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TV Isn't Broken, So Why Fix It?
PolygamousRanchKid sends this quote from a contentious article at CNN that questions the need for further development of TVs and the entire TV-viewing experience.
"The technology industry is absolutely bent on reinventing television. ... But nobody seems to be able to answer the big question: what exactly is so broken about TV anyway? The tech industry is filled with engineers and geeks. They naturally want to optimize the TV experience, to make it as efficient and elegant as possible, requiring the fewest number of steps to complete a particular task while offering the greatest number of amazing new features. But normal people don't think about TV that way. TV is passive. The last thing we want to do is work at it. ... As long as there's something on — anything — that is reasonably engaging, we're cool. Most of us are even OK spending a few minutes just shuffling through channels at random."
So, what do you think is broken about TV right now? Is there a point at which it'd be better for us to stand back and say "We've done what we can with this. Let's work on something else"?
Have you SEEN what's on TV?
TV is broken because, with a few exceptions, content is tied to a specific time and location.
I want to be able to watch my favorite shows when I remember I want to watch them, not a time set by someone else. I also don't always want to watch them from home.
Take away Tivo, Slingbox, etc and these things are not possible.
The only thing broken about TV is the massive proportion of it dedicated to advertising instead of actual content.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I'll take a crack at this.
It's expensive as hell.
The cost exaggerates how much crap there is to sift through to find anything worth watching.
Often the "worth watching" query comes back empty.
The STB's are universally awful.
Even if you DVR and FFwd, the commercials are an annoyance.
I'm sure there's more... but that's what I can think of off the top of my head.
Too many fake reality shows. Way too many. Less Jersey Shore, Lady Hoggers, and the like, and it will be just fine.
Because it is passive, they cannot measure the degree of effectiveness of their mass control initiatives, resulting in more time and money spent to repeat the message enough to guarantee assimilation. They want ways of getting feedback.
Why should I pay for a bunch of channels and service I don't want?
If they offered modular, on demand service I wouldn't have to monkey around with xbmc, encoding etc.
Services like on-demand streaming of movies/tv where you pay exactly what you want are the future. The cable company can't let go of their monolithic 'screw you cuz we can & always have' thinking. Eventually they will go the way of the labels as far as monopoly via audio CD's - technology will evolve past them (already is/has) and they'll just be left waving their wizened fists angrily, struggling for relevance and trying to screw people over with control of cable internet.
The model itself.
Originally it was said it'd be subsidized by ads. Try running a stopwatch during primetime...at least ten years ago you could get nearly 45% or more advertising in movies, and 30% plus in 30 minute specials.
In theory--cable would cover this cost. Except instead you just get more channels with the same unsolicited bulk broadcast.
To go away from that, you need...oh... pay per view. Costs as much as renting the fucking thing, plus delivery.
Or you can get HBO or cinemax which at a minimum of about 15 a month is near worthless assuming you want to watch a movie once a week, but are only a 1 in 4 chance of enjoying any given movie.
So you get to pay about $100 a month or more in order to have irrelevant ads slung at you. And then you have that nice awkward experience of sitting down to watch something with your parents when a 'little blue pill' commercial comes on. Or a public service announcement. Or somebody asking for my money to feed children so they can take their 80% administrative fee.
Let's try to sum up the problems with TV:
- too much advertisement
- not enough relevant content
- cable top boxes making it hard to space shift in my home
- artificial difficulty in time and space shifting
- viagra
- inability to watch when I want
- insufficient box office content
- serials pushed all over the fucking place by sports
- networks moving things to different times, days, or even other networks
- reruns.
- It's damned near impossible to get a tv guide in paper.
- The digital tv guides don't work reliably unless you have a cable box (and those are hard to scan quickly since the boxes are slow)
- Oh yeah, the boxes are slow
- A thousand other things
Please, can we just brutally fucking murder the entertainment industry for holding something that was a simple, easy, functional service utilizing public spectrum utterly hostage?
A thing does not have to be "broken" in order for change/progress to be made. Telephones weren't "broken" when cellular phones were invented, and the horse drawn carriage wasn't "broken" when the automobile was invented. It isn't broken, companies are just trying to make money by making progress in a technology that people are interested in.
THAT's what's broken about TV - and I don't see Apple TV or any of these other gizmos fixing that, unless they accept CableCard.
I think you're so close on this one, but what's broken about TVs will not be fixed when the AppleTV supports CableCard, but when the AppleTV has no reason to support CableCard. In my view, the problem is the cable companies themselves, or rather the whole setup of having a "cable company".
With digital video and the Internet working the way it does, why on earth should I be locked into a specific provider by my geographic location? Why should I need to buy/rent specific hardware for that provider? Why should that provider be broadcasting video on channels, where I'm locked into watching shows on specific channels in a specific order at a specific time of day?
Now I won't be shocked if some people disagree with me here, but in my view, this is one of those things where things were developed at some point based on the restrictions at the time, but if you were building things today, you wouldn't design it this way. Like someone comes in and says:
I have a great idea for a Netflix competitor. It's just like Netflix, but without a good recommendation engine, you have to watch things on our schedule, we force you to watch ads, and we force you into renting hardware instead of watching it on your regular set-top box. Oh, and the set-top boxes we provide are absolute crap, which makes browsing frustrating. And it's great that browsing is terrible, because you have to browse through a million terrible 'channels' of time-locked content looking for something to watch. And best of all, we'll charge 10 times as much as Netflix!
Now image that. Who listens to that and says, "Oh, that's a great idea!"