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iPad Just Another TV Set?

An anonymous reader writes "An iPad is just another TV set, and can be viewed just like an extra outlet. These are the words Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) has thrown toward content providers as demand for consumer viewing keeps shifting to more available sources like Roku, Apple TV, and the iPad, over providers like Netflix, and Hulu, and now Cable TV. Programmers are throwing down the gauntlet as more devices are able to stream video from a variety of providers."

25 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Programmers, not what you think they are by Vectormatic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Schedule managers would be a more apt term

    when first reading TFS, my first parsing suggested some random C-jockeys screaming "oh no it isnt" in a bid to prove the ipad isnt a TV, didnt make a lot of sense

    --
    People, what a bunch of bastards
  2. They don't get it by zule666 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I moved last fall and decided to try going without cable or satellite. Between Hulu and Netflix I really haven't missed cable other then the occasional sporting event. When are content providers going to get it? I don't want to pay for 110 channels I never watch.

    1. Re:They don't get it by Hijacked+Public · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You'd think they would look at the death throes of the newspaper guys, and magazines, and Blockbuster et al, and record stores, and etc etc, and change their ways. But they won't.

      --
      "Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
    2. Re:They don't get it by bsDaemon · · Score: 2

      Yeah, radio with pictures is played out.

    3. Re:They don't get it by Shikaku · · Score: 5, Insightful

      To a pull system from a push content system. A push system is defined as something like television, where everything is pushed with a schedule at timed intervals. A pull content gives you a choice, instead of waiting and being forced to stay for a show.

      For example, even on legal sites, you choose when and what to watch, availability withstanding.

      DVR is a stopgap in that direction. Netflix, Hulu and Youtube are currently going in the right direction.

    4. Re:They don't get it by cyn1c77 · · Score: 2

      To a pull system from a push content system. A push system is defined as something like television, where everything is pushed with a schedule at timed intervals. A pull content gives you a choice, instead of waiting and being forced to stay for a show.

      For example, even on legal sites, you choose when and what to watch, availability withstanding.

      DVR is a stopgap in that direction. Netflix, Hulu and Youtube are currently going in the right direction.

      Playing devil's advocate (even though I agree with you), do you think the general public can handle being able to choose their programming? Currently, I think a lot of people are used to watching what is fed to them by the networks.

      Remember that too much choice paradoxically makes people unhappy!

    5. Re:They don't get it by xaxa · · Score: 2

      Playing devil's advocate (even though I agree with you), do you think the general public can handle being able to choose their programming? Currently, I think a lot of people are used to watching what is fed to them by the networks.

      Remember that too much choice paradoxically makes people unhappy!

      Your TV (computer) could choose for you, based on what you say you like, what your social-network-friends like, what's popular, what the network recommends, etc.

    6. Re:They don't get it by causality · · Score: 2

      Playing devil's advocate (even though I agree with you), do you think the general public can handle being able to choose their programming? Currently, I think a lot of people are used to watching what is fed to them by the networks.

      I think that constantly treating them like they can't, for the last few generations, has not only trained them to be the way they are now but also made everyone believe that this is normal. This is true for things a lot more important than TV. Few people have the individuality and the principles to do whatever they're going to do no matter how insultingly you treat them. For the masses, we tend to get what we expect.

      A large population of passive people who hate introspection, do not want to develop refined tastes, and need an industry of marketers to tell them what they want is great if you're a multinational corporation. Then you can treat them as predictable units on a graph and cater to profitable trends, nice and dehumanized, neat and "individual just like everybody else". If you value any kind of intelligence or quality of life, then it isn't so great, not when so many are so artificially helpless and need to have basic things explained to them because they lost their drive and curiosity a long time ago.

      Remember that too much choice paradoxically makes people unhappy!

      I suppose it does when they are suddenly confronted with large amounts of it for the first time. The truth is that life is full of choices and always has been. It's just that many behaviors become so ingrained that we no longer understand they are choices.

      --
      It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
    7. Re:They don't get it by Vanderhoth · · Score: 4, Informative

      I have to agree with you. I tried to get rid of our cable to save $150/mo. It worked well for me and made me realize how little TV I watch. I mostly download the shows I like. The problem is I'm a highly technical person and spend a lot of time looking things (like TV shows and Movies) up for reviews and release dates and such. My wife on the other hand is the complete opposite. She'll watch a show I've downloaded and she'll say it was great, but she has no motivation to find her own stuff. When we got rid of the cable she just about went crazy because one of the people she works with would mention an episode of House, Bones, or talk about the next great show that's coming out this fall. I told her just to go download it, but she "couldn't figure it out" and wanted me to do it. There are only so many hours in the day, I have a lot of hobbies and not enough time for the things I want to do, let alone sit around looking for shows for her. So I broke down and had the cable hooked back up.

