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!"
It's cheaper than a TiVo and I get to keep stuff permanently. Also, I can enjoy The Sopranos and (before it was canceled..) Jeremiah without having to cough up $$$ for the expensive channels.
Well, lets see: with my research occupying upwards of 80-90 hours a week working, including some time posting on Slashdot :-), who has time for TV?
Seriously though, I mark my time online historically with the first major news announcement I heard online before I heard it via television. That news item was the Oklahoma city bombing of the Federal Building. Since then I have received most of my news items online rather than through traditional outlets. Even as a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, I get most of my content online.
Additionally, with the increasing productivity of the average American worker just trying to keep their jobs, one might suppose that the Internet provides for a more flexible media resource outlet allowing folks to customize their news searches without having to wait through the tripe and entertainment garbage that Fox News and more recently CNN et. al. have been delivering.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
We still watch good ol' broadcast TV every now and then, and we still have favorite shows, but we really don't watch much TV, simply because TV has been replaced by the Internet for instant-access news, information, and interactive entertainment. Cable just isn't worth it anymore.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
This is a product of the fact that people want to be able to reclaim their time. That is to say, letting a box push information to them at it's own speed is a waste of time and doesn't give them exactly what they want.
TV isn't going anywhere though, as soon as the TV companies get off their collective butts and get more and more on-demand TV then viewers will return to that medium (even if it is through their computer/digital entertainment unit).
The days of people flipping through channels are ending, and the days of people flipping through menus of available media better be coming soon, or else they risk alienating a generation of people who don't have the time/desire to waste their life waiting for a show to start.
I don't know about the other guys in that age range - but who wants to watch all these reality shows? I had hard enough time keeping up with season 10 of a normal show, now theres season 5 of ppl doing weird stuff on tv.
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
Quoting the penultimate paragraph:
Mr. Spector sees things a little differently. The missing men grew up with a joystick in hand, he said, and computer games have grown up with them.
No comment necessary.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Speaking from the middle of the 18-34 set (I'm 25) I can agree that most of us guys are watching a lot less boob tube. Partially because hardly anything worthwhile comes on (teen dramas and reality shows. And that's IT) the networks, and partially because a lot of us are pulling long hours at our jobs/universities trying to get our respective shit together, and when we get home, it's to watch the news or a freshly Tivo-ed basketball game or episode of the Sopranos. (Or Pr0n. Sweet, delicate pr0n). Then right off to sleep.
When I was in high school, I had much more free time to just veg out in front of the TV AND there seemed to be a better selection of things on (ST:TNG...BUFFY!). Cable networks are where it's at for decent entertainment.
Then of course the problem becomes the exorbitant rates cable companies want ($72.50/month for basic "digital" + HBO where I'm from. Fuck all that). But that's a rant for another time.
El riesgo vive siempre!
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.
Don't get me wrong, but I fit smack into that bracket and I don't get cable or sat. I just use my broadband connection to download all the shows I need.
Few bittorrent sites, supranova.org, torrentz.com, and an irc.irchighway.net network later and I've dropped completely off their "This group watches TV" radar, when the fact is I have over half a terabyte of TV.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
You'd think TiVo and other PVR's (Replay, Myth, Sage) would lead to increased TV viewing, but I would argue it keeps you from watching that piece of junk between two shows you actually care about. That gets you out of the habit of just mentally grazing TV and into the habit of active viewing
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Honestly as more and more TV shows make the transition to DVD, there's even less reason to watch TV, especially with the arsenal of inane reality-based shows bombarding the airwaves. I can play program director at home and put on the re-runs I want to watch rather than having some person who doesn't know me try to make programming that matches my tastes. TV is going to have to morph into something REALLY compelling for me to turn it on anymore, and once the Simpsons goes off the air, they'll have to work damn hard to get me to use a TV tuner again.
I'm turning 35 in a few months...does that mean I'll have to start watching more TV?
Give people TV programs worth watching if you want them to watch TV.
And the same will happen when a new medium appears.
Number of entertainment forms increase while number of hours per week stays the same, therefore average number of hours spent on the old medium per person decrease as number of hours spent on the new medium increase said Dr It'sFuckingObvious in a press release today.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Its more cost effective for me to not buy cable; which is about the cost of two uncapped DSL lines both with static IP's in my area. Instead, I buy the occasional DVD when I'm in the mood for a movie.
Another reason is that during the winter when you can actually go outside and not die of heat exhaustion I can sit on my patio with my laptop and wireless and use the net. If I want to watch TV then I'm stuck inside watching it inside.
I think the media companies are going to have to deal with this trend. As much as they would like to turn the Inter-web into a one-way communications medium like TV, its just not going to happen. Thats one of the big draws. I don't have to view your crappy commercials or just be a passive consumer of information.
If nothing else, the blogging fad is a big validator of the fact that people like to speak out in communications as much as absorb (well, most of us).
With the introduction of broadband internet and wireless networks to which you can connect from anywhere, we, as a society, have come to expect on-demand content. Television, with the exception of TiVo, does not fit into this new view of how we like to be entertained.
I have noticed that I have almost stopped watching TV altogether not neseccarily because I don't like what's on, but because I don't feel like planning my day around what I want to watch. Sometimes, when I happen to be doing nothing, I will watch the Daily Show, but even a show as funny as that isn't really worth planning my evening around it.
I'm in that age bracket, and I've been watching more TV than ever.
I sit at my coffee table with my laptop and a wireless card...the TV is almost always on.
I love these TV execs who are whining. "The numbers don't add up!" "How could they not be watching are ever-wonderful "Ass Crap Reality Show"? Everyone loves it!"
