[HN Gopher] Why TV Lost (2009)
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Why TV Lost (2009)
Author : zuhayeer
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-12-09 06:49 UTC (1 days ago)
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| julienchastang wrote:
| TV did not lose (just the opposite). We live in a Golden Era of
| an incredible abundance of great TV (including a large selection
| of foreign shows which was never possible before). Moreover it is
| a better business model and content is higher quality (in
| general). Also, I still enjoy antenna TV because of high def
| broadcasts which involve less image compression.
| C19is20 wrote:
| Where (what country) are you talking about?
| leephillips wrote:
| Digital broadcast used to be the best image source available to
| watch on your TV. As you say, far better than cable or
| streaming because of the lack of compression. Is that still the
| case?
| ghaff wrote:
| Antenna tv isn't an option for many of us. The context of the
| piece is clearly broadcast TV. Obviously the general format is
| going strong.
| mpalmer wrote:
| Higher quality in general? No way. There's way, way too many
| streaming shows that aim for the middle. Tons of
| reality/competition shows, tons of superhero shows where dialog
| and plot take a backseat to looking cool. TONS of garbage
| animation and children's shows.
|
| From where I sit, it's way easier today than 5 years ago to
| find something _new_ to watch, but way harder to find something
| great.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Discoverability is real problem. But even then we have more
| prestige, high-quality TV being created today than a few
| decades ago.
| rhino369 wrote:
| We are in a silver age of TV right now.
|
| The golden age was caused by cable networks venturing hard
| into original programing and it started right around the
| Sopranos. But the golden age ended 5-7 years ago as talent
| got spread too thin, the number of shows exploded, and the
| streaming services started pivoting to mass entertainment
| rather than critical acclaim.
|
| But prior to the golden age, TV was very lowest common
| denominator. Almost everything aimed for the middle. Of
| course, there were great shows in all eras, but TV is much
| best post-2000 than pre-2000.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's anecdotal but as a kid we had japanese anime on tv.
| There was a surprising amount of quality (considering the
| tech used for production). And some animes like saint seiya,
| have .. to my half educated ears.. world class OST [0].
| Others like Space Adventure Cobra also featured very fancy
| jazz funk. It's somehow unbelievable that at the time,
| companies would allocate money for such features. Maybe it
| was the spirit of the era.. a kind of spiritual drive in the
| air (new technology, promises of the post war future, rising
| tv market) making people doing their best.
|
| And I can't help thinking that this energy is gone. It's
| done, known, technology made everything available so there's
| no real drive needed to try setting up a show and
| broadcasting (an few iphones could do).
| nindalf wrote:
| Rose tinted glasses. I too have watched anime since I was a
| kid and the quality of what they're making in the last few
| years beats what I grew up with. Animation quality, plot
| complexity and diversity, soundtracks, voice acting -
| everything is as good or better. Compare anime that have
| been remade, like Fruits Basket. The recent version is
| vastly superior.
|
| Look at the top 50 anime on MyAnimeList, probably the most
| used anime site. (https://myanimelist.net/topanime.php).
| This would be the equivalent of IMDb top 250.
|
| - pre 2005 - 8
|
| - 2006-10 - 5
|
| - 2011-15 - 10
|
| - 2016 to date - 27
|
| You'd expect some recency bias but not to this extent
| unless recent anime was really good. I've seen most of
| these and they certainly deserve to be up there.
|
| Look, I don't doubt that you enjoyed shows from when you
| were a kid. I was obsessed with dragon ball z as a kid. But
| try watching it now, it's just not that good. Nostalgia
| makes them better in our memories than they actually were.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I didn't mention dbz btw. If you have soundtracks of
| those I listed, feel free to spam me.
|
| I admit having next to no knowledge of today, beside a
| few returns from people watching animes (less positive
| than you). And in any case I don't think SS OST is bound
| to relativity, it's really instrumentally and
| harmonically extraordinary. I'd place it near or even
| above John Williams...
| nindalf wrote:
| Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood. The best anime by any
| measure. The soundtrack is extraordinary.
|
| #1 all time on MyAnimeList and #19 all time on IMDb.
|
| By the way I know you didn't mention DBZ. It was an
| example of a show that I thought was incredible as a
| child and simply doesn't hold up today. I speculate that
| some of your favourites could be the same.
| Jcowell wrote:
| In my opinion Hiroyuki Sawano blesses any anime he
| participates in. Truly a master of his craft.
