihnatko.com/2012/02/20/heavy-hangs-the-bandwidth-that-torrents-the-crown/ http://ihnatko.com/2012/02/20/heavy-hangs-the-bandwidth-that...

rcthompson 15y ago
The article is saying that for a child raised (mostly) on commercial-free media (Netflix), advertisements are so intrusive and annoying that the child rejects watching TV outright because of the commercials. I wonder if this is the kind of stuff that keeps advertising executives up at night. What would happen if everyone under the age of 20 thought like this (assuming that ad-free media sources still exist)?
- huggyface 15y ago
  The title "TV" refers to a physical medium. If it meant "the commercial-supported major networks", then perhaps it should have said that. Nonetheless, it is understood that children notice change. If you give your child maple syrup when they're accustomed to Aunt Jemima, they will ask you what it is. They will probably ask for their Aunt Jemima back. Children are not savants supplying higher information (and I say that as a very proud parent of four of them): They are creatures of routine and habit. A day later they would happily enjoy maple syrup, rejecting their old standby. There just isn't anything profound or particularly insightful about that observation. It doesn't merit the "TV is broken" bit.

jpdoctor 15y ago

Folks do not want to pay the amount commercial free TV would cost. Full stop. If the "investment money" ever stops supporting youtube/hulu/(insert profitless service here), then goodbye web substitute. Even The Daily Show has gone into full annoyance mode lately.

rhizome 15y ago
Folks are already paying the amount that commercial-free TV would cost, but the money is eaten up by ESPN's multi-channel presence in basic-cable packages. Yes, your cable dollars subsidize ESPN.
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  > Folks are already paying the amount that commercial-free TV would cost Not even close. Take the entire amount of advertising $$ spent on TV ($100B+) and divide by the folks watching. That is the money that people would have to shell out one way or another.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    By my top-of-head calculations: $100B advertising / ~160MM households = $625/household/year, or about $50/mo. You're right, I wasn't even close. I was way over.
    - jpdoctor 15y ago
      I said people watching. You chose to interpret that as households/year. Good luck.
      - rhizome 15y ago
        99% of households have a TV, and that number is probably from the 2000 census. What numbers do you think are more accurate?
  - hythloday 15y ago

mikebracco 15y ago

I'm baffled every time I'm watching broadcast TV and see an ad for something I would never in a million years purchase...and if the advertiser just had a couple pieces of info about me would never bother showing me that ad. I guess this will eventually come with IPTV and ad platforms for broadcast that more closely resemble targeted advertising online. The sheer inefficiency of shotgun approach broadcast advertising is crazy to me.

bicknergseng 15y ago

TV might be broken, but the inability of a child to focus on something for more than a few minutes at a time isn't the best evidence. It definitely brings up some interesting things to think about, though. First, while the attention span of adults is normally quite a bit better than that of kids, the digital age is eroding our ability to focus on one thing http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312119/Facebook-internet-wire-brain-shorten-attention-span.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1312119/Faceb.... While this may be a temporary trend as we adapt to the information overload the internet can provide, I think it's fairly safe to say that people 10 years from now will be far less likely to sit patiently watching TV than people 20 years ago. The most obvious implication from this may be that commercial advertising, rather than TV in general, is going to need to adapt. I imagine part of the reason why people under 30 are cutting the cable in increasing numbers is because they aren't willing to sit through loud, irrelevant commercials in order to watch something they don't actually want to watch. The tolerance of the consumer for TV style advertising is shrinking proportionally to the consumer's attention span. This should be good for subscription services like Netflix, and would be good for HBO/Showtime if they didn't for customers to pay for cable/sat in addition to their services.

justincormack 15y ago
Do not cite the Daily Mail. It is not a news source or source of information about science.