Give me a break. As a geek who doesn't even own a tv right now I don't miss watching TV at all. When we moved into our house I had to sell my TV (65in Sony HDTV - boo hoo) and the only reason I want a new TV is for three things: DVDs, XBox, PS2, all of which I have hooked up to old 20in computer monitors.
The message is clear, your shows suck, and while watching drama queens fight over getting to stay on the island might interest younger women, it does absolutely nothing for young men.
Casual Games/Downloads
I used to plop down on the sofa at night afraid I'd "miss something", I would watch my favorite shows (simpsons,futurama,poker) and usually flip around while waiting for the next one.
Now that I have a TiVO (with dual tuner of course), I can look through all of the movies that will be on in the next three weeks and see if I want to watch any of them. I can tell if next week's poker game is one I have seen already, etc.
With sufficient planning, I can come home and play UT2004 or with the wife (no really!) all evening, without the nagging voice in the back of my head saying "there is media you want to be absorbing, and you're missing it!"
I suspect TiVO, by giving people the ability to plan and schedule their own viewing lets them cut out the crap they would usually sit through in the middle of the evening.
Mom does not need an endorsement of the fact that you've wasted your life to date on this interweb thingie. All she wants is grandchildren, Timothy. When are you going to deliver on that?
I guess that's what happens when TV is flooded w/ pointless reality TV shows. Congrats, they appeal (mostly) to women and surprise!, a lot of men eventually stop watching TV. The only TV show I watch is Simpsons, and it is annoying as hell to hear all that american idol singing in the other room (girlfriend watches it) while I'm on the interweb.
Maybe it's just me, but, sure it can!
Why is it so hard to believe that intelligent males in the 18-24 demographic are just watching those programs that interest them? It seems to me that this is a sign of television's viewing audience rejecting most of the mindless drivel that they put on these days.
After all, it used to be fine for me (when I was about 5 years younger) to just mope around the house watching whatever was on. But these days, I'm busy with life, so I just make an effort to watch those shows that I like. I think that is the real issue here.
Sure, most sitcoms are just rehashing old (or sometimes current) ideas, and here are other issues people have been bringing up why television will fail, but I think the real reason we are seeing a declins it that computer games and apps (like IM) offer interaction. You can't get that with TV. Its as simple as that.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
There was also a report by Harris Interactive, that while 84% of college students have TVs, 91% have PCs.
All the information I *want* is right there at my fingertips - not just the stuff the media wants to either shove down my throut or not give me enough information on.
Then there's the quality of the movies and other tv shows that are just poor. Very few channels have anything that's worth scheduling a night for - like 'The Shield,' 'CSI,' or something on the Discovery or History Channel.
Information wise, the Internet brings what I want, when I want and at what level I want 24/7/365(6).
Big stations thought they had it right with reality TV but that certainly drove more women to the small screen but moved men away from it. Now we're playing more video games than ever and hating TV. At least there aren't ads in the middle of my game.
I fondly remember the day I discovered Farscape while in the middle of of season 3. I spent a month watching one or two episodes a day, living and breathing the stuff.
It's a truly heady experience and one I heartily recommend. Being able to pull down the entertainment you want, when you want it is going to change the way things work at a very basic level. Media executives should be scrambling to figure out how to switch to a subscription model before their ad dollars dry up.
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.
I waste a lot of time tinkering with my MythTV box (thank you Isaac and team!).
I spend so much time making my TV and video viewing time more productive that I don't have much time for actually watching TV.
As a side benefit when I do sit down to watch some boob tube it's on my terms (no advertisements) and on my schedule.
Face it, folks. Television is 99% crap.
At least one-third of the daily broadcast schedule is infomercials. Most of the "cable" channels run only popular shows from other networks, or heavily edited movies over and over and over again, basically just to fill time.
Television advertising is grating, patronizing, lowest-denominator sludge which subtly insults as it offers suburban paradise with five-figure price tags to minimum-wage consumers, and interrupts the crappy programming eight times an hour to do so.
Sitcoms aren't funny. Dramas are political speeches. The local news is a carnival barker, and reality programming is nothing but a metaphor of a society fascinated by the misfortune of the powerless.
There hasn't been a meaningful sentence spoken on television in decades.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
What a pathetic group of people
Why watch news?
I've always thought: If something so important was happening, that i had to know about it _right_now_, then someone will have posted it on slashdot.
So I just come here instead.
Case in point:
WTC being hit - slashdot
US going to war - slashdot
Space Shuttle Columbia - slashdot
47 hours of live round the clock coverage of each of the above events (most of which is old news anyhow) - cnn
I don't get cnn for a reason.
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.
I would much rather play Enemy Territory then watch some poor asian geek sing Ricky Martin!
She bangs, She bangs!
-asoap
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
You know, I gotta agree. I'm in that demographic range and I sure don't watch half the TV I used to. I attribute this to two things:
1)Reality TV
2)Scifi cancelled Farscape
"According to the Turtle" www.paperbackreader.com
With T.V. I can have tripe like "Yes Dear" forced upon me or I can view meaningful content on demand via the internet.
For example, I can pay $80/mo. for standard, no movie channel cable from Time Warner and get news fed to me in 30 minute bursts or I can pay $8.95/mo. for internet access and read in-depth studies from sites like foreign affairs. I can be a better parent and read about my gifted son's condition and learn from it on the internet or I can sit on my ass and watch Temptation Island.
T.V. no longer consistently delivers meaningful content (if it ever did). Heck even formerly great channels like TLC have relegated themselves to regurgitating reruns of While You Were Out.