| marstall wrote:
| more options at the high end, I'd agree with the general
| point. check out the Topic app, which distributes a highly
| curated set of quality foreign shows. Insane level of quality
| across the board.
| bloat wrote:
| When did TV lose? In the UK the most popular show on a non-
| traditional channel is in tenth place behind BBC and ITV shows.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/nov/30/squid-g...
| krallja wrote:
| I bought a new TV about the time this article came out. I think
| I've watched maybe a dozen shows on it via the tuner. Every
| single other thing has been either optical media, gaming, or
| streaming.
|
| The replacement I bought this year will probably never have
| anything connected to its coax jack.
| authed wrote:
| We are heading back toward the "TV" era... Where speech is
| controlled/censored 98% of the time. Take for example /r/politics
| where 10-25% of daily front page posts are talking against Trump
| and anyone going against their ideology will get banned.
| krapp wrote:
| >We are heading back toward the "TV" era... Where speech is
| controlled/censored 98% of the time.
|
| That's an odd assertion to make when you're talking about
| Reddit, where anyone can fork a subreddit at any time, or even
| the web where anyone can launch a website for free or without
| much expense that can be seen by almost anyone on Earth, or
| even Donald Trump whose every word and deed still makes
| headline news and who is currently launching his own multimedia
| platform.
|
| Speaking of which, Trump and his followers have to be the least
| censored "censored" political group in history. They're
| constantly shouting from every social media platform and every
| comment section about how censored they are. It's ridiculous.
| nverno wrote:
| Trump is banned from at least Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube-
| so it's not like Trump supporters have zero basis for their
| complaints. I think these platforms are generally considered
| mainstream, so being forced out of them can be pretty
| impactful censorship. How many platforms have Biden, Obama,
| or any previous president been banned from? This censorship
| of major political players is unprecedented in US history
| afaik.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I presume Trump supporters are all about keeping the
| government out of private business matters, so they do seem
| to have zero basis for their complaints.
| krapp wrote:
| Trump wasn't banned for his political beliefs, he was
| banned for violating the TOS. Trump's supporters
| conveniently forget that he was allowed to run rampant
| across social media for four years and given far more
| leniency than anyone else, and of course they're pushing
| the narrative that his ban was part of some vast leftist
| conspiracy, but the reason he was banned and Biden, Obama
| and others weren't is because Trump was raving like a
| lunatic and seemed like he was about to start a civil war,
| and Biden and Obama have done nothing of the sort.
|
| And what has been the impact been of Trump's ban? He's
| still perfectly capable of getting his message out. His
| followers are perfectly willing to move to non-mainstream
| sites like Parler and Gab, and they're still all over the
| mainstream sites to boot. He's still the overwhelming
| favorite for the GOP in 2024, and he's starting a social
| media platform and possibly a streaming TV deal. Trump
| simply not being President anymore has had a bigger
| chilling effect than being deplatformed.
|
| As always, the right's hatred of the left has led them to
| overplay their hand. It's obvious to everyone that neither
| Trump nor his supporters are oppressed, suppressed or
| censored in any meaningful way, and certainly not to the
| degree that they claim.
| nverno wrote:
| > It's obvious to everyone that neither Trump nor his
| supporters are oppressed, suppressed or censored in any
| meaningful way, and certainly not to the degree that they
| claim.
|
| Well, I'm not a Trump supporter, and have no horses in
| the left/right race- however, it seems obvious to me that
| there is censorship involved, given Trump is literally
| banned from those platforms. Anecdata- the only time I
| ever saw anything Trump had to say was on Twitter, and
| since his banning, he might as well not exist in my own
| infosphere. It's amazing to watch the pretzels people tie
| themselves in trying to justify their ideology.
| authed wrote:
| I wish that mega corps would be required to be dumb pipes
| like ISPs and let law enforcement make requests to take
| stuff down.
| nindalf wrote:
| Use /r/Conservative then? It's not like you don't have options.
|
| I really hope you're not going to complain "I tried commenting
| on HN but I got downvoted"
| authed wrote:
| This is just one of thousands of examples...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/ is surely better
| then the one you mentioned (but it gets a lot less exposure).
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| ...use a different website then?
| authed wrote:
| Another example is Google heavily censoring search
| results.... it is spreading everywhere. The top websites all
| do it.
|
| I do use Yandex and other websites when what I'm looking for
| is hidden (but the list of websites that aren't censoring (or
| are censoring different stuff) is shrinking).