      We just bought a new TV that came with Netflix, which we just got here in Canada and it's awesome. I can afford to pay the $8/mo they're asking and love the fact it's like downloading in that I can watch them when I want. I live on the east coast so most of what we watch we have to stay up until midnight to catch. That just doesn't work for me. I'd pay up to what we pay for our current cable if they had all the recent shows so I could make my wife happy and drop the cable in one felled swoop. We'll see what happens with the national usage based billing issue that seems to have sprung up right after Netflix came to town.

    8. Re:They don't get it by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      Calling ads creative content is pushing things a bit.

      Ads are a sales pitch and as such are driven predominantly by crass and callous motives and in the general case should not be called "creative".

      This is the aspect of advertising that people find objectionable. They are disrespectful on a fundemental level that will always be in conflict with any means to grade them and filter out the most objectionable material. The general lack of consideration given by advertisers will always drive people to find ways to block ads completely if only to deal with the very worst offenders.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    9. Re:They don't get it by TenDimensions · · Score: 2

      Remember that too much choice paradoxically makes people unhappy!

      I suppose it does when they are suddenly confronted with large amounts of it for the first time. The truth is that life is full of choices and always has been. It's just that many behaviors become so ingrained that we no longer understand they are choices.

      This definitely is a chicken/egg problem, though, and I don't think it's all that clear.

      Did humans evolve in a state that had a lot of choice? Has recent socialization caused our "choice mechanism" to atrophy? Definitely not cut and dry and I think when cast in the light of millions of years of evolution I have to fall on the side that too much choice/freedom for most people can cause unhappiness.

      Granted these are all generalizations, but working under the assumption that self-introspection (needed to make choices of convenience) arose as a side-effect of a more complex brain aiding in survival - it's not "natural" to make use of that introspection for survival. For the purposes of survival what kinds of true choices really need to be made by our evolving ancestors on a higher conscious level? No choices your dog can make since that's all about raw survival. Even more complicated things like making tools tie back to raw survival - just at a higher complexity - hence the side effect of self-introspection and the capability of more complex choices like picking one television show over another. As near as I can tell throw a modern human into the wild where life is on the line and no real choices of convenience need to be made at all.

      Therefore I'd propose that self-introspection and the ability to chose is much more a learned behavior and our natural state is to make choices only when necessary. Look at all the passivity in the world and how much resistance to change there is as additional proof of this.

      It's funny to tie this all back to something as mundane as television watching, but I think that's precisely the point. If people are uncomfortable making choices for important things they'll certainly be more than happy allowing an algorithm to spoon feed them their entertainment.

  3. This is a about broadcast rights by NixieBunny · · Score: 2

    From TFA: "We haven’t negotiated rights for our programs to be viewed on anything other than a real TV. The question remains, what constitutes a real TV?"

    I think the cable guys have their knickers in a twist because soon the only thing their cable will carry is TCP/IP.

    --
    The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
    1. Re:This is a about broadcast rights by MoonBuggy · · Score: 2

      Not an unreasonable definition, but I don't really see its value. Logically, what does one gain by classifying "devices which receive and display moving pictures" into the subsets of computers and TVs? I guess I just fail to see why it matters to regulators, content producers, or anybody else whether the device on which I'm watching this week's episode of House can also run third party software or not.

      I know that this all stems from advertisers treating "web TV" differently from "real TV", but that just links back to my previous point: any boundary drawn is entirely arbitrary, so why choose to create one?

  4. Re:Get a clue, Olde Skoolers by xgr3gx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Throwing the gauntlet" worked so well for the music industry. They probably could have made so much more money, much more easily if they had embraced digital media from the onset.
    Television needs to get on board with the digital age. If they fight it they are just going to fall behind as users find better alternatives to traditionally TV.
    Perhaps it's time to offer ala-carte channel selection. Why should I have to buy a package from my cable company when I can just find what I want online.
    The harder they fight it, the faster they will lose viewers. Especially now that TVs have Youtube and Hulu apps embedded, making it much easier for the average user to watch online content.

    --
    Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
  5. Grandma by xnpu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ask my grandma and she'll tell you anything that can display TV programs is obviously a TV of some kind!

    One doesn't disagree with my grandma.

  6. Re:Get a clue, Olde Skoolers by grub · · Score: 4, Informative

    No kidding! The music industry wanted people to buy shiny plastic discs at brick and mortar stores. Fast forward a few years and a non-music entity (Apple) is the largest music seller in the world.