The entire media industry is sooo out of touch with the populace and clearly have no clue how to react and change to an increasingly digital lifestyle so many of us are adopting.
remember when the writers threatened to go on strike? The studios should have done to them what Reagan did to the air traffic controllers. Fired em!! Maybe some new blood would have gotten into tv and movies instead of the constant remakes , rehashing of old tv shows, formula TV based on what some advertising weenie thinks we all want to see
Never underestimate the logical power of sarcasm
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.
What broadcasters need to do, IMO, is simply cut back on the costs of programming, then they wouldn't be whining and complaining that we're off doing something more useful (yes, at least playing games is more interactive).
The biggest problem I have with TV is commercials. Cut down the commercials, and I'd watch more. I realize that's how they make money, but it's beyond my ability to see as many commercials as there are for the precious little content I'm getting.
So: quit paying people Jennifer Anniston and Matt LeBlanc millions of dollars per episode, cut back on the commercials, and you'll get more viewers.
I'd even equate it with taxes: by lowering taxes the government is making more money per capita then it was before. Sure, revenues are still down, but not as much as the tax cut was. I'd say cutting commercials would not hurt television as much as it would immediately seem to - because more people would watch and they could charge more for commercials.
I suppose, then, they'd start getting greedy and we'd repeat the whole process all over again...
Stupid sexy Flanders.
... we are seeing the very same trend! TV is down, Internet is up but so is also radio.
I guess the sheer stupidity of TV programs and the TV hosts in general (sure, there are exceptions) have finally taken its toll in the TV business. Personally I hate having my intelligence insulted (mmm, make sure there are no typos there now...) and so do many others.
The trend started a few years ago, as trends are want to. Prior to a media conference there was a poll where people were asked if given the chioce of dumping either the TV or the PC, what would they chose? The majority would dump the TV.
That's enough to explain it. Simple price competition. High-speed Internet penetration is growing rapidly and is expected to pass cable TV in about two years. Cable has been stuck at 66% for years, while broadband is already somewhere in the 45% range.
Not having cable TV, I had no idea people were paying $79 a month for a basic tier of channels. I thought it was still around $18.
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
All you need is a package with the various Discovery, History, TLC and sports channels for $20 a month. It would sell like crazy. Beyond these types of tv, men in that age bracket like myself just don't see the appeal. Here's a thought for you tv people that might be reading this. Stop bashing men and stereotyping them and men might might be more inclined to watch. If portraying Blacks, Women, Arabs and so on stereotypically is unnacceptable, why should portraying men that way be acceptable?
Of particular disdain is that in order to have the programming loud enough to hear, the commercials are so loud they hurt your ears. Or you can have the commercials at the right volume and strain to hear the programming, if at all. Pop ups killed themselves when they were abused, and thats what tv does with commercials that are significantly louder than the programming. Whatever happened to sound leveling technology?
I'm 30 and I junked my TV at my last apartment in 1998. I think the weirdest thing is trying to watch tv when I'm visiting other people or sitting in a waiting room. It's the same thing as not eating sugar for months/years then eating something like a cookie and thinking: what the hell is this revolting shit that I used to consume by the bagload?
I don't really understand the emotional backlash from tv-viewers who think the non-tv people have a superiority complex but I suspect it's similar reaction with smokers vs non-smokers, fatties vs exercisers, SUV-drivers vs non-SUV-drivers and all the other great emotion-laden topics of this world that require masses of cognitive dissonance to justify expensive and unhealthy weirdness to calm an overy-anxious soul: excessive spending, tv-watching, eating, smoking, drinking just to calm down and forget about "the crappy universe" that's out to get you.
For the record, I used to be most of these things which probably makes me even more annoying than an ex-smoker. All that stuff you don't have time for (preparing food, exercising outdoors, enjoying nature, sex, talking, reading, thinking) you now have time for.
As for the trollers who say reading Slashdot takes up time... hm. Yes, about 20 minutes to read newspapers and slashdot online and make a comment. Not exactly in the same realm as tv-watching.
Talking to people whose lives revolve around work and tv is like talking to a Pepsi vending machine.
Everyone goes to the most popular sites
With insight like that online, who needs television?
Next they'll tell us that nobody visits the least popular sites.
If cost is an issue, then build your own is probably the way to go. There are some interesting projects out there like MythTV that look pretty impressive.
With an Internet connection and some scripts I think you can download programming schedules that make the home-brew devices as useful as a TiVo. Believe me, having reliable scheduling information and automating the recording is useful. It was bliss moving from stacks of tapes, pre-recorded with 10 minute slop intervals on the end, poor quality, to the TiVo.
I paid US$250 about 3 years ago for the service and invested more money in bigger harddrives, time in upgrading, to get my TiVo adequately useful for me. I didn't mind throwing the money to TiVo at the time for the lifetime service; I don't think they were making huge amounts on the hardware sales and they did a pretty nice job with the software.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
BayWatch knew what men in the 18-34 age group wanted... big breasted women running down the beach in skimpy swimsuits.
Plotlines? Well, if you insist, but they aren't central to the show. Try and limit it to stuff like: "Pam gets injured while undergoing a bikini wax. Other cast members lend support."
Chip H.
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
Too bad the article does not talk about any youths reading books now-a-days. Is this really true. Are video games and porn really taking over their lives that much?
Uhhh...maybe because we find it entertaining? You don't, and thats just fine. You do what you want and I'll do what I want.
Personally I don't understand how people can spend more than 2 hours a week on slashdot much less spend money to see stories before other people.