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| the stuff they're censoring is like... white supremacy and
| threats of violence?
| brightball wrote:
| TiVo took the commercial value out of everything except live
| programming (mostly sports). Netflix took what was left.
|
| It's the same reason the TV money start pouring into college
| football contracts around that time.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Why TV Lost_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501696 -
| March 2009 (183 comments)
|
| _Why TV Lost (2009)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2010956 - Dec 2010 (24
| comments)
| drc500free wrote:
| Truly enjoying the "this is overblown" vs "this Justin.tv thing
| is about to steamroll them" comments.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| TV really seems to be in its twilight. When I happen to chance to
| watch it, I'm seeing basically the same 4 commercials and they
| are all geared toward elderly populations. No one I know has
| plain broadcast TV on in their home anymore.
|
| I wonder at what point will it become unprofitable to operate a
| TV station. In my location at least half of the OTA channels are
| religious broadcasting stations. Will non-profits take them over
| completely at some point?
| gruez wrote:
| > Will non-profits take them over completely at some point?
|
| Can a given market really support multiple PBS-like stations?
| ghaff wrote:
| Generally they can barely support one. Also while everyone
| thinks of Nova and Masterpiece Theater a lot of local PBS
| content is cheap talking head shows or at least it was
| historically.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| The religious channels are not PBS. "support" is not relevant
| if the goal is propaganda (religious or political).
| commandlinefan wrote:
| HBO just announced a new season of "Sex and the City" on HBO
| Max. It occurred to me that although I've never watched an
| episode of the original series all the way through, I know all
| the characters names and their basic story arcs - the show was
| just part of popular culture when it was new and you couldn't
| help but hear about it. There's nothing like that now. My kids
| couldn't even tell you what shows are on - I doubt they could
| even name the broadcast stations.
| leephillips wrote:
| Really? I don't have that impression--part of popular
| culture. I tried to watch it once and lasted about four
| minutes. I've heard people refer to it a few times, but know
| nothing about the characters nor anything else. Contrast the
| Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends, for examples (the last also
| dreck that I never watched, but recognize as part of popular
| culture).
| mFixman wrote:
| I don't know what you are talking about. I can tell you the
| rough plot of Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Tiger King
| despite never having seen a single episode of those series.
|
| Shows are still part of popular culture, it's just streaming
| instead of timed TV.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Hm, ok I guess you've got a point there. I took the post as
| being about "why TV Lost (to streaming services)", which I
| consider Netflix to be one of. But you're right - those are
| more or less "shows" the way "Friends"s was, more than
| Logan Paul and PewDiePie and the other stuff I'm too old to
| "get" that have replaced TV in popular culture.
| thrower123 wrote:
| When I watch football, I catch some ads for the current CBS
| and Fox shows that are in the old money spots of weeknight
| primetime. They look absolutely awful, and I've never met
| anybody who has ever admitted to watching any of them. It
| feels a little bit like the Rick and Morty interdimensional
| cable episode.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Those CBS shows just look so wildly awfully. Last year they
| showed ads for the queen laitfa cop show or like the big
| bang theory at the end of seemingly every single
| commercial. I have to assume that only old people are
| watching this stuff because there are just so many better
| options.
| jedberg wrote:
| I lament this fact often. We no longer have a shared cultural
| experience around media. Very occasionally something pops up
| that everyone seems to know about, like Squid Game or The
| Mandalorian. But it isn't like the old days, when anyone
| would talked to saw the latest episode of I Love Lucy or
| Friends or Seinfeld.
|
| There are so many choices and it's so fractured that there
| are no "big winners" anymore. But that's also a good thing,
| because the big winners weren't winners because they were
| good, they were winners because a network executive decided
| they would be winners.
| kikokikokiko wrote:
| "In my location at least half of the OTA channels are religious
| broadcasting stations. Will non-profits take them over
| completely at some point?"
|
| I don't know how the situation is in other countries, but down
| here in Brazil, 2/3 of OTA channels have become religious
| channels in the last 10-15 years.
|
| And those channels are DEFINITELY FOR PROFIT. It's a disgusting
| scam, ripping off the elderly, the poor and the overall dumbest
| segments of the population. I have nothing against religion,
| I'm not religious myself but I can see how it can be beneficial
| for a lot of people. Having said that, the religious channels
| as they exist in Brazil should just disappear, and the world
| would be a better place. TV must die, it serves no useful
| purpose anymore.