    The old timers don't get that their shit is just data.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  7. "Rights holders" = Feudal lords by unity100 · · Score: 2

    For anyone vested in study of medieval law and renaissance, the behavior of these 'rights holders' are no different than how the feudal lords behaved at the wake of the renaissance. It doesnt matter where the reasoning for this 'right holding' stems from - when you give control of things/concepts/positions that majority of the population needs to a few, the result always ends up the same, regardless of the justification for it. Intentions dont guarantee a desirable result.

    History repeating itself again, however lack of knowledge makes people unable to realize that they are seeing a movie that was made long before and shown repeatedly in theaters worldwide.

    1. Re:"Rights holders" = Feudal lords by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm pretty sure that the "majority of the population" do not need entertainment shows created by someone else. This isn't food we are talking about.

    2. Re:"Rights holders" = Feudal lords by localman57 · · Score: 2

      Yes, you need them. But it's just a higher level need. Just like you need social interaction. If all we needed was food, we'd be on the same level as animals. The ability to consume and contemplate information from outside of your immediate observation is fundamental to being human.

    3. Re:"Rights holders" = Feudal lords by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2

      I'm sorry, when did it become impossible for me to make up my own story and tell it to other people? Our culture hasn't been privatised at all, its just that you want someone else to do the work of creating and presenting.

  8. Re:No.... by ahankinson · · Score: 2

    You mean like this? http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/imovie.html

    I just attended a concert and a workshop where one of the performers was using two iPads as control surfaces for electro-acoustic music. To me, the iPad (currently) is more like "Web 1.0", where, for most people, it was a medium focused on consuming. If you don't think Apple is going to make this work in the consumer space, and guarantee its success, you don't know Apple.

  9. Re:Over-the-air & Cable TV are dead... by slyrat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The days of broadcast TV served at the expense of commercial breaks are over. I strongly dislike commercials and will avoid listening to/watching them, sometimes at extreme costs.

    In October last year I got rid of the cable TV, kept the cable internet feed, and bought myself a Roku player. I rarely watch commercials anymore. I choose what I want to watch, and I can even stream stuff I've digitized and stored on disk on other machines on my network. And I'm paying far less, by orders of magnitude, for the couple subscriptions that I watch on the Roku as compared to cable TV.

    How can broadcast/cable TV compete with this?

    Where TV can compete is with live showing of programs. I've found that if you are interested in watching sports the best option is through actual TV / cable. You get much better picture and if you hate commercials just start watching it 30 min to an hour after start and just skip through the commercials with a dvr. Almost all other types of TV shows / programs are just about as good without paying for TV. Another aspect that has happened is twitter commentary on live shows when the shows are going on. This also gives a good reason to watch live shows or first shown shows. These are good ways to get people back to watching actual TV rather than after the fact recorded TV. I'm not someone who watches any of the above, but I can see the appeal of it.

  10. Re:The TV is everywhere by SydShamino · · Score: 2

    So you want to watch next week's shows today? Sorry, they haven't finished post-production yet. You'll have to wait.

    Okay... now they're done. Let's have 25 million people separately download them? Waste of internet bandwidth? Yes. Maybe we can use P2P to distribute the bandwidth. No, wait, that uses the same amount of bandwidth, just spread over more uploaders. Hmm...

    Maybe we can use a centralized broadcast that can transmit it just once, let anyone who wants it cache it, then use that broadcast's bandwidth to transmit other things? And then people who miss the centralized broadcast can get a copy separately later? Let's do it!

    --
    It doesn't hurt to be nice.
  11. iPad is not always a media consumption device by rubypossum · · Score: 2

    GarageBand for iPad is pretty sweet and I use it to make music, not all of which sucks. Pages is pretty decent for putting together a letter or flyer, it's not as nice as Pages for Mac but you really could layout just about anything in it. I can't vouch for Keynote or Numbers because I haven't bought them for iPad but they're probably at least as nice as their Mac counterparts. MS Office app knock-offs abound, so many I haven't even bought one. For non-Apple apps you have Freeform which I like better than Inkscape for creating application icons (even if it doesn't support SVG.) I've written a few hundred lines of code/html using Textastic, it would be great if they polish it up a bit more. A few other production apps on my iPad are Sketchpad, Elance, oDesk, Photoshop Express, iOctocat and Remoter VNC.

    I spend more time with my iPad playing World of Goo or watching Netflix than using any of these. But I don't think that will always be the case, I think the apps will just get better and better and will eventually be easier to use than the Desktop apps.

    --
    I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
  12. Re:Uhuh... by berashith · · Score: 2

    maybe the niche can be avoided if the tablets get big enough to view from a greater distance. Of course, then you wouldnt necessarily want the multi-touch features, maybe just a magic stick that could remotely direct you through options.