FredFredrickson 15y ago

So what happens when a kid who is used to TV goes to watch Netflix and the stream gets interrupted (like we all know it would on a typical hotel wi-fi network). If you've watched videos online before, you know it's just buffering, but the tv-oriented kid would do the same thing as this guy's kid did: ask if it's broken, or why we stopped it. I'm not saying that there are no problems with the way TV is presented, but to raise a child in a relatively TV-less environment, marvel at their confusion over how it works, and then come to the conclusion that TV is broken... that doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.

faboo 15y ago
My 5 year old had a much easier time understanding that Netflix needs to buffer or downgrade sometimes than why there are advertisements on television. I think that's because Netflix buffering has an explanation that directly relates to the activity itself, whereas the explanation for advertisements is a lot more abstract.

doki_pen 15y ago

Thanks for posting this, and thanks everyone for upvoting it. It's even better the 4th time it's made it to #1 on hacker news. I gained some new insight into how TV sucks and the Internet is awesome.

wpietri 15y ago

Broken for whom? Beatrix isn't the customer. She's the product being sold. TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things. Hopefully young Beatrix is an outlier like her parents and she'll never get hooked. But it could be that, like most adults, she'll get used to sitting there through the commercials, wasting 8 minutes of her life to get 22 minutes of entertainment. Plus, of course, whatever she wastes on buying things that she doesn't need.

tsotha 15y ago
>TV is only broken if the customers (advertisers) start to lose their ability to manipulate a lot of people into buying things. That's exactly what's happening, though. Most adults don't sit through commercials any more. The percentage of people who don't get their shows through the internet and don't skip over commercials with a DVR is something like 33%. I'd bet my last dollar that demographic skews elderly in a major way, too.
- wpietri 15y ago
  Interesting. Do you have a source for that? When visiting DVR-using friends, I see them watching some commercials (especially, if it's interesting, the first one of a group). And I know that some people who get their TV over the Internet end up seeing ads (e.g., Hulu, YouTube, network sites). So I suspect that a fair number of ads still get watched, but I can't quickly find any data on how many versus past years.
  - tsotha 15y ago
    I can't find the source, but I think it was on HN within the last year or so.

caycep 15y ago

they're only just now realizing this?

ilaksh 15y ago

TV is outdated, but so are a lot of more important things: cars/transportation, government, "economics", agriculture, manufacturing, infrastructure, humans, natural language.

evincarofautumn 15y ago
You’re a human, typing in a natural language, on a computer powered by the electrical infrastructure provided by his government. That computer only exists because of the manufacturing capabilities we gained during the industrial revolution 200 years ago, which, in addition to being the source of the modern economy, could not have happened if it weren’t for the rise of totalitarian agriculturalism 10,000 years ago. That 10,000 years is a pittance compared to the millions of years of human history spent focused more on hunting, gathering, and herding than on cultivating crops. The origin of language in humans is hazy, but we’ve only been around in our various forms for a few million out of the billions of years of Earth’s history. How could all of these brand new things possibly be outdated? ;)
- ilaksh 15y ago
  When is the last time you upgraded your operating system, bought a new computer, or bought a new car? The pace of technological evolution is exponential, not linear. http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns We have to operate on a day-to-day basis, not a cosmological one. We should apply current scientific knowledge on a large scale immediately. * Cars/transportation -- Where Robot Cars (Robocars) Can Really Take Us http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/ http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/ * natural language -- Problems with natural language for requirements specification http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Books/SE9/Web/Requirements/NL-problems.html http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Books/SE9/Web/Requiremen... * government -- Politicians Are Not Trained To Solve Problems http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvoh2vsQSI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvoh2vsQSI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_I9-MJKQ4c&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_I9-MJKQ4c&feature=relat... * economics -- ARE ECONOMICS A SCIENCE OF TRUTH OR AN IDEOLOGY OF POWER? http://www.futuremagazine.net/economicsiencie.html http://www.futuremagazine.net/economicsiencie.html * agriculture -- Urban Farming: Hydroponics in the City http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcBCcSLDlo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqcBCcSLDlo * manufacturing -- Hod Lipson on Programmable Matter: Shape of Things to Come http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmPLeQLdfPA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmPLeQLdfPA * humans -- not really quite outdated yet, but soon. Jeopardy! IBM Watson Day 2 (Feb 15, 2011) Part 2/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QYchgv5dMM&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QYchgv5dMM&feature=relat... * infrastructure -- Evacuated Tube Transport http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92dK_yxaKvk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92dK_yxaKvk