| panzagl wrote:
| I wonder how much it costs to run an OTA station, ignoring
| content costs. I wonder if there's room for truly local
| stations to emerge.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Live sports is really carrying cable subscription packages at
| this point, and I get the feeling that a lot of people who
| watch it would consider it a bridge too far if the major sports
| leagues decided to ever adopt a full pay per view model.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I have to think live sports will move to streaming services
| that package betting on the same screen and allow different
| announcers. There's just so much money to be made off
| controlling gambling.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| But the format of a cable subscription doesn't need to match
| current form factor. For the past few seasons we've bough
| Youtube TV during the NHL playoffs, and canceled after. I'd
| just as happily pay NHL directly (probably a lower cost for
| me, and higher margin for them) but their current offering
| has blackouts for exactly the games I want to see. Another
| example, we buy Disney+, but not their ESPN package. But we
| would it they had coverage of the teams/leagues we care
| about.
|
| Really the blackout exclusions that leagues have that allow
| them get higher cable revenue deals are the problem. But if
| that dynamic shifts and the deals are exclusive, I would
| expect the league-direct streaming services to become
| competitive.
| kfarr wrote:
| > The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things
| are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly,
| online. But they're still dragging their heels.
|
| True, it took them about a decade for legacy TV networks to
| finally start offering first-party streaming apps (Peacock, CBS
| All Access, etc.)
| iso1631 wrote:
| Back in 1988, at the height of TV viewing, these scene on Star
| Trek TNG seemed massively futuristic. Imagine TV ending by 2040
|
| DATA: Is there something wrong?
|
| SONNY: Wrong? Only that your computer here fixed about the best
| martini I have ever had. I just might get to like this place.
| Let's see if the Braves are on. How do you turn on this teevee?
|
| RIKER: TV?
|
| SONNY: Yeah, the boob tube. I'd like to see how the Braves are
| doing after all this time. Probably still finding ways to lose.
|
| DATA: I believe he means television, sir. That particular form of
| entertainment did not last much beyond the year two thousand
| forty.
|
| Yet here we are, 24 years on, with just 18 years to go to that
| 2040 date, and it looks like it may well work out about right -
| as in TV as a passive viewing habit (rather than actively seeking
| out an episode of the Mandalorian or Tom Scott or what-have-you)
| rhacker wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if someone from the future really did come
| back to write some of those shows.
|
| Look what was predicted for 2024 from DS9 in 1995:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Past_Tense_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Sp...
|
| "Sanctuary Districts" sounds like "Sanctuary City" - very
| bizarre naming. Not to mention the homelessness situation has
| started exploding lately.
| Izkata wrote:
| 2063 is gonna be a crazy year ;)
| rhino369 wrote:
| Seems like Millenials and GenXer still watch a lot of TV, its
| just on a steaming service instead of cable, and much of it is
| pretty damn passive.
|
| Not sure how GenZ engages, I hear more twitch/youtube/tiktok,
| but I think they still view a lot of TV shows too.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > much of it is pretty damn passive.
|
| How could it possibly be more passive than "I just leave my
| TV on Fox News/MSNBC/CNN until I'm outraged about the right
| things"?
| jandrese wrote:
| To be fair in the Star Trek universe there was a lot of global
| thermonuclear war going on so it makes sense that broadcast TV
| would die out as the spectrum became too noisy to effectively
| transmit signal.
| munchler wrote:
| That's an interesting scene, but it's not a passive viewing
| scenario. I do agree that passively turning on the TV just to
| see what's on is virtually extinct.
|
| As a side note, it seems very unlikely that a baseball team
| named the "Braves" will exist in the far future, even if
| baseball itself is still played in some form.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Interesting the focus on piracy in this article. TV was losing it
| when their customers started needing a DVR to watch their
| favourite shows because of counter programming and to skip the 18
| minutes of advertising per hour of TV. Now everyone has an
| average of two of Netflix/Prime/etc. because it's just
| eliminating the DVR and all the headaches involved and just
| getting the shows you want when you want them.
|
| TV is still around and will be for a while yet, but it continues
| to fade.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV.
|
| Hmmm. That would be nice.
|
| I watched a one-hour show last night (with a 6-minute ad-break)
| that rolled titles at the 40-minute point. There followed a
| 10-minute ad-break, and 10 minutes of trailers. All of the ads
| were low-grade - hearing aids, wills and equity-release, and
| charity donation pitches.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > I watched a one-hour show last night
|
| Why?
