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The Economist On Television Over Broadband
zxjio recommends a pair of articles in The Economist discussing television over broadband, and the effects of DVR use. "Cable-television companies make money by selling packages of channels. The average American household pays $700 a year for over 100 channels of cable television but watches no more than 15. Most would welcome the chance to buy only those channels they want to watch, rather than pay for expensive packages of programming they are largely not interested in. They would prefer greater variety, too — something the internet offers in abundance. A surprising amount of video is available free from websites like Hulu and YouTube, or for a modest fee from iTunes, Netflix Watch Instantly and Amazon Video on Demand. ... Consumers' new-found freedom to choose has struck fear into the hearts of the cable companies. They have been trying to slow internet televisions steady march into the living room by rolling out DOCSIS 3 at a snails pace and then stinging customers for its services. Another favorite trick has been to cap the amount of data that can be downloaded, or to charge extortionately by the megabyte. Yet the measures to suffocate internet television being taken by the cable companies may already be too late. A torrent of innovative start-ups, not seen since the dot-com mania of a decade ago, is flooding the market with technology for supplying internet television to the living room." And from the second article on DVR usage patterns: "Families with DVRs seem to spend 15-20% of their viewing time watching pre-recorded shows, and skip only about half of all advertisements. This means only about 5% of television is time-shifted and less than 3% of all advertisements are skipped. Mitigating that loss, people with DVRs watch more television. ... Early adopters of DVRs used them a lot — not surprisingly, since they paid so much for them. Later adopters use them much less (about two-thirds less, according to a recent study)."
No, socialism is bad, it's what got us here in the first place. Gave the telcos $200B for a 46mbps pipe to the home by 2008 (? might have been 2006, I don't recall). As is typical with government, there was no oversight, or checks to make sure what needed to be done was being done...the money disappeared.
in my house its usually on cartoon network or the news and its just been sitting there playing while we are online, gaming, or doing things around the house. we watch important shows on hulu if we care about it, or we look through ovguide.com, so we can start and stop and go back to previous episodes. we have a tivo someone gave us but never saw justification for the subscription fees.
shows that we really care about and want to keep come in from netflix and copied to external hard drive.
we search for the ultimate device to make use of this collection. that device would read through all the episodes of each show we have and play them back like itunes on random and broadcast those to all the tvs in the house on our own custom tv channel. we dont want to have to pick a show to watch, we just want them all playing on their own and we can either sit down and watch if were interested at that moment or not.
my younger sister lives in an apartment but is rarely ever there because of work or social activities. she just has her laptop with her always and a sprint card. this is how she watches her tv shows and gets her news. if that device gives her whatever she needs, why pay the extra money for something that only works when she is in one particular spot?
the people i know that care about the tivo are older, they are settled into houses, have a big entertainment center hooked up, and do not spend alot of time buzzing about. like my dad, he loves tivo. the difference i think is he specifically spends an hour or more sitting in front of the tv and thats all he does, his purpose is actually to just sit there and watch... just sitting and watching tv would drive me nuts.
That was not socialism. If it had been socialism the government would have put some oversight in place to make sure that the telecommunications companies actually rolled the fat pipes that they promised to. There would have been regulation and some control over the companies that received this money to make sure that the money did not just vanish into shareholders' pockets. What happened in telecommunications in the US in the 1990s and 2000s was a classic example of what happens if you just let private companies do whatever they want with public money.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
That is not socialism, it's incompetence. Making sure that work paid for (in this case rolling out telecoms infrastructure) is done properly is basic management and should be part of every system of government.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Just really, really difficult to do legally.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
We need to avoid both at all costs.
We do not need government owned or operated businesses. This never ends well. We do not need a government that has its strings pulled by big business. This never ends well either.
What we need is government protecting an environment that fosters competition, and businesses competing. It IS the hard way... requiring the most work and diligence.