I hear that Alistair Cooke has passed away, on the radio on the way in to work and I can do a search through Google News and get a bit more information from choosing a source or two. I couldn't do this with TV, maybe someday we will, eh? TV films things and you get to pick and choose what you want to watch, they show you a commercial at the end of the clip or you simply pay to see it, ala carte. Content on Demand.
I left the TV for my video games and surfing over a decade ago. Too many other things to do or learn about than have my brain turned to mush with sitcoms or Oprah.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...I'd watch more. Family Guy, Firefly, even Seven Days; all shows that I loved watching that got nixed at various points before their time. They kill a good show, and 4 reality shows arise in its place. Its the nastiest hydra the industry has come up with in a long time.
As it is now, I've got FG on dvd, I've recorded every ep of Seven Days, I've seen every ep. of ST:TNG multiple times, and I'll be getting the Firefly dvds as soon as monetary situation allows. So why should I keep watching TV? Enterprise is utter crap. Reality TV is of course abysmal and should just go away entirely. And I've never liked a sitcom really. They all annoy me. The really creative/funny shows are marginalized and replaced to pander to the demographics, and when the demographics dont like whats being pandered to them, the producers just don't understand why...
Its the same reason I don't even bother going to the movie theatre anymore. Went to see LotR, and thats the last movie I see myself paying for in theatres for a long time. Even Pixar's newest offerings will probably be relegated to 'wait for dvd' status. I'd rather spend $15 on a dvd than go see a movie in theatres, as its not much more pricewise and I can then view multiple times. And since 90% of my favorite tv shows are either on DVD now, or coming to DVD soon, why should I keep watching it live with commercials?
Sorry, wandered around a bit there, but just felt like ranting some.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
I'm not sure exactly when it started, but sometime between high school and post-college I lost the desire to simply sit and watch something. (I guess I don't really count towards this demographic, being a 22 yr-old woman, but I tend to follow the trends of the young adult male most of the time anyway.) I remember being home on summer break and having my father complain that I was spending too much time on the computer. Yet he would say nothing if I found a warm spot on the couch and watched TV for 12 hours on end. I'd sit there saying to myself, "I can feel my brain liquifying and draining out of my ears. Why on earth does Dad think this is a better pasttime than playing a video game where I actually have to (god forbid) think?" Even if the computer's broken or occupied or otherwise unusable I find that I can't simply sit and watch TV anymore. I have to be doing something else, whether it's doodling, reading, or doing some sort of craft activity. Folks my age who grew up with computers and interactive stories just get BORED with passive activities. You'd think the parents would be happy at this trend away from mind-numbing television and back towards a creative and brain-exercising medium like books used to be, but most of them (my father included) seem to be afraid of this new trend, whether it's because they think their children are going to grow up as little psychopaths from too much violence or they fear carpal tunnel syndrome. And god forbid the move away from television encourages the creation of new and more interactive media coming from the boob tube. The future's here, and it has a keyboard. Deal with it.
Reading the parent made me wonder if a lot of mod's had the wool pulled over their eyes... Sounds like trolling to me. But, since it's +4 interesting... I'll feed. Who do you think pays for those high quality Soprano's productions? The suckers who don't have broadband + a burner? What happens when they dry up, no one subscribes to HBO, and we all want our entertainment for free? Guess what... no Sopranos. Yes, the entertainment industry needs to grok the net and it's capabilities / appeals. But don't kid yourself - as a pirate, you are violating copyright laws and contributing to the decline of quility programming on TV. Less cash from the customers = less output, plain and simple (Enron economics aside).
If any big media people are out there, take this as indication of a new opportunity for revenue. I too am a 18-34 year old and don't watch TV. I don't have time on weekdays to do that, and given the small amount I would watch, cable just isn't worth it. Furthermore I am not such a fan of most of these shows that I would buy the DVD. Lastly while finding episodes to download can be inconvienient, not to mention illegal, it is the best option right now (but just to clarify, I don't - I have good reason to stay clean right now).
What do I want? I want to drive down to the video store and rent these. I heard "24" was good, I wouldn't mind renting the first season over a couple weekends. I never got to see Dr Who as a kid - I would love to rent those. I have seen a few series in the rentals (like south park) but not that many. Of course blockbuster only has so much floor space, and can only have so many DVD's, so why don't they have one megawarehouse per city that is full of all sorts of hard to find movies and episodes. Advertise it in the normal outlets and work it like inter-library loan.
Of course, another solution would be a legit download service, but since there is no way to inforce the rental concept, it would be purchase only if they were willing to do it at all, and at that price point it wouldn't earn my business. So mega-rentals.
Here is a link to the Onion article mentioned in the NY Times article.
....This article makes me want to watch TV
What's the standard /. user account + password for the NYT? it looks like they disabled slashdot124?
thank you
Not that I think this is a bad strategy. I'm ripping and distributing 7th Heaven in an attempt to get it off the air. So far, no luck. No downloads either. I think the ideal TV audience is the techno-illiterate.
The Boob tube indeed.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Thanks to the Internet - a medium where anyone can publish anything, people are learning more about what really interests them, and are less likely to be interested in the pre-packaged entertainment that is television.
Unlike television, where only the shows that get the go-ahead to be produced are broadcast. The broadcasting companies are usualy only interested in producing something based on something else with a proven track-record and are less likely to innovate. They try to make it to appeal to as many viewers as possible. Whereas web-pages are just made by someone wanting to share their own brand of 'entertainment' with like-minded people.
In other words, the Internet is helping people break out of the tyranny of popular culture being shoved down our throats by the TV. Once people have tasted this freedom to like what they want to like, they are less likely to go back to the TV.