|
| In the 80s there wasn't much choice, but today you can watch
| pretty much whatever you want when you want with no adverts,
| no catering for the lowest common denominator, and at least
| in the UK TV viewing has dropped so much that it's no longer
| needed to be social at work the next day (in the 80s everyone
| cared who shot dirty den or whatever in eastenders, as pretty
| much half the country watched it. Not so now)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| * I don't work (retired)
|
| * I was in the mood for a Twilight Zone episode
|
| * I wasn't in the mood for that when I scheduled my
| recordings.
|
| I normally only watch news bulletins live. I don't have a
| feed of $EVERYTHING; I have Freesat and a bunch of basic
| Sky channels, with catchup services such as iPlayer. I
| cancelled Netflix.
|
| I'd subscribe to a service that offered $EVERYTHING, but it
| doesn't exist.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| > 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV.
|
| It's a feedback loop. Audiences increasingly switch to
| streaming, so companies are willing to pay less per a second of
| advertising. TV stations increase the amount of time dedicated
| to advertising to compensate, which drives more of the audience
| into streaming.
| Kranar wrote:
| This doesn't jive with how pricing typically works. There is
| no such feedback loop, at least not one that is as simple as
| you're making it out to be.
|
| Consider that your feedback loop implies a kind of symmetry
| by which TV stations could presumably also increase revenue
| by decreasing ads and attracting viewers in the process.
|
| If TV stations have good reason to believe that increasing
| the amount of time dedicated to ads would increase revenue,
| they would have already done so a long time ago regardless of
| streaming.
|
| My suspicion is that TV is increasing ads because people are
| moving to streaming without any kind of feedback loop
| involved. Those who are left willing to watch TV will do so
| regardless of increased advertisements. It's not that ads are
| pushing people to streaming creating some kind of feedback
| loop, it's that people are simply moving to streaming because
| it's a better product across a multitude of factors and those
| who are stuck with TV will continue to be stuck with it, ads
| or no ads.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I don't know if it's my imagination but I've noticed this
| with FM radio too. Sometimes I'll turn on the radio in the
| car because there's a local station that plays music I like,
| but it's become unlistenable because the ad:music ratio is
| about 50% now. And the ads seem to be mostly for things
| boomers might buy (like hearing aids, luxury cars, and blood
| pressure medicine), because of course everybody younger never
| listens to the radio.
|
| FM radio is dead; it just doesn't know it yet.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| A number of times the past few years I have tried turning
| on the FM radio in my car just for old times sake, or if my
| phone is dead or something. A vast majority of the time, I
| will flip through all 6 programmed channels on my radio and
| every single one is on ad-break.
|
| So I decide to sit on one that I'll just wait through...
| but then I realize I've sat there for what feels like 5+
| minutes (longer than one average song) still being
| bombarded with ads and justifyingly so decide that radio is
| no longer for me, and so off it goes for another year.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| AM radio is even worse. It's descent into fringe talk radio
| turned the ad side of the business into prostate pills and
| ads that are probably fake.
|
| Radio used to mint money. I think what you're seeing is the
| decline in the business led to consolidation, and now they
| are milking whatever they can get until they can sell the
| spectrum to someone.
| rhino369 wrote:
| FM radio probably knows it, but what are they going to do?
| Nobody is going to start listening if they reduced ads.
| Best course to just squeeze every last dime out of the
| current listeners until you can't turn a profit anymore.
| kaftoy wrote:
| I still feel more connected to the world when I tune into
| some FM station than when I am listening to some Spotify
| playlist. Same with TV: even if I watch movies or series on
| streaming services, I still watch the news almost every day
| at 7PM and, during the day I do switch in and out some
| national news TV network. Both the TV and FM, even if
| flooded by ads, still make me feel connected to the world,
| while streaming services kind of put me in a bubble. Maybe
| it's worth also noting that in my country(EU member state)
| the ratio of ads to real program is limited and controlled
| by government. So stations cannot abuse it and take it to
| 50/50, the ads are limited to 20% duration (12 minutes
| every hour).
|
| TV and FM ads are innocent children compared to the
| shameless promotions in youtube videos, for example, so
| I've learned to tolerate them, laugh at some of the worst
| ones, or just ignore/change station when I am not in the
| mood. TV is not dying in my house nor the radio in my car.