somedayme 15y ago

I paid for Directivo for 10+ years, long before HDTV. $100+/month. Now, I have a Samsung 55" LED with a beautiful picture that I bought online for cheap. I plugged an older Macbook Pro into it via hdmi. Couch Potato, Sick Beard, $7/month lifetime unlimited usenet account from a thanksgiving special, mplayer extended to play it all. I haven't seen a commercial in years. As the author says, if it isn't online, I don't watch it. TV isn't broken, cable companies are.

yason 15y ago

This sounds stupid but I always thought there weren't commercials for channels that you actually pay for? That the advertisements were to compensate for channels that didn't cost anything? I haven't really watched tv since the mid 90's and never in the USA so I might miss something obvious here. But where I lived, regular channels were broadcast nationally over the air and they had commercials. I always thought the popularity of cable/satellite subscription was based on you getting rid of the commercials, not paying for seeing more commercials on more channels?

sedev 15y ago
Unfortunately, that's incorrect. The cable channels, as mentioned upthread, early on promised "since we can restrict access, unlike broadcast, we can just charge people and we won't show ads." That's not true in 2012. It is extremely, extremely rare to find television without frequent and intrusive advertising. HBO has less toxic advertising practices and better content, which is why you see them mentioned so often in this context. Basically, the main television networks are all double-dipping (cf Marco Arment: http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/double-dipping-ads-in-ipad-magazines http://www.marco.org/2011/10/27/double-dipping-ads-in-ipad-m... ).

rogerclark 15y ago

this story seems a bit manufactured. i get that the kid makes the whole thing more endearing and maybe more poignant, but the writing seems inauthentic and intentionally crafted to drive home the obvious point (a point that every tech-savvy person in our modern world already agrees with)

kgo 15y ago

I made nachos for my niece once. Put Doritos on a cookie sheet, smothered them in cheese, and put them in the broiler. She thought they were weird and broken because I didn't use the normal plain-style tortilla chips. Her mom made her a new batch the right way. Young children have a tenancy to think that the rest of the world is exactly like their home, because that home is their world. Then when they experience the outside world things seem strange. Like the above anecdote, I remember thinking it was weird when a neighbor made Taco Salad with Frito's instead of Doritos. I remember how weird my grandmaa's house seemed all around when visiting. The food was different, the board games were different, it was all strange. I think this anecdote is the same. Its not so much a case of the wisdom of the children, but just another example of a child not understanding that the entire world isn't like their sheltered existence. [I don't intend sheltered as a pejorative here.] I'm sure there were plenty of other things on the trip that seemed broken, but none happened to be as evil as commercial TV.

rmc 15y ago
That is true in general, but in 30 years time, do you think the majority of people will be using traditional TV schedules, or will it be watch on demand? The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
tsotha 15y ago
Wait, you use Doritos to make nachos? Weirdo.
- sutterbomb 15y ago
  And fritos for taco salad? I'm so very confused.
SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
I disagree, in that I also think it's a terrible experience to have to put up with commercials. There's thinking something is bad because it's different, and then there's thinking it's bad because it SUCKS. I grew up on commercial TV. Now I can't stand commercials, and I think HULU is absolutely insane for not having a "no commercial" tier -- and for charging you and STILL running the commercials. I would SO rather pay for my media than have commercials interrupt it. It's not a kid being uncomfortable with an unfamiliar situation; it IS annoying to have your program interrupted. And I'm not even militant about advertising -- I don't run ad blockers, and I even click on ads from time to time. What I can't forgive is people wasting my TIME. I have a finite amount of that (and why am I posting on Hacker News..? sigh...), and people showing me ads for things that I have ABSOLUTELY no interest in is nothing but a waste of my time AND their advertising money. HULU has a little button where you can tell them an ad isn't relevant to you, but it seems as if they ignore it. What a waste...