Years ago.. when CDs came out.. I loved the fact I could listen to music and skip to tracks I like quickly.. couldn't do that with tapes. We had the VCR which allowed me to access tv programs when I wanted to as well. Some call this time-shifting.. and some call it stealing because you don't see the commercials.
Why I stopped watching:
1) I lost the ability to have what I wanted at a reasonable cost and reasonable fair use.
2) Companies did not give me the choice to subscribe to the channels I wanted... so I saw that my value per dollar go down steadily through time.
3) Companies are running a relatively unviable business - it's dependant on selling advertising (or so they say).
I thought that if I paid for my shows.. I was paying for my shows... apparently the shows require a subsidy. So.. this whole industry requires subsidies from secondary industry. Does this not strike you as a precarious position? What hubris to think that your programming would continually survive without innovation.
My point is.. much like other traditional media industries in the United States, they are dependant on old systems and politics which give them money to keep them in business.
If something better comes along.. guess what.. people want it. They will do everything in their power and means to grab it.. to hold it.. to cherish it.
Don't spank them for wanting what they want. Offer them the choice... the new innovation.. the options and they will spend their time and their money.
To do otherwise is to insult your customers. Guess that's already happened... the customers are more saavy these days.. and they speak with their time and their money... they choose alternatives because someone else has figured out how to grab their attention.
So I vote with my wallet and support what I like... I don't like having to pay for channels I don't need. I don't like having to buy 18 songs when I only want 3. I guess I won't waste my time or my money on something I don't want.
I guess that those industries will suffer under their own weight because they can't support themselves due to a flawed business model.
I guess I'll go read my news and mail from the Internet... or maybe I'll stop buying fast food and start working out.. maybe I'll start being healthy again. Hmmm?
What will YOU do?
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
Here
It's debatable whether a few people downloading episodes of their favorite TV programs can significantly impact the entertainment industry. If it does so in a negative way, so what? The overall market is driven by what consumers want. If people don't think television shows are good enough to pay for or to wade through a bunch of ads then there's no real loss to begin with. Maybe more people will go outside for a change if the current industry folds. Or, god willing, we'll start seeing some really innovative stuff from other people...
In any case, it's just irresponsible to call something like this "thieving." We have different laws for theft and copyright infringment for a good reason - they're different actions with different consequences. Our ideas and intuitions about whether it is right to take an object away from someone else don't directly apply to making a copy of something. If you don't think infringing copyright is a good idea, that's fine, but I strongly urge you to not to resort to appeals to emotion by calling it "thieving." It just makes you look like you have an agenda.
Too many lawyers, doctors and metrosexuals for the demographic.
In TV economics, you are not the customer, you are the product. Corporate advertisers are the customers, and they pay big bucks for your eyeballs.
Makes me feel dirty every time I think about it. I stopped watching shortly after this was pointed out to me.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
That's what in-show product placement is for, and why it will become more widespread.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry to say, this shouldn't be that shocking. For the last few years, we have all seen television quality fall through the floor.
Instead of blaming Nielson's ratings, perhaps these TV execs should look at their own programming. I mean, if you look at primetime anymore, you have very few options on the major networks, like NBC, ABC, Fox, WB, etc: Reality TV shows (rehashed versions of the same old crap), News Shows (Rehashed versions of the same news stories with too much sensationalism and not enough real news), Cop/Lawyer dramas (How many different spinoffs of Law and Order CAN one network put on the air in one week?), and senseless "hip, urban comedy" (Dave Chappel show, Hugleys, etc etc, that all seem desperate to try to be Fresh Prince of Bel Aire, and others that came before, with nothing really new, exciting, or even original in their scripts, acting, or casting.
I mean, look at the Comedy trends these days. [White suburbanites/black innercity/hispanic] person and group of [multiracial or uniracial] friends discuss [the days events, sex, money, school, other pressing topic] in humorous [vignettes, soliloquy, anecdotes] while surviving in [unreal urban/suburban/barrio] setting and much hilarity ensues.
Same with the tv crime drama... I mean, how many of those are there? Law and Order, law and order CI, law and order SVU, CSI, CSI Miami, NYPD Blue, etc etc... I mean, the ONLY original cop drama I have seen in years (since Miami Vice, actually, and like it or not, it WAS original and set the bar for cop shows to come) was The Shield. In that show, you never quite knew if the star was a good cop or a bad cop...
All channels have reality shows now that are all the same thing [mixed group of people] go to [exotic but clautrophobic area], are forced to [compete with other groups or each other or work as team], and are aired solely for [fights, arguements, drunken moments, crying, etc].
Fox has little right to complain at all. Fox used to be the one with the original programming. And for a while they got back to it with 24, but for the most part, Fox shows the same crap as everyone else. WB is the same. Seems that every time WB gets a good show, Buffy, Angel, etc, they cancel it, and that show is bought up by UPN who keeps it going. Fox and WB adn UPN all have the same comedies (all pretty much black urban comedies, or repeats of Friends), and their sportscasting sucks.
Just like the Music Industry, only the TV networks dont have Napster and Kazaa to blame for declining vierwership.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
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
I try to seek out commercials. Why is AdCritic (or something like it) not free, sponsored by the very ads they offer? You'd think advertisers would be keen on having people download and view the ads, much less knowing exactly how many people have done so... I actually enjoy watching a good commercial, but you'd think distributing them was a crime. Pretty much my only source is P2P.
