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Ugh. I think it's very Brave New Worldish that half of our global telecommunications grid is saturated by people watching TV.
by ryandvm 12y ago
Ugh. I think it's very Brave New Worldish that half of our global telecommunications grid is saturated by people watching TV.
- opendais 12y agoWe are in the Brave New World, my friend. That is just the open internet. Now add all those lovely people who watch cable, satellite. ;) http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/americans-spend-34-hours-week-watching-tv-nielsen-numbers-article-1.1162285 http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/americans... People spend more time watching TV as they do working on average. [34 + 3 = 37] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm 34.5 hour work week average
- snowwrestler 12y agoIt's partly structural; video content just takes up a lot more bits and bytes. Even if you could somehow find a movie and a novel of equal positive social value, the movie would take up orders of magnitude more network capacity than the novel.
- vectorpush 12y agoWhy? Doesn't that seem a little arbitrary? Streaming video just happens to utilize a lot of bandwidth. If the state of things were such that current netflix activity only utilized 5% instead of 50%, people would still be watching the same amount of netflix, but the statistic wouldn't seem as effective for comparison to a dystopia. Further, netflix watchers are almost entirely composed of former/would-be TV watchers who ultimately end up spending less time in front of the tube because they avoid commercials entirely (adding up to a ton of time in aggregate) as well as at their leisure instead of when the TV guide demands they stop what they're doing to catch their show.
- driverdan 12y agoI bet amateur radio operators said the same thing when TV stations took some of their frequencies away.