| qnsi wrote:
| You should really read some introduction to economics to get
| a good mental model of how those things work.
|
| Why wouldnt TV companies do this in the past when TV was in
| the prime? Just increase number of ads and get more money.
| Clearly there is some limit as to how many ads to show
| because I dont believe they want to decrease the viewership
| numbers
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| I have an advanced degree in economics, but okay :)
|
| How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is
| a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time
| increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads?
| Have ads become more entertaining?
|
| I'd say the more likely explanation is that there is a lag
| between audience loss and advertiser realisation of
| audience loss. TV stations manage to meet market growth
| expectations by exploiting this and pumping out overvalued
| ads to non-existent people. Over time, they've become
| increasingly reliant on this strategy to keep their heads
| above water as advertisers catch up to reality.
|
| It can't go on forever, so they've now belatedly started
| their own streaming services to try and keep up.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I haven't studied economics at all, but if you could get
| your academic comrades to stop offering intro courses as
| one-and-done gen-eds, I bet we'd drastically improve the
| quality of online armchair economic analyses.
| pomian wrote:
| I think we have seen the same drama in newspapers. More
| ads. Even whole cover page, is an advertisement. Reduced
| readership, and unlikely to attract more due to high
| advertising volume.
| willcipriano wrote:
| I'm a exec, I'm not that creative.
|
| I could work real hard and try to provide more value to
| consumers and attract more customers, but as I said
| that's hard work and I'm not very creative so it may not
| even pan out.
|
| I could also say, "Increase advertising by 5%!" and in
| the short term gain the same rewards as the other option,
| maybe even more. Then put that success story on my resume
| and move on.
|
| At some point shareholders decided they wanted the second
| option. They all move on quickly as well.
| johncessna wrote:
| > How would you explain the increase in ads then? If
| there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why
| has ad time increased? Have audiences become more
| accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining?
|
| It seems possible to me that folks who are still watching
| tv are more accepting of ads, whereas the folks who
| aren't/weren't moved to something else.
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| That'd slow the decrease in overall viewership for sure,
| old folks homes need to put something on during the day.
| But the key demographic (18-54 year olds) are likely less
| ad tolerant, as channels keep upping the ante on ad time
| they'll lose their most lucrative audience members.
| dmurray wrote:
| This is harsh. GP's theory doesn't clash with traditional
| economics.
|
| One reasonable answer to your question: TV companies didn't
| increase the number of ads because consumers would switch
| to a channel with fewer ads. In fact, they showed just
| enough ads to break even, as the marginal ad revenue per
| hour tended towards the cost of producing an hour of
| television (because of the perfectly competitive TV market
| you posit). Now the cost has stayed the same, but the
| number of eyeballs has dropped, so TV networks need to show
| more ads or go out of business.
| jedberg wrote:
| TV has always had competition. With anything else you do in
| your free time. When it started it competed with radio.
| Later it competed with what you had on the VCR. Then
| gaming. Then streaming. They always had to worry about
| losing people to other activities.
|
| And as such, they couldn't just run 25 minutes of ads and 5
| minutes of show, because people wouldn't watch.
|
| There are more ads now because the people who are left on
| linear TV are the people who are most die hard about
| watching it and will take more abuse, or simply don't have
| any idea what to do with their free time instead.
| wvenable wrote:
| If there are a limited number of ad spots, the scarcity
| makes those spots more expensive. And, as you said, the
| number of ads has a negative effect on viewership which
| would make those ad spots less valuable as well.
|
| That was past. Now that viewership is declining and
| alternative mass advertising opportunities are available
| what we're seeing is the death spiral. There's no natural
| scarcity making TV ad spots more valuable. Viewership is in
| decline. The only way to even maintain income levels is to
| increase the number of ads. If there is a formula on the
| perfect amount of ads, the inputs to that formula have
| changed.
| athenot wrote:
| > and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV
|
| And now Instagram shows 1 ad every 3 posts/stories, which is
| getting closer to the ratio on TV.
| munk-a wrote:
| There's a reason I don't use instagram - but also a reason I
| am forever thankful to my pi-hole.
| efitz wrote:
| You nailed it. From the footnotes in the article:
|
| "A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a
| better user experience."
|
| The biggest problem, IMO, with copyright in the current age is
| that the copyright holders want to adopt business models
| premised on controlling me and my experience. I'm not reluctant
| to paying for content, but if you make the experience suck I
| will work around you.