I don't like commercials in the middle of shows so much, but can tolerate product placement. I think more shows will head that way. They pretty much have to!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Unchanged for 50 years, it's incredibly syncronous. Your content is time-slotted, and you have to make plans to watch TV. Tivo and Reply fix that, which i s why I still watch at least 10 hours a week. If it weren;t for that, I'd have given up long ago.
With a PVR, TV is becomes a high-bandwidth syncronous bit stream. On my PVR it becomes richer, I can fast forward, pause, slow, and rewind. While that is going on, I'm on the computer assililating on-dempand content. Content like the famous nipple shot.
Which brings the FCC in. They keep TV uninteresting. They signifigantly devalue it. I have to go to the web for all the juicy stuff.
Now I've often wondered about a Hybrid channel. Most have an online presence, but something that is really on-line, with a content delivery channel on TV. Say like TRL on MTV being TRL via internet. Hell make all of MTV TRL and have software order the videos on a ranking. Get people out of TV, and get your audiance controlling it. Then let thier PVRs pick it up... TV will cease to be the medium it has been, in instead it'll be a one-way high broacast bandwidth stream. Hell, "download" a linux ditribution at 51 megabytes/sec by capturing it to your PVR (~500x400, 256colors) then decode the frames. (And that does not include the 2 22.1kHz stereo channels)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Any time I turn on the TV, I love to see the brilliant women triumphing over idiotic men who couldn't possibly understand the nuances of daily life half as well as a woman. Those stupid husbands. All they do is burn food on the grill and screw up the DirectTV satellite. Of course, I feel like I need to watch more of this sort of thing to figure out how women and kids got so smart.
And thank GOD for gay men who are perceptive enough to tell us what to wear. Men's fashion has been in such a rut before these shows came along, Since Mr. Rodgers died, I didn't know WHAT sweater vest was in. Now, thanks to the "fab five," a hapless modern bozo like me can wear clothes that will look hopelessly outdated next year, just like the smart, professional women do.
But for the really hetero alpha males, we have shows about "Beer" and "Women with Tits." These cater to my testosterone tendencies without insulting my intelligence or sense of chivalry at all. It's enough of an outlet for me that I don't feel like I have to run through Circuit City anymore with drool trailing behind me, even though my wife will let me do that on occasion.
I hope they make more shows with the twenty-something male in mind. I'd like to see more obnoxious behaviour, especially related to beer and sports, which pretty much are the only things to occupy my consciousness, being a man and all. And plenty of sex, but please, only sex with strippers and ditzy sluts with huge boobs. Real women are intimidating to me.
Keep it up, guys! You'll never lose me as a viewer.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Then again I wonder if they are producing this crap for girls KNOWING guys are watching less.
:) However, you do notice some other disturbing things. Pay attention during the "Power Block" on Spike. Of course, you see commercials for car products, tools, and whatever, but notice the way the commercials are pitched. Lots of special effects, shouting, and flashing lights. The same type of visual stimulation you'd use to capture a child's attention, or people with short attention spans and stunted maturity. Even more disturbingly, you see an unusually high concentration of commercials for credit counseling. Apparently, SpikeTV thinks its viewers are young, poor, hyperactive males with little earning power. In order to afford the expensive "car-toys" on their shows and commercials, they offer them credit and bankruptcy help. Hmm. And we wonder why the country's average personal debt load is so frighteningly high. They are pushing a culture of borrowing and short term vision for immediate gratification.
You've unknowingly hit on a very fascinating sub-world of advertising, the "target demographic." If you want to know who the networks think are watching, then pay attention to the commercials. This is actually one of my morbid curiosities. I sometimes get a kick out of flipping to some outrageous, twisted show, just to see the commercials and see who the network thinks is watching. Sometimes its funny, sometimes its scary.
For example. What kind of commercials do you see during "The Apprentice?" I would think that a show like that would appeal to men, so I would expect to see manly commercials. Yet if you notice, you'll see that there are a surprisingly high number of commercials for feminine hygiene products, cleaning products (whose commercials always feature women, exclusively, by the way - so much for equal contributions in the home and eliminating stereotypes, eh? Where are the men in those commercials? At work? Is that what we're supposed to conclude?), and vaccuum cleaners.
Now flip over to SpikeTV. I guarantee you'll never see a maxipad commercial there.
Finally, one last, even more revealing example. I was home sick from work the other day, and had the TV on. To entertain my little voyeuristic interest, I had it on FOX for a while. Examining FOX's target demographic is among the most easiest, funniest, and scariest, all rolled into one. You can immediately tell that FOX caters to the heavily conservative, religious audience, with low income and a very gossipy nature. The shows they run during the daytime are trashy talk shows and court "reality" shows with lots of yelling. The commercials are even more revealing. Lawyers come on once or twice every commercial break asking if you've been injured. Apparently, if you've been hurt, even through your own stupid fault, they'll find someone else to blame (and, of course, to sue).
Scads of credit counseling/consolidation commercials. Lots of ads pitching trade school or diploma programs. Apparently, the demographic that is home during the weekdays, watching FOX is poor, uneducated, conservative, voyueristic, and looking to get rich quick.
I don't do it often, but when I do watch TV, I enjoy trying to read between the lines and see what networks and advertisers really think of their viewers. It can be quite enlightening.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
The NYT article states that
TV networks are expensive, actors, satellites, cameras, etc all paid for by advertising, having to buy a TV to watch it all, etc, yet it's all free to me the consumer.
Porn sites are much cheaper to run and seriously less to produce content. I doubt any porn star gets a Million a pop.
OK, so we know where the guys are, it's cheaper to operate, plus you can even determine if they saw and/or clicked on your ad.
