Slashdot Mirror
You're Watching Less TV
NickFusion writes "With a plethora of online games, chat, IM, email and, well, Slashdot, who's got time to watch television? Evidently, not men ages 18-34. The NY Times (free reg, etc) takes a look at the issue and comes to conclusions that will shock, I say shock, the average Slashdot reader. Meanwhile, Fox Broadcasting Corp. is calling for a recount. Disclosure: I'm quoted in the NY Times article, and so is one Rob Malda. Mom will be so proud!"
Wasn't it a Fox exec who commented that not watching the commercials was theft?
Obviously we must ban video games and the Internet because they are stealing potential revenue from the media companies!
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
...can be found here.
Article
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
If you're using Windows, late versions of Nero support burning bin/cue. To assemble a bin/cue from your [properly-formatted] MPGs, use GNU vcdimager under cygwin.
Your dvd player needs to support SVCDS. Some will only decode mpeg-1 if they detect a cd, SVCD is mpeg-2 like a DVD.
Nero works well enough for me.
I use GNU VCD imager (http://www.vcdimager.org/) under linux (I believe it also works in Windows with Cygwin). It's as easy as 'vcdimager -t svcd input.mpg', then you burn the resulting bin/cue. Of course, the inputs have to be in the correct mpeg formats, so I tend to spend more time reencoding AVIs than actually watching them.
Pretty much all DVD players will play s/VCDs, as long as they're built to spec.
While we're on the subject, what's the deal with these dinks cropping the top and bottom of 4:3 vids and calling them 'widescreen hdtv' encodes? Pisses me off no end, since my DVD is not smart enough to recenter the picture, and it only uses the top half of my TV.
Go here to see if your DVD player supports SVCDs.
In Germany, the GEZ (Gebuehreneinzugszentrale) demands every household with TV and/or radio to contribute a monthly fee which is more expensive (about 16 Euros) than a cheap DSL connection. What is more, GEZ people are known for their sometimes nasty methods to acquire subscribers. So especially many students don't need a TV and put the money into more useful things like internet connectivity.
Build your own... I did, and despite the fact that it can cost in excess of $500, it is well worth it. SageTV offers predictive recording, which is quite excellent, and the real bonus is that using DScaler and FFDshow, you can render the analog TV signal at near DVD quality, far more clear than is offered by TiVo.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
I did download an episode of "The Screen Savers" a week or so back that had commercials it was highly freakish.
Standarly there are no commercials in any downloaded show.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
March 29, 2004
Leisure Pursuits of Today's Young Man
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Note to the television networks: Pete Brandel is not missing. He's right here, but like a lot of other 20-something men he's just not watching as much TV.
Mr. Brandel, a 24-year-old real estate agent in Chicago, says that these days he looks to the Internet for news and entertainment. Television, he says, is bogged down by commercials and teasers that waste his time.
"I'll go to the Comedy Central Web site and download David Chappelle clips rather than wait to see them on TV," he said.
The television industry was shaken last October when the ratings from Nielsen Media Research showed that a huge part of a highly prized slice of the American population was watching less television. As the fall TV season began, viewership among men from 18 to 34 fell 12 percent compared with the year before, Nielsen reported. And for the youngest group of adult men, those 18 to 24, the decline was a steeper 20 percent.
In a world where fortunes are made and lost over the evanescent jitterings of fractions of audience share, the Nielsen announcement was the equivalent of a nuclear strike, a smallpox outbreak and a bad hair day all rolled into one.
But those who track the uses of technology say that the underlying shift in viewership made perfect sense. The so-called missing men might be more aptly called the missing guys, and they are doing what guys do: playing games, obsessing over sports and girls, and hanging out with buddies - often online.
And the evidence is accumulating that the behavior of guys like Mr. Brandel is changing faster than once thought. The rapid expansion of high-speed Internet access lets the computer become the video jukebox that Mr. Brandel uses to watch comedy clips. The seemingly inexhaustible appetite for computer games, DVD players, music and video file-sharing - and, yes, online pornography - all contribute to the trend, these experts say. While no one activity is enough to account for the drop that Nielsen reported, all of them together create a vast cloud of diversion that has drawn men inexorably away from television.
A spokesman for Nielsen Media Research cautioned against reading too profound a societal shift into the ratings slide. Jack Loftus, the vice president for communications, took a gentle view of the ratings data, saying that the total loss of average viewership, spread out across the entire population of men 18 to 34, translated to a reduction of "about four-and-a-half minutes" a person each night, which he characterized as "a bathroom break." The amount of viewing time lost, he said, has not narrowed since October.
That is understandable, experts say, given that nearly 75 percent of males 18 to 34 have Internet access, according to the latest figures from comScore Media Metrix, making them the most wired segment of the population. By comparison, 57 percent of men from 35 to 44 are online, comScore found in research for the Online Publishers Association, which is releasing the results today.
Between the allure of high-speed Internet services, computer games and other activities, "you begin to have the ability to get entertained and distracted in a million ways, and not just television," said Rishad Tobaccowala, an executive with the Starcom MediaVest Group, a company that advises advertisers on where to put their money.
Incompatible survey methods make it impossible to say that a rise in one kind of activity corresponds precisely to a drop in another. But study after study show that those in the age range of the "missing guys'' are devoting much more of their time and attention to interactions that take them away from passive activities like watching sit-coms and even popular reality TV shows like "The Apprentice" and "American Idol.''
David F. Poltrack, executive vice president for research at CBS, says that the trend of young men watching somewhat less television is clear, but that the Nielsen numbers still do not add up. The
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Here is a link to the Onion article mentioned in the NY Times article.
If you're a boxing fan, you should check out HBO Boxing After Dark. It's fairly high quality boxing, decent names, etc. Comes on most Saturdays. Last weekend, they were in Little Rock, Arkansas (woo pig sooie!), and a local middleweight (Jermain Taylor) showed one of the best jabs I've ever seen.
Also, ESPN Friday night fights has some decent fights sometimes.
What's the standard /. user account + password for the NYT? it looks like they disabled slashdot124?
thank you
Here
On the second day I had it running, it had recorded an episode of the "The Parkers" which I never watch and had no interest in. Wondering why the hell it grabbed that, I looked at recently watched programs and saw a biography on Queen Latifah who also had a guest appearance on "The Parkers"...
It's smart, and unlike TiVo, It has never called me 'gay'
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
It is not theft. It is copyright infringement.
Both are crimes, but theft is the illicit transfer of value from one person to another. The thief gains and the victim loses by the same amount. In copyright infringement, value does not transfer. They are fundamentally different. If you must use an analogy, copyright infringement is more akin to trespassing than it is to theft.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
I guess the writer meant for that to be more poetic and less, well, bad.
May be it is just me but I hate that show with a passion. That crap is not funny.
Not to mention the fact that they go crazy with the laugh track.
The laugh track guy for that show must have itchy fingers because he cues in the canned guffaws after every sentence spoken. {huh huh ha ha ha} What a crap show.{hee hee huh ha ha ha}
No way it is in same category as the Simpsons. {hee hee huh ha ha ha}
First, why are you downloading it off of P2P when a taped- or digital-recording is *much* better quality since it's direct from the source?
I disagree about the quality. I do a fair amount of recording from tv to computer, and I don't think a blanket statement like this can be fairly applied. There's quite a few factors that need to be taken into consideration. Firstly, the actual recording medium. If it's a vhs tape, then there's a few negatives there right from the start. Unless it's never been used before, there's already going to be some degradation of quality right there. And if he wants it stored digitally, then that's going to be increased in the transfer, on top of the additional noise from the compression. The quality of his capture card is another thing that has to be factored in. If that's not a high quality device, then he's looking at another minus. I don't care how high a bitrate someone's encoding at, if they have a bad source the end result is going to suffer for it. On the other hand, if someone's recording to a high quality digital format, and then compressing it to a net friendly size isn't going to hurt it that much. I don't think there's going to be much difference in an ATHF episode encoded at 900kbs or one encoded at 5000kbs. So, depending on the equipment available, there very likely could be a gain in quality of end product from downloading off of the internet. As long as we're talking about a source that knows what it's doing, not some 10mb encode off kazza.
Though, on the other hand, in the case of ATHF he'd also be missing the Adult Swim cards - a pretty big loss in my opinion, but oh well.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Women have all the spending power these days, even if its their mans money they're using. Advertisers want to sell to these women, so they make ads for the women. TV stations want to sell ad time so in an effort to increase advertiser interest in an already cutthroat market, they put on more and more shows that would attract female viewers. This has the obvious side effect of alienating the male 18-35 demographic.
And these execs wonder why Sopranos has the ratings it does, or Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. Jesus. I'm in advertising/marketing and this is the most obvious problem in the world, especially since I fit into the "missing" demographic.
We are entering a world where the old solution of casting out a huge net and seeing what you get is no longer nearly as effective as it once was. The future is in niche market advertising and those who adopt early will reap the rewards.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Courtesy http://www.m-w.com (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)
Take:
1 : to get into one's hands or into one's possession, power, or control: as a : to seize or capture physically <took them as prisoners>
One can not "Take" intellectual property, one could take the media it is on but the IP itself can only be copied. If it can not be taken then by your definition above, there can be no theft.
Good points.. just thought I would add that the value of information is artificially created by copyright law. Without the government, music wouldn't have intrinsic value once distributed.
People want stuff because it has value. If it didn't have value, people wouldn't want it.
I disagree. J.S. Bach's music doesn't have intrinsic value anymore, yet people still want to listen to it.
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I've done this on Stargate SG-1, and more recently my wife has as well.
A well done "alternate world" show (more general then sci-fi, and there are some sci-fi shows that IMHO wouldn't qualify, most notably Star Trek) benefits amazingly from the immersion you can do if you want.... if it doesn't scare you too much.
Television shows on DVD are two or three times better then TV shows on TiVo, which are themselves three or four times better then the TV show broken up by commercials all the time. The ability to watch, uninterrupted by more then a few seconds, three or four episodes in a row is awesome.
One particular Stargate arc that is really enhanced by this is the one that starts with Upgrades and ends with Divide and Conquer (3 episodes total). Much more compelling drama as a ~2 hour single event then three seperate episodes.