| verelo wrote:
| This, 100% this, all the time, every day.
|
| Stop making buying your content so hard, impossible, or
| generally shit that it's easier to get illegally.
| munk-a wrote:
| This is a large part, from my observation at least, of the
| reason why Game of Thrones was so insanely pirated. If you
| can recall a few years prior another nerd sensation was
| sweeping the country (Lost) - but by the time GoT came around
| Netflix and other streaming services were really coming into
| prominence. HBO Go in that era refused to offer you a la
| carte access - instead requiring you to have an account with
| a major cable company to gain the privilege to pay for
| access. I think the contrast is pretty clear because now
| we've got a plethora of independent streaming services with
| their own costs (like Dropout and Nebula) that don't seem to
| be having trouble attracting customers - even if it's just
| for a single series or creator (i.e. Dimension 20).
|
| The ease of access is a key point for me. I am morally
| opposed to piracy under normal circumstances - but if you're
| levying a price that I need to pay with my time or sanity I'm
| going to table flip and go back to the dark side (or, more
| likely in the modern day, just not watch your crap since
| there's plenty of stuff out there).
| heurisko wrote:
| I agree. For the last series of GoT I bought a month pass
| from a streaming service in the UK--"Now TV" or something--
| to watch it. It was a reasonable price, so I think they
| were successful there.
|
| On the other hand, the last series was garbage.
| a4isms wrote:
| A bajillion years ago in HN time, Joel Spolsky wrote about the
| then-fashionable peer-to-peer frenzy, that everyone was getting
| Napster wrong: Nobody cared about peer-to-peer, everyone cared
| about:
|
| "You can type the name of a song and listen to it right away."
|
| My n=1 anecdote: Soon thereafter, I was typing the name of a
| song into iTunes, buying it for CAD 1.29, and listening to it
| right away. I spent hundreds of dollars a year on the iTunes
| Music Store.
|
| It wasn't peer-to-peer that some of us liked, it was making the
| experience as frictionless as possible. Rightsholders hate
| that, but they lose this argument every damn time. The winners
| in content are always those who make it easy.
|
| p.s. In the 1950s, TV was the disruptive low-friction
| experience. You could turn on the set and watch Lucy and Desi
| right away, without buying tickets, getting dressed, and going
| to a theatre!
| thinkingkong wrote:
| I think this is also what makes Amazon so succesful. Their
| primary product is convenience. Not "stuff".
| a4isms wrote:
| With Prime, you can type the name of a product and get it
| right away.*
|
| ------
|
| * For sufficiently next-day values of "right away."
| bartread wrote:
| > counter programming and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising
| per hour of TV.
|
| ^^^This.
|
| I basically can't tolerate watching anything on ITV, Sky, or
| other commercial TV in the UK nowadays, nor for well over a
| decade, due to the frequency and quantity of ads. I also
| strongly object to what I presume is audio compression applied
| to ads to make them louder than surrounding scheduled
| programming.
|
| And counter programming is an obnoxious practice.
|
| Let's face it: lots of people have always wanted to watch what
| they want when they want to. Lots of people don't want to
| arrange their lives around the TV schedule. Good riddance to
| it.
| stickydink wrote:
| If it helps (not that ITV has anything _worth_ watching), I
| think TV stations recognize this - both ITV and Channel 4
| have ad-free on demand options for a few pounds a month
| dazc wrote:
| Ironically, the ad-free version of C4 still has
| 'promotional messages' on some shows.
| Kye wrote:
| A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to normalize
| audio between what the studio distributes and what the
| advertiser distributes. Failure to fix something can be
| innocent or malicious: someone high up can simply not
| prioritize it, and no one could honestly say it's to serve
| advertisers without an admission. Some of it is innocent,
| some isn't. Laws are passed to regulate it, but they find
| ways past it.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| They use psycho-acoustics. It's not actually louder, in the
| sense of carrying more acoustic energy overall; but the
| sound-engineer emphasises those parts that we perceive as
| "loud". Regulators are pwned, and refuse to act.
|
| Movie sound-engineers seem to have started doing the same.
|
| I really don't understand why annoying ads have't become
| extinct, in accordance with the Darwin principle.
|
| [Edit] And advertisers hire loud, shouty actors to present
| their ads; it's almost as if they were challenging us to
| change channel or stick in a DVD.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| Not an advertisement, and I have no other relationship
| except as a satisfied customer: Consider getting a TV
| Speaker from ZVOX that has the 'output leveling' feature.
| It really works, and keeps those of us who are
| 'aural'-sensitive from being whacked on the side of the
| head by crazy audio. Also works to fix bad Movie mixes
| (avengers... black widow...). This seems to be the
| cheapest unit with the 'Output Leveling' feature: https:/
| /zvox.com/collections/accuvoice/products/av100-accuvo...
| munk-a wrote:
| > I really don't understand why annoying ads have't
| become extinct, in accordance with the Darwin principle.
|
| Unfortunately it's because of the Darwin principle. While
| I hate them to death annoying stuff is more memorable
| than pleasant stuff - you can sit on a beach all day and
| get bitten by a mosquito at one point, you're definitely
| going to remember the mosquito more than hours of
| pleasant relaxation. Annoying loud crap gets our
| attention, I think, in part, because things that are
| annoying and loud are dangerous (both in the modern and
| historically) so we're trained to pay more attention to
| them. I wish it wasn't true but Advertising gains
| effectiveness from obnoxiousness - like if a marketing
| company could make your house smell like rotten fish
| every time they were blasting information about their
| insurance you'd sure as hell remember their name.
| Legion wrote:
| > A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to
| normalize audio between what the studio distributes and
| what the advertiser distributes.
|
| Weird how this supposed lack of normalization never seems
| to result in overly quiet commercials...
| a9h74j wrote:
| Like hospital billing errors always being in favor of the
| hospital.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| When I bought a DVR, some cable networks were starting to
| speed up scenes of shows in order to fit in all of
| commercials.[0] I think this started in the late 90's but
| that's just my personal recollection. I did spot a Reddit
| thread pointing out this issue seven years ago. I suspect
| some scenes are cut from syndicated shows for the same
| reason.
|
| [0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2015/02/cable...
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/2vwgk9/tbs_
| spee...
| colechristensen wrote:
| Oh yes this is pretty well known and pretty easy to know,
| just count the minutes of the show and minutes of ads...
| the show is shorter in syndication.
|
| I don't remember where but I'm pretty sure I've heard show
| runners talking about it on DVD commentaries.
| rhacker wrote:
| We had 60 years of TV getting to that 18 minute mark per 1
| hour show.
|
| I wonder how many minutes of advertising or signups will be
| involved after 60 years of internet.
|
| I can imagine a 20 years from now - to continue watching
| Netflix Original Series "Idiocracy Now: Season 2 Episode 7 -
| Jim invents plastic soil mulch" sign up for this exclusive
| opportunity to get a new AI robot dog....
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I'm honestly pretty hopeful about ads in the streaming era.
| Netlfix has been streaming since 2007, streaming original
| shows since 2013, and aside from some admittedly obnoxious
| ad placements in some shows (Coke in Stranger Things S3),
| they've resisted the urge to ad up. Some services are
| dabbling with ad-tier subscriptions, which is worrisome.
| Ntrails wrote:
| Netflix autoplays ads whenever you load it up or are
| scrolling around to find something to watch
|
| Prime returns things you cannot watch without paying in
| its search
|
| It forces you to watch ads before it starts the show
|
| _They 've all barely gotten started, I assure you_
| enkid wrote:
| You can select free to me when browsing amazon to only
| see things that don't charge you to watch it, at least on
| the ui on my phone.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| My kids are basically growing up with Stremio and Youtube on
| desktop (with adblock). I imagine most children of techies
| are the same.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| My kids would sooner turn something off than sit through an
| ad.
| daanlo wrote:
| My kids (4 & 6) saw real ads on TV for the first time in
| their lifes' about a week ago. Otherwise they had always
| just watched netflix. They watched disney channel on TV
| and were mesmerized by all the ads for toys. ,,Oh I want
| this one", ,,and this one", ,,dad can we buy that one?".
| Was bizarre to see that for them this was somehow really
| special.
| temp8964 wrote:
| I don't make it easy for kids to skip ads. Ads is a way to
| stop them from watching for too long.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The question of what TV actually is seems rather central to the
| issue of whether it "lost" or not, and seems unanswered in TFA.
|
| Is it a broadcast medium with a fairly small number of networks?
|
| Is it a non-broadcast medium with only 1 or 2 service providers
| in a given neighborhood/area?
|
| Is it a particular format for story-telling, and if so, what is
| that format?
|
| I am guessing there are other fundamental "what is it?" style
| questions that I'm not thinking of here.
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