QED
Advertisers should pay porn sites and they should all be free. Free porn brought to you by Doritos, Mountain Dew, and the new Mitsubishi.
I guess the writer meant for that to be more poetic and less, well, bad.
What is that line from Field of Dreams? "If you build it, they will come"?
Honestly, I'm not watching all that much TV, not really because of the Internet (let's face it - the Internet is actually pretty boring when you get right down to it; real life is so much better), but because it just isn't worth my time.
What shows do I like to watch? I've started watching Deadwood, because it's good. I would watch Stargate SG1 if I could get the new episodes (I've seen all the reruns). Angel is in reruns right now, but I watch that too. And other than that...well, I like The Movie Network, as it saves me money at the local Blockbuster.
Seriously, if they put something on TV that interested me and was worth watching, I'd watch it! But all we have now are lowest-common denominator shows that manage to royally insult the intelligence.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Wasn't it a Fox exec who commented that not watching the commercials was theft?
No, but I'm not surprised that the company that owns Fox News is blasting the research.
Conservative Organization Blasts Research Which Hits Its Business Model!
Vows to Fund Own Research to Prove Liberally-Biased Researchers Wrong!
News at 11:00!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
1. Entertainment -- Questionable at best sometimes. And rivled strongly by other media and the now very strong gaming industry.
2. News -- Nearly a joke at this point. I cringe at the thought of watching any TV news and do so at this point only when I don't have control of the remote. (Normally I still have control of my feet luckily and proceed to leave the room at that point.)
3. Ads -- Wow, here is a big suprise. People don't care to subject themselves to countless ads about stuff they may or may not want to buy. Small wonder TiVo and the likes do so well.
4. Sports -- While this catagory could be lumped in with entertainment and news it really can be considered almost seperate to a degree. It's one of TV's few saving graces as sports fans can watch things that might otherwise not be able to see.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
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}
For my wife, who generally used TV as a boredom reliever, TiVo did decrease the amount that she watched. Before TiVo, she thought that she always might be missing something decent to watch, so she'd channel flip. After TiVo, she knows she isn't missing anything. She watches TV, but she watches much more deliberately and not accidently.
I'm completely the opposite. I rarely watched TV before TiVo because I felt like nothing was ever on, so why should I have to flip through channels to find it? With TiVo, I rarely miss a Daily Show episode (that's at least 22 minutes more than I usually watched because I'd miss it somehow), and I've discovered at least half a dozen other shows that I didn't know I liked. I watch more TV now than I did before. When I am bored, the TiVo always has at least a dozen STTNG, Buffy, Simpsons, Futurama, or Family Guy episodes sitting around to peruse.
So I think it largely depends on your viewing habits pre-PVR. The only downside now, I guess, is that my wife feels out of the loop when people at work discuss funny commercials. Then she realizes that it was during a lameass reality TV show, and she feels better.
Why would people be less interested in television when there's so many good things on?
* Real World - network executives get young kids to the point of alcohol poisoning and videotape them for your amusement
* Fear Factor - out-of-work hollywood actors line up to eat bugs for your amusement
* Tough Crowd - Colin Quinn and his buddies validate your racist tendencies
* The Apprentice - A dozen yuppies compete to get close enough to see if Donald Trump's hair is actually a new, sentient life form.
* American Chopper - All of America tunes in each week to see if this will be the show where Paul Jr. hits Paul Sr. over the head with a tire iron.
* Rush Limbaugh - Only in America can the Vice Presient of the United States be seen calling in to an Oxycotin addict's tv/radio show.
* Seinfeld - A "show about nothing"; of course it will be a huge hit. Each week we anxiously look forward to an entirely new paradigm shift in obsessive-compulsive behavior.
* The Osbournes - Watch burned out rocker being slowly driven crazy by his own family.
* X-Play - This is a show that's all about Morgan Web's sweater pies, but I think there's a side theme of gaming, but I'm not sure.
* Almost everything on WB - Lame urban sitcoms that have revitalized the laugh track industry.
* Survivor - Amuse yourself by watching Mark Burnett dangle rice and toilet paper over the heads of starving, back-stabbing media-whores on a deserted island.
* Law and Order: SVU - It's like Dateline NBC with worse acting.
* Will and Grace - Yet another show about 30-something beautiful single people. I just can't get enough of homo/hetero-erotic lust triangles. Rumor has it, Mr. Roeper will return during sweeps week.
* CSI: Miami - Someone died; someone's hiding something; someone's an arrogant/evasive prick; someone's hair is in the wrong place. Not since CSI: Topeka, CSI: Fargo and CSI: Van Nuys has CBS come up with an intriguing, compelling and creative series.
* American Idol - Innovative show involving no-talent hacks (who have slept with the right people) criticizing no-talent hacks.
I'd write more but it's time for the Jimmy Kimmel show.. gotta go.
I think somebody is missing the big picture, here. The Internet is not taking TV viewers away. TV viewers are being forced away by the continual drivel being produced by TV content providers. How many Law & Orders do we need? Oh look, now we have 2 CSIs! Oh, can we have some more generic cop/laywer shows, please?! Oh, here's a lawyer show that takes place 100 years in the future! Okay, you don't want to watch the cop/lawyer show? How about this nice helping of fake "reality TV"!! WOO!!! About the only things I watch on TV anymore are West Wing and The Daily Show. West Wing because it is different from anything else being shown on TV right now, and The Daily Show because it applies comedy to this progressively dumbed down society to show you how dumb it really is.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
When I was growing up I remember WTBS (Atlanta, usually offered nationwide now) used to do something like this - shows started at 8:05 or 8:35, so if you watch one show on TBS, you may as well watch the next one as you've already missed the start of anything on the other networks.