finnw 15y ago

I'm in the UK. Until a few years ago I didn't really mind ads - I would happily sit through them until my show came back. Then in mid-2009 gocompare.com launched their ad campaign (with Wynne Evans singing.) They pushed it really hard - it was on nearly every show on every channel. The song was so irritating that I got into the habit of muting the TV during the commercial breaks. If I had been a TV network executive, I would have refused to run those ads. They are so awful that they encourage viewers to avoid ads, and I'll bet it has decreased revenue from other advertisers. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_-9QFvhQWo&noredirect=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_-9QFvhQWo&noredirect=1

nessus42 15y ago

I have a TiVo and TV works just fine for me. (It's hard to fathom now, however, how I ever coped with TV before getting a TiVo, which I've had for more than a decade now.)

niels_olson 15y ago

My favorite experience is when the iPad runs out of batteries (blessedly more frequently now) and the kids realize they have nothing to do but read. Throw away your TV? So 2006. You want to take care of your kids? Cancel your streaming video accounts. I like Shiela Ash's question about cigarettes: "Why would you pay for something that goes up in smoke?!" Modified for streaming: "Why would you pay to rot your kids' brains?!"

noahlt 15y ago

I could imagine a similar and opposite article, "Netflix is broken", written from the perpective from an older person instead of a younger one: Why do I need to sign in? Why do I have to choose something to watch – why doesn't it just let me start watching immediately? Why is it so hard to change channels? Why do I have to watch things on my small computer screen instead of my large television screen?

CraigRood 15y ago
I'm waiting for the articles on the low bitrate/high resolution video. Going to be the whole MP3 vs FLAC all over again.
moheeb 15y ago
If Netflix had a 'random' button it would be their greatest innovation ever.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Sometimes I end up picking or asking my girlfriend for random numbers just to shuffle TNG episodes, since that's how I'm used to seeing it.
Tooluka 15y ago
Why do I need sign a cable TV contract? On a paper? Requesting some people to make a draft and fetch me it with a decoder, 3 day before I can actually watch anything? What's a decoder anyway? Why do I need to BUY it? Even though I already have a brand new TV? What do you mean a GOOD decoder is 2-3 times more expensive? And it is forever bound to a certain cable provider? Why, it's just some generic hardware? Why is it SD? Do you aware that we have FullHD stuff for a decade already? Oh, you do have HD? 2-4 channels out of 130? And my decoder doesn't apply? What, even GOOD decoder doesn't apply? So I need this card which is more expensive than GOOD decoder? And card only fits about 20% TVs on the market? Etc. etc. The list goes on indefinitely...

chemist 15y ago

Older people might think Netflix is broken, but the fact is they'll be dead soon and with them goes their opinion that the old way of television was better. That being said, most of us probably know both sides of the argument pretty well, and I've got to say that I like the newer, streaming versions of television better.

colonel_panic 15y ago

Nobody's mentioned tiling? And then also tiling. And then tiling and more tiling, and then the good part is coming up and--tiling. And here's the big play and it looks like they might just make a touchdow--tiling. I miss analog.

cenuij 15y ago

Commercial television is a horrible user experience. Public service broadcasting in the UK is slightly less horrible. It's quality is declining as the BBC has tried to spread itself across a multitude of markets at the same time as trying to keep the license fee under control. The bias of the BBC has always been in dispute. The right wing think the BBC is left leaning (because by their simple ratonale anything state funded is). The left wing want to keep the BBC out of the hands of the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The Scots, Welsh and Irish see the BBC as a propaganda machine for Westminster. However, regardless of it's flaws, the BBC is probably the premier broadcaster of quality television on the planet; though I fear too many changes from idealogical government intervention will change this for the worse.

joejohnson 15y ago

I'm sure most of that didn't happen but it's a cute story to drive a tired point.

jrockway 15y ago

Yes it is. The problem with TV is that advertisers have a lot more money than you do, so advertisers get to dictate how TV works. I'm looking forward to a world where people produce content and I give them money to watch it. It works for the porn industry, so why not everything else? (Probably the same reason why our cell phones don't treat voice and data as the bits they are. There is more money to be made for the middlemen by offering "value add" instead of a "dumb pipe". And there's one thing middlemen do well: keeping themselves alive at the expense of everyone else.) In the mean time, I'll just pirate everything. That cuts out the middleman!

pash 15y ago

In the last week or so, it's become clear that Google is planning to offer some sort of IPTV service over its fiber network in Kansas City when it comes online later this year. [0] It will be interesting to see how disruptive their offering will be. Even just selling programming a la carte would be a huge improvement over what the cable companies offer, but I have a feeling Google will (eventually) do more than just that. 0. http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/22/3444862/google-giving-stronger-signal.html http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/22/3444862/google-giving-s...

ericng 15y ago

Some people have mentioned the cable boxes are the issues but no one has mentioned Scientific Atlanta by name. If I'm not mistaken they have been producing horrible boxes for multiple carriers for years! As a Cablevision/Optonline subscriber, I find that using their iOS app is way ahead of using the actual cable box interface. Is it IR that just makes the interface slow or is there some other hardware constraint that?

jsz0 15y ago
Most cable set tops have dedicated decryption, video/audio decoding chips so the main CPU available for running the UI is very weak by design. Cisco & Motorola make these set tops pretty much by spec of what the big cable providers want. They don't want a general purpose platform and truly just don't understand why they might want a better user interface. Only in the last year or so have these set tops started to get faster but they are still gimped by the guide software the cable providers use. They usually opt for consistency over quality. The same guide that runs on a 2012 set top needs to work on a 1997 set top.

vacri 15y ago

I then do what I should have simply done in the first place. I hook up the iPad to the free hotel wifi and hand it to her. She fires up the Netflix app, chooses a show, and she is happy. No. You shouldn't have. Thanks for making the free hotel wifi choked for everyone by pulling down a long-term video. What you should have done was bring along some videos of your own.

evo_9 15y ago

Advertising needs to be turned upside in the DVR/Digital streaming era. Imagine if the show you watched ran ad-free, and instead simply had a 'Sponsored By' section on the shows start page (basically a newly designed 'landing page' for each tv show). Then we viewers would simply choose to watch the ad's when we/if we wanted. And even if we didn't watch an ad, just seeing a Tide logo on that page would cause some to buy their product ('cool they sponsor Family Guy...' for example). The thing that advertisers don't seem to understand is that we consumers are actually interested in the right ad's. I would choose to watch the new trailer for Game of Thrones - Season Two for example. Or an add for the new Honda Element, if I were shopping or just curious what the new model looked like. All the sponsored by ads could be google-style customized to the viewer, and the view-rate would likely be higher than it is now where I DVR skip pretty much all ad's since there is no easy way for me to know what is being shown. On top of all that, advertisers would be able to know exactly how many people were actually watching their ads. They could even add in interactive 'like/dislike' voting to further determine the effectiveness of the ad. I thought of all this 5-6 years ago when DVR's really got popular. It seemed to me an obvious way to 'evolve' TV, and I'm pretty surprised something like this hasn't already happend. I guess it's expecting too much from an industry that is used to just shoveling ads at us from all angles, the idea of 'choice' is probably pretty scary/imposible for them. Maybe this is the way Apple intends to crack TV?

charlieok 15y ago

I act just like that four year old now when I'm around a "normal" tv. It had been long enough that I decided to simply go in assuming that tv must be fixed by now, and I can pick a show from a menu, netflix/hulu style, and get what I want immediately. I went through the motions, and had an entertaining exchange with my sister. Something like: Me: "I just selected 'Modern Family'. Why is 'Modern Family' not playing now? I just see a short description and no 'play' button." Her: "Don't you remember how tv works? It's not on right now, this is just a tv guide" Me: "I guess tv is worthless. I hope nobody paid any money for this" I wasn't being deliberately obtuse. I was genuinely surprised at how much it sucked, and I really do not understand why so many people pay so much money for it.

rahim 15y ago

For all the folks that still watch broadcast television (I do): starting in December 2012, the "CALM Act" takes effect, restricting the use of louder than normal commercials. http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-rules-restricting-loud-commercials http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-rules-restricting-lou...

mscrivo 15y ago

It's unfortunate that windows media center hasn't caught on in a bigger way. I use it on my casual home theater and my larger more serious home theater. I have a channel master 4221 antenna that feeds into 2 HD Homerun tuners and clearQAM feeding into a couple more. This gives me the ability to record/watch 4 channels at once from any networked media center in the house. Media center has a fantastic interface that aggregates all the channels available across all tuners and hides the complexity. It allows you to easily record series and find shows across any of the tuners, all while looking beautiful. In addition to the great tv viewing experience, there is the wonderful media browser addon that beautifully indexes your digital movie collection and plugins like showanalyzer to automatically skip commercials in recordings. With TMT 5, I get a blu-ray player built right into media center too. I honestly could not imagine a better setup. The only issue is that the initial setup is way too hard and time consuming. But the result can't be beat right now.

verisimilitude 15y ago
That channel master 4221 is an AWESOME antenna. I didn't have a car when I bought mine, so I had to walk with it for 2 miles to my apartment. I set it up in the closet (which is completely not recommended... multipath, etc., etc.) and still got unreal picture quality on my computer.

sfseth 15y ago

i can completely relate. it is a legit challenge to describe advertising-funded media. there was once a concept of an editorial firewall, which seems cute in an antique sense of the word, possibly believable circa 1971. advertising, for one reason or another, seems to have the effect of shaping whatever it funds towards a decreased intellectual stimulus, ie lower curiosity. there's something to think about with respect to Super Bowl ads being the most valuable on TV.

jconley 15y ago

My 3 yr old kids had exactly the same reaction to a nearly identical scenario. Though, we subscribed to cable TV after my father in law threatened to not come visit any more if he couldn't watch his live sports with the clicker... Publishers/networks are broken. The industry needs something to happen to it like Steam, then Facebook, and finally Apple did to video game publishers. Take the (old) middle men out of the loop. Let content producers "sell" directly to consumers.

petermcd 15y ago

Here is how we are trying to fix TV with HTML5 video support, so any video web site can get on TVs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpBZ1xdcC1Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpBZ1xdcC1Q The folks at PandoDaily ran a nice article about us, too: http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/23/nthcode-wants-to-bring-the-internet-to-everything-plugged-into-your-tv/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/23/nthcode-wants-to-bring-the-...

jwr 15y ago

I had exactly the same problem with my daughter (now 3 years old). She grew up playing with an iPhone and an iPad. The TV was broken in two ways: 1. Touching the screen (and swiping) didn't do anything. 2. The concept of having to wait until a specific time to see a show was completely alien. Thank heavens we at least don't have commercial breaks in kids programs (Poland).

franze 15y ago

once upon a time i visited my father's house. when he started watching TV my 3 year old ran to the televisionscreen, tried to swipe it, pushed on some things on the screen, even did a two arm multi arm gesture to minimize the current screen - nothing happened - he turned away quite bored, i was very proud.