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Here's a question for my fellow amateur economists: What happens to the quality of broadcast television when you increase the supply of broadcast channel-hours
by SiVal 15y ago
Here's a question for my fellow amateur economists: What happens to the quality of broadcast television when you increase the supply of broadcast channel-hours by a factor of 50 and you don't increase the supply of viewers at all?
I used to watch TV, like most people. Then, in the 1990's, the number of channels started increasing. More options, great. Twice as many channels did allow for more specialization, so maybe there were twice as many things I wanted to watch. When it reached four times as many channels, though, there were still only twice as many things I wanted to watch. Ten times as many channels, and now I wasn't sure if there were even twice as many as in the old days, because the budgets for the good shows were being spread among more shows to provide vehicles for more ads in all those new broadcast channel-hours.
Then, along came TiVo. Ah, TV was fun again. I could skim the cream. Couldn't imagine life without it. But as the years passed, the things I grabbed with TiVo were losing quality, too, seemingly bleeding budget to the shows "out there" that my TiVo and I ignored.
Then, my TV set broke. I assumed I'd have to get a new one quickly because, of course, everyone had to have a TV, right? I was sure I'd go crazy without it.
But I didn't. As time passed, I found I grew less motivated to get a new one, not more.
Well, after years of no TV, we finally got one a few weeks ago, so we wouldn't have to gather 'round the laptop for Netflix and slide shows of family vacations. The image is spectacular. But I can't believe what I'm so clearly seeing. They may call themselves The Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, History Channel, Food Network, Science Channel, or whatever, but they're all "Paid Programming", reality for rednecks, and pseudoscience for suckers, punctuated by screaming ads.
Even the islands of quality have clearly suffered extreme beach erosion.
But at least DVR technology has improved. Sorry, JUST KIDDING. You'd think that after years of Moore's Law, Comcast could make a cable box that didn't act as though I was waking it from a nap with each key press. You'd think that a product called an "HD DVR" would have an HD interface (wouldn't you?), instead of one with the display resolution of the lower half of a Nintendo DS. You'd think with so few needles hidden in the haystack of broadcasting, their interface would help you navigate the guide and find shows to watch, but apparently nobody at Comcast HQ has ever used Amazon to find a book.
Either that or they never watch TV.
- rdtsc 15y agoI have a TV but I am not using it to watch cable broadcast. I have cable but just because it came in a stupid bundle with the internet. So the TV is there but it is used to watch Netflix, Youtube, Amazon and Hulu videos. It is used for games, skype (there is a camera attached to it), also used to browse pictures (since it has a better resolution and color profile than my laptop). And I have noticed the same effect in respect to commercials. I cannot stand watching them and refuse to watch anything that suddenly interrupts and starts showing commercials (so I stopped using Hulu eventually as well because of it). Extended family members think I am crazy for being so "fussy" and I think they are crazy for putting up with annoying commercials.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoI'm in the same boat. Watching TV at my parents is so annoying. Not worth it at all.
- Retric 15y agoVideo games and the internet killed TV. Going from 3 to 300 channels did not help. What really cut into their budget was a steady drop in viewership over time as new toys simply become more compelling than TV. Reality TV is simply what happened when keep cutting the budget. PS: Seinfeld reportedly turned down a $5 million per-episode offer to continue the show for a 10th year. You can put on a full season of a reality TV show for that.
- DanI-S 15y agoSome validation: In the UK, the BBC has a pretty fixed budget, a pretty fixed (low) number of channels and a pretty fixed audience. They have continued to produce a high quality output of world-class educational and entertainment TV for a good chunk of the last century. They also managed to build a free streaming service superior to Hulu, and a bunch of great websites. It costs $230 per year ($19 per month). And there will never be any ads.
- DanBC 15y agoLegally I don't need a licence but I buy one anyway.
- DanI-S 15y agoI'm British, but I live in California, and I'm eagerly awaiting the day that I can pay monthly for BBC iPlayer (their streaming service). There are sketchy proxy services available, but it feels terrible to be paying a third party and effectively stealing the content.
- cjrp 15y agoiPad only, but I guess it's a start: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14322604 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14322604
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- cdh 15y agoOn the other hand, they could easily provide paid service internationally but choose not to. It's disingenuous enough when the word 'stealing' is re-purposed in discussions about copyright infringement, since it is very doubtful that every copy of a shared file resulted in an actual loss. In this case, though, it seems easy enough to establish that the BBC has provided no way to compensate them for viewing their content from the United States. You might be "stealing" bandwidth in some sense, but I don't think it's fair to characterize the content as stolen in this case. The third party (VPN/proxy provider) is paid for network access just like you pay an ISP, not for the content itself.
- shalmanese 15y agoAccording to most people who follow TV closely, it's lead to a TV renaissance. Most people agree that, post-Sopranos, we've been living in a golden age of television with shows like The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, Community & Louie all being an order of magnitude better than what's gone before it. We're currently suffering from a glut of amazing television and if you haven't been paying attention, that's your fault, not TVs.
- Tloewald 15y agoThe tv shows are great, but the networks and broadcast model are broken. The whole argument about content is missing the point of the original article, which uses a clever slightly askew title to draw in readers.
- eyemac 15y ago> Ten times as many channels, and now I wasn't sure if there were even twice as many as in the old days. I dislike the fact that they make such a big deal about the number of channels available. DirectTV, for example, offers between 140 and 285 channels! Who would want to flip through that many channels?!
- tsotha 15y agoMy dad has DirectTV. Sure, it has loads of channels. But once you subtract out all the PPV channels, the really narrow special interest channels (the marlin fishing channel) and the holy rollers there's only twenty or so you'd want to watch, depending on your interests.
- jswinghammer 15y agoWell in terms of economics what you're talking about is more specialization and niche audiences being served. HBO made itself into the network to watch smart television during the last decade. Right now that's less true as other networks figured out that people like smart things. I'd say if you were not watching "The Wire" or "Six Feet Under" that you're missing out on something rather interesting. "The Wire" was unique partially because it was like a very long, very good movie in terms of quality and respect for the audience. There's so much good television now that I don't have patience for the argument that TV is worthless. I don't turn on the television except to watch something specific but when I do I find the quality seems to get better year after year even with my favorite shows ending. More shows are willing to experiment and try to reach new audiences. I won't speak to the shows on Discovery or whatever since they sound dumb to me but the shows with actual plot and characters are better than ever.
- ericabiz 15y agoYou know TiVos are still around, right? I'm pretty happy with my Series 3 (lifetime subscription.) Just cloned and upgraded the hard drive in it so it should last many more years to come. Works fine with Comcast or any other cable provider--you just have to pay for them to provision cable cards. As a bonus, it also works fine with an antenna.
- epscylonb 15y agoThe cost of creating the content has come down too, people tend to talk about this more in the context of film but it applies equally to TV too.