As for the 40-minute shows. They had a "supersized" Scrubs - normally the shows are 20 minutes without commercials. I think Scrubs (supersized) was 23 minutes without commercials.
Number of entertainment forms increase while number of hours per week stays the same, therefore average number of hours spent on the old medium per person decrease as number of hours spent on the new medium increase said Dr It'sFuckingObvious in a press release today.
The legal workweek needs to be cut down to twenty hours maximum. That way, we will have time to spend watching dead media like television.^-^
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
I don't see anything much on there that is uplifting or even entertaining. As a 45 year old male, I see a lot more on TV that is either distasteful, insulting or annoying. IMHO it is good thing that young men are getting away from corporate controlled media.
Yep - I agree completely. Really, the current situation for television is a few conglomerates with the money, deciding what programs should be created, taped, and aired. All in all, they've done a pretty good job (since, after all, that's how they got the money in the first place).
The thing is, that can easily change - and it will, if enough people decide TV isn't a worthwhile medium anymore.
I think today's television suffers from a lack of creativity, primarily. The shows in the sci-fi genre are the most common exceptions to the rule, and that's why so many of them develop rabid, cult followings. But these only appeal to a small segment of society (hard to imagine as it is being a Slashdot reader, most people aren't into "geek" or "high tech" things). The only really good, original idea they've had in the last 5 years or so, other than sci-fi related shows, was the concept of "reality TV". They've milked that for all it's worth - and it's pretty well burnt out.
(I think a good indicator of a dying TV concept is the introduction of as many sexual themes as possible. This is always a sign they're desperate for more viewers. Therefore, you have new reality TV shows springing up that are all centered around relationships, cheating, and sex.)
In some ways, I think the future of TV might be "low budget". Some of the more interesting (or at least humorous) programming I've seen on cable and satellite has been low-budget amateur productions shown on regional access channels.
The big-name TV stars are mainly concentrating on using their jobs as launch-pads to a movie career, where it seems like the better quality scripts and ideas go anyway.
The really fun stuff to watch may turn out to be produced by your neighbor down the street who loves doing interviews and making documentaries with his camcorder, as opposed to the latest sitcom cranked out by stars demanding 17 million per episode.
You can download with Tivo and burn straight to SVCD or Divx for much cheaper than homebrew. Look into TurboNet and TivoWeb.
Not having to dedicate a power sucking ($$$) PC to catch tv shows is nice too.
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.
-metric
By your reasoning, enjoying anything of value without compensation is illegal. In that case, any form of giving without expecting a return is illegal too. That'd be sick.
.., .., .., .., auctioned for .., .., and .., resp." would be ideal. Couple this with a good search engine to allow public and artist to find each other and I think music, games, film, and other products of pure information could thrive without copyrights.
This is exactly what the RIAA wants you to believe. Receiving value without compensating is theft. That is simply not true. Outside the zero-sum world (esp.. the realm of information and other intangibles) you'll find lots of information wheter this doesn't hold.
If I don't respect a lawful monopoly on distribution, then I'm violating the law. I'm not taking any property. I'm not taking his monopoly. I'm not taking anything physical. I'm only lowering the probability of me purchasing a copy. If that's bad, then informing myself must be also bad because it lowers the probability of me purchasing crap products.
However you turn things around, you keep coming back to an artificial construct that is (was!) designed with a specific purpose in mind: to encourage the production of creative works, at the cost of disallowing free sharing of copies and derived works. The tradeoff might have been worth it, but with the current terms and in its current DMCA/EUCD form, I'm personally convinced that doesn't hold anymore.
IMHO we need to move to a scheme where the interested audience pays once, before the work is published. The audience invests based on reputation and bears the risk. After publishing, the author releases all control.
A system where an artist could put up an auction saying, "I need 750,000 EUR to make this production. Collection of funds ends in three months. If the required amount hasn't been reached, everyone will be payed back minus 5% to cover auction costs and other expenses, guaranteed by bank XYZ. Previous works are
The only thing you'd miss as an artist is the income from surprise hits. You'll only be able to cash in on your next production. But this still seems to be a better tradeoff, that wouldn't put off artists in the same way the current system puts of the audience and produces bland, riskless prefab artists. All IMHO of course.
Cheers,
Emile.
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
...they'll either throw it back or run away. I think since it's kinda hard to throw all the crap back at the television networks, most people are simply turning away. I think this will be a major contributing factor in the years to come, as well as internet. There's so much freakin trash on TV these days, that it's a wonder people haven't turned their heads to their computers SOONER. The only networks I even bother changing to anymore are Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, and Food Network (I'm addicted to Iron Chef). Somtimes Bravo too, but that's about it. Most of the stuff on television to day is just TRASH. Hopefully more people will stop taking in all the BS television throws at us and go for some more inspiring content, that the internet provides (ok, goatse is definatly not inspiring, but c'mon, there's some good stuff out there....really!). Seriously though, TV is crap these days. Turn the trash off.
Television is for people who can't stand to be alone with their own thoughts. The pace is designed to remove the burden of identity.
I was in the same boat.. do what I did.
Troll ebay for a used Panasonic showstopper. They are a replayTV unit with lifetime subscription. I bought a used one for line $160, upgraded the drive to a 120 gig for another $80 or so. For $240 (less than the $299 sub. on a new replayTv unit), you get a 120-hour (extended, i.e., low, quality) unit with lifetime sub. Sure, doesn't have the new broadband features, but it works great. Wife and son LOVE the thing...
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE