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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?
I can't imagine life without a PVR, being a slave to some executives scheduling decisions is no way to lead your life. It also helps that my PVR includes comskip so I spend 1/3rd less time watching tv and my kids aren't bombarded by relentless advertising.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Now a 3-d tv, thats a good reason to spend 2k on right?
Right?
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.
I was happy, and still am, with my 26" standard-def. It's a later model so it has a built-in digital tuner.
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
The part which is broken is the networks and cable companies, who add nothing but get between the consumer and the content creators. Those who decide which content gets produced with our money, and who enforce regional distribution restrictions, exclusive digital streaming rights.
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.
Commercials, among other things. Because everything has to be dumbed down to gain mass market appeal and advertising dollars, there is a real lack of quality programming. But hopefully we may see the internet change all that, once all the DMCA type shenanigans come to an end, and people figure out that you can still charge for content even if people steal it.
Too many fake reality shows. Way too many. Less Jersey Shore, Lady Hoggers, and the like, and it will be just fine.
Well I'm not getting one just to find out if the conjecture is true. I don't care one way or the other.
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.
I want to see channels from any country, in any country.
That's all.
... fixed schedules and they show only the content that will get them the most (average) viewers. So programs cater to the lowest common denominator. You can't simply just watch what you want to when you want to relatively (obnoxious) ad free.
The great thing about the internet is you can find old shows like cartoons and whatnot from earlier in your life that no network will broadcast anymore. As bad as content industries make 'piracy' out to be, they can no longer forcibly send old shows offline permanently (which is a good thing). If anything piracy will be a great boon to future historians of entertainment, the arts and humanity generally speaking.
Primarily the mode of delivery. It made sense that the internet would piggyback on existing infrastructure (cable and telephone) but the tables have now turned, and it would make more sense to piggyback TV on a line specifically meant for Internet (fiber).
Complexity is an interesting one. Modern TVs are freaking complicated. My grandfathers set blew about 2 years ago so I helped get him a new one. Trying to find a larger screen TV that doesn’t require a geek to operate is pretty damn hard. There would seem to be a huge market for people that just want something you turn on, change volume, change channel, turn off. Even if you get a geek (like me) to set it up for you, you still end up with either multiple remotes (one for TV/one for digital box, one for DVD player) or a just as complicated “smart remote” that kinda works.
Some very basic functionality that should exist (but I haven’t seen) would be that the TV should detect a signal on an input and auto switch to it via some kind of hierarchy. Turn on the DVD player.. input should go to that.. turn it off.. back to digital box.. turn that off, back to analog cable. This seems basic and maybe it has been done, but when I looked I couldn’t find a TV that supported this.
What's broken about TV? This: the vast majority of the content is utter crap pandering to the lowest common denominator.
The channel system is a lousy user interface. Clearly efforts towards on-demand programming, channel guides, and such offered by cable and other providers are a big improvement over the old pure channel system. However, the interfaces are still way behind the kind of useability you see in smart phones, PCs, etc. The technology is here now to make these systems far better. Unfortunately, cable companies and the Bells are nothing more than "last mile" providers incapable of proving the innovation required.
TV is fundamentally broken because it is completely passive. This is what advertisers and media companies love about it, though, and this is why they are pushing hard to break the Internet and turn computers into TV 2.0.
They've succeeded partially, seen in the acceptance of the term "media consumption device" which is being used to cover virtually all of the new mobile space (and a point to shout down people who like to tinker, and in defense of DRM and lock-down.)
So much of our commercial world is dictated by one idea: people don't know what they want. You think you're perfectly happy with your TV... until we make it better.
Yes, almost everyone watches TV. Even more so outside the geeks, but even most geeks download and watch their favorite TV shows.
But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that most TV viewers simply won't care enough about any of this stuff to shell out $1,500 for a new Apple TV, or spend a few hundred bucks and countless hours fiddling around adding a new box to their TV set and figuring out how it works.
It's true... on top of the cost of the TV, I'm not going to spend $1500, or anything near that much, to "improve" TV... but that doesn't mean I (and most average people) wont' spend anything. Tivo was a great start; my DVR is integrated into my satellite system now, but I also have a $100 bluray player that gives me Hulu and Netflix access (among others).
If people ("geeks") weren't spending so much effort on improving TV, I wouldn't be able to have that for $100 bucks (or less) now.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The thing most broken about TVs today is the blasted set-top box.
Maybe in the living room it's ok to have an "entertainment center" with all sorts of electronic boxes wired together, and to have multiple remote controls, or spend $$ to buy something like a Logitech Harmony. But for every TV you've got?
For the past few weeks Comcast has been putting the "You're not doing this right." messages on some channels on my TV. It looked like it might be merely "going digital", but last week I did a rescan on a digital TV, and didn't find the channels that warn. I'll rescan again Wednesday, after the switchover, but I'm not optimistic. So now the second TV (which actually is digital, unlike the "first TV") is about to need some sort of extra box, extra remote, and of course when the extra box is active we won't be able to get the broadcast HD channels without extra fiddling, etc. (Or we could spend more $$$ for an HD set-top box, etc.)
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.
Oh yeah, this upcoming change is going to break MythTV, or at least badly decrease its usefulness.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Nothing.
THAT'S THE PROBLEM.
How's a TV manufacturer supposed to get more money if people aren't buying new TVs/their current doesn't have planned obsolescence?
Then there's that pesky "internet" that's killing the cable cash cow.
is the most broken idea in the TV landscape. With current systems, its hard to know if there really isn't anything on or if you're just missing out on that one thing you always wanted to see. I need TV to intelligently learn what I like. Just because I watch that one lousy infomercial that drunk night after the bar doesn't mean thats all I enjoy to watch.
On the other side, I don't need to talk to my TV or flail my arms like an idiot trying to get it to flip channels. I don't see anything wrong with the remote as it exists as an interface tool.
You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson: never try.
About half of TV is not "watched". It's just "on". (Radio is almost entirely in the "just on" mode today.) A sizable, although shrinking, fraction of the population likes the rigid schedule of TV shows.
3D TV was an awful idea. Everything, including the viewer, has to be positioned properly for it to work. If you lie down on the couch watching a 3D TV, you will have an eyestrain-inducing experience as your eyes try to converge on misaligned images.
The shows mostly suck. You have to slog through adds. I don't know when anything is on. Its different everywhere you go. The remotes and interfaces are terribly designed. For the most part, the TV, receiver and media players don't talk to each other. Thats why I stopped watching. I want to watch whatever I want, whenever I want, without adds. If someone can provide that for REASONABLE prices I would pay, but until that happens, I guess its up to me to figure out plus a copy of XBMC.
What's broken is being unable to play my AVI files directly from my USB on my TV, but thank goodness I can view my photos.
It's what's *on* the TV that's the problem. I realized the other day that I don't watch a single TV show on the 3 major networks, I don't even really know or care what's on their schedules anymore really, and only one on Fox, The Simpsons. The few other shows I watch like Breaking Bad, Justified, Curb, Daily Show, Colbert, are all on cable. Although the dearth of quality TV can be a good thing as well, I'm no longer tempted to veg out on the couch anymore.
...is everything that is wrong with television in a nutshell.
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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?
You should be able to find the show you want instantly without having to scroll some large channel database. Or worse let it scroll for you.
You should be able to get it when you want. But on-demand is a higher tier service here, approaching $100 a month.
It should be free like the old broadcast days. Most cable channels have plenty of advertisers.
The way TV currently works I'm asked to conform to a schedule set by an Exec that thinks will bring in the most eyeballs. When I was growing up (before we had a VCR) we would schedule our lives around what TV shows we wanted to watch. I remember that Monday was usually take out or quick meal night because that's when my mom wanted to watch her shows. New TV shows were introduced after the old ones we already liked. How many sitcoms were stuck in the spot after "Friends" in the hope that it would draw people too lazy to change the channel?
My setup right now is SickBeard to Sabnzbd+ to XBMC. I paid $50 for a block of 1TB that I've been using since the middle of last year. I don't know and I don't care when most of the TV shows I watch are on. My TV time is usually midnight to 4 am. I'm in grad school, work and do a ton of other stuff on campus (Swing Club, international cooking classes, hang out with friends).
Every TV show I currently watch has come from a suggestion from a friend, Slashdot, Reddit, or Fark. To avoid the disappointment that follows numerous shows I usually wait until the 3rd or 4th season to get into them. I just started Dexter this year. I watched all previous seasons in the span of 3-4 months. I literally just started Farscape. Breaking Bad, Community, Game of Thrones, It's Always Sunny, Chuck, etc. All came from suggestions.
Then you have "Well if it's not in the #1 spot, it's failing" mentality of broadcast TV. Community is one of my favorite shows. Season 1 had me in stitches with some of the episodes. I lost it at the first Halloween episode when Abed was Batman. But NBC decided to bench it so "Whitney" and some other female comedian can get a boilerplated TV show. Cable TV is much better. HBO & Showtime seemingly don't care their global rankings but more about if they can get a core group of die hard fans. But those are "premium" channels and I'm sure as hell not going to pay $100+ a month to get them (because you need to add all the other channels I don't want). Chuck was brought back by a fan campaign and I'm glad taht it's going to get a proper final season but NBC seems intent to kill it anyway I heard they shifted it to something like Fridays. Because 18-30 year olds aren't doing anything else on Fridays? Seriously.
Give me a legal torrent seconds after the TV show ends leave in the commercials and I'll watch it. But until then I can't imagine going back to "Oh, this airs Thursdays at 4"
no new content. Repeats and repeats. Endless whole days showing the same show to fill air time. The shows shown on all the other cable channels owned by the same company. End the monopoly of cable and satellite companies owing the TV shows, cables shows, and internet access. Break up the companies and allow more choice.
This comment only applies to the USA. It may or may not apply to other countries.
Here in the USA we basically have to pay some provider a monthly subscription fee. Yes, you can try to watch over the air (OTA) TV for free if you are lucky enough to get a good signal where you live, but the channels are very limited. So we get suckered into buying more channels than we want just to get the channels we do want. For example, you may want one particular sports channel but you have to buy 15 different ones in a package to get it and you'll never watch the other channels. TV providers fear letting customers buy channels a la carte as they know that their income would plummet. Off the top of my head I would think that most people would probably be happy with paying a lot less money for only 20-30 channels if they could pick those individual channels themselves. I have to admit that I have just about reached my limit with TV charges and another rate increase might just make me drop the whole thing and resort to cheaper alternatives to watch the shows I want to see at a later date and time. Some people argue that "Oh if you switched from cable to satellite" or vice-versa that you would "save a lot of money" but the reality is that once the introductory offers expire, the prices are pretty much the same whoever you get your TV from. What we really need in the USA is a way to drive down the costs to the consumers to subscribe in a way that doesn't take away our favorite channels. As long as the providers are able to get away with avoiding a la carte pricing, they've got us trapped.
However, I have to say that I am not at all an Apple fanboy, but I am really impressed at how Apple took mobile telephones and pads and turned them into something actually useful that were generations ahead of earlier attempts to do so. It's been rumored for some time that "Apple TV" is going to debut next year and I am curious to see if Steve Jobs figured out something on TVs that Apple can make better in a way they did for portable music players, mobile phones and pads.
Don't miss it.
Deleted
There is absolutely nothing worth watching.
Technoli
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.
There is absolutely no reason in with today's technology that we can't have real video on demand. There is no reason I shouldn't be able to watch any show I want, whenever I want. If the providers want to include commercials, then so be it, but they're delaying the inevitable and forcing people into piracy with limited availability of programming online and by only allowing viewing within a limited window. The major television providers now offer "on demand" services, but these have serious limitations. All they're doing is giving people a taste for what could be. A cable company that offered true video on demand could absolutely clean up in the market, but the content providers are far to unwilling to shift their business models to match the desires of consumers. 50 years from now, children will express disbelief when told that you had to wait for a specific time to watch your favorite program, much like I had a hard time I had as a child grasping that television used to be only black and white.
The very fundamental principle of using television as a revenue generator is broken. I would gladly pay for a service that allowed me to watch whatever shows I wanted, when I wanted, with no commercial interruption. I am not willing to pay for a service that forces me to watch three minutes out of ten of commercials, and I certainly don't like to adjust my viewing schedule to accomodate the shows I want to watch! It is much easier for me to download shows and watch them later than it is for me to be in front of my television while they are being broadcast. If I want to watch a live event, such as a sports game, I can always head to the local pub and watch it there. I currently have basic cable and I pay ten dollars a month for it. The only reason I have that is that I purchase my internet through the cable company and, even paying $120 for the whole year, I was able to save a bunch of money on my Internet services ($300 off over three months, plus a 5% discount on my total bill, that amounts to a savings of $240 over the course of a year). I rarely turn it on. Not even for sporting events. Fix the delivery system and make it more accessible. Charge based on what you watch, rather than what channels you watch. If I was charged $0.25-0.50 per show I watched I would be inclined to watch more. But paying a monthly fee for a bunch of stuff I will never watch? Not worth the money.
.sig
It is very important that TV continues to exist as it is, as well as PVRs. Otherwise, people won't be able to upload the good tv series on usenet so I can download commercial-free episodes and watch them on my PS3.
House, the Big Bang Theory, Family Guy, the Mentalist, Supernatural, Storage Wars, Dexter: good entertainment for about 400MB/hour (I don't care much for HD).
A good usenet provider with a decent retention is not free (maybe 10$/month) but the insanely fast download combined with the excellent filtering provided by hand-crafted search engines (such as Nzbmatrix or Newzbin) is worth it. And for the poor people, I think there is some stuff available on P2P (if you don't mind getting some weird midget porn when you look for Disney content), but I find it slow and dirty.
lucm, indeed.
"So, what do you think is broken about TV right now? "
I'm a spectator so maybe that question could be answered by a different type of stakeholder. The stakeholder who might be interested in using the Kinect to ensure that adverts stop while the spectators go to the toilet; or that stakeholder who wants internet streaming to be protected from skipping the commercials. That stakeholder will find plenty things broken in the current state of the TV technology.
I've kept the promise to myself that I won't be buying another TV until I can literally roll it onto an entire wall like wallpaper. The precursors to that technology already exist, so there's plenty of room in perfecting and economizing the concept.
We've seen prices crash in many media markets due to increased availability and competition due to the increased deployment of broadband.
But the cable/satellite industry is apparently still recouping their costs of infrastructure that was deployed and payed for over and over again by subscribers with very little options.
I'd like to know that with an increase in the amount of available sources for entertainment that standard television will be coming down in price - but it just doesn't seem that way.
The price for cable subscriptions is absolutely ridiculous considering the entire industry is not open.
Sorry I'd prefer to spend more time with this one - I've seen a big rant on CNN.com recently about the same thing and all I can think of is... What ISNT broke about television?
How lame was all that interactivity where viewers would chat about the show in real-time?
What a crappy experience that was.
It's not surprising that it went away after a few choice trials (I seem to remember it was a geeky show on FOX). Now it seems some shows (Dexter?) are using their website or dedicated app to do those things now. Think of it as opting-in for the interactivity, those who want that can still have it.
My point is why step on the product with crap that takes away from from all that passivity...
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
I would gladly pay for HBO. I will not, however, pay for a $100 cable package that's required before I can opt for HBO. So instead the cable company gets nothing from me.
When i was learning kernel programming , one of things they often told is that dont fix something until its broken. Never. If they are going to do with TV it will be a disaster. Last they did something like this was for Google Reader. Now almost nobody uses it . it has just become a pet peeve for google+. sorry google fuck you for this.
I'm all for digital TV. Digital is on/off. [Idiotbox in off mode] > [idiotbox in on mode].
TV is in most places currently is transported by bits that are sent differently from all other bits, on different networks using different technology, for legacy historical reasons. Whether or not that is "broken," it is going to change.
That's technically. From a business standpoint, there is lots that is broken, including the bundled channel subscription model (this is akin to making you subscribe to 8 or 10 woodworking magazines to get a subscription to "Rolling Stone" and 8 or 10 gossip tabloids to get a subscription to "National Geographic").
Honestly, I don't want, will not pay for, or even deign to give a red cent to telco companies and their garbage they call TV for a number of reasons.
1) TV doesn't do its job anymore. News in particular. Entertain and inform were the tasks at hand. Instead I see middle American slobs neither entertaining nor informing me of anything useful. Reality shows and garbage slant news coverage is not something I will pay for. 2) The TV that is good is covered up, hidden, made inaccessible, or mired in advertisements - if it survives some political TV executives wide-swung axe. (Examples: Eureka, Firefly, Community, and many others.) 3) The price is exorbitant. When people say they are paying for 1,000-3,000 channels they are forgetting they DO NOT NEED 1,000-3,000 channels. Nor will they watch that much garbage content. They are forcing a justification to price gouge you. 4) TV in its current iteration is a problem that telcos have forced us to have. Its complex, there are huge software issues, huge time slot issues, and even bigger hardware complexity issues that make it so unwieldy most leave the damn thing off. We're paying middle men of middle men for the right to look at content that is shit. I don't need more middle men. 5) It does not meet demand. It demands of you. 'YOU BE HERE AT THIS TIME AND THIS PLACE AND I'LL SHOW YOU SOME MILDLY ENTERTAINING TRASH.' I don't think anyone should pay for that - not today not ever. I run my life, not some damn box. I don't care if its a sporting event, debate, or "hit show" b/c it will be forgotten inside of a year.
We need a simplistic a la carte system where we can pick what we want, when want, and how we want it, and how much we're willing to pay for it. Nothing more, nothing less. Because of monopolistic practices inside of the communications industry and due to network greed we don't have that. Instead we have the opposite of that and then some.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
The tech industry isn't trying to re-imagine TV because there's something wrong with it. Companies like Apple and Google are trying to re-invent TV because they don't make any money off of it the way it is. Cable companies, networks and studios make a crap load of money from delivering TV content, and the tech industry wants a piece of that.
The economic system is maxed out (continuous exponential growth in limited space) and further attempts to produce more growth/income/profit result in silliness.
That's why perfectly working systems are abandoned for less functional, faster deteriorating and more overall expensive gadgets and services.
Sounds like retailers and television manufacturers are grumbling about market saturation. Didn't they get enough money from the last federally mandated and subsidized change in television broadcast formats?
Nothing is wrong with the current television. I can view local news and weather and it accepts video inputs from my games, netflix, dvr, and dvd player. What else do I really need?
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Channel-flipping worked fifteen years ago when we had maybe 50 channels. The hundreds we have today, often duplicated in different formats? Not so much. The entire experience is just awful and broken:
* Content discovery is awful
* The menus, channel guides, and other navigation stuff are some of the worst experiences I've seen (I generally avoid TV, so when I see them in use at friends' houses I cringe)
* We still have the idea of content being delivered by channels in timeslots. Talk about being stuck in the past. Everything is delivered digitally now, yet we still push content in a way that was built around the restrictions of analog broadcasting. I realize it's not exactly the same, but given that we re-use the lines for cable internet connections, it's clearly possible to have two-way communication. We use DVRs as a lousy hack to get around this, but the future is clearly a more iTunes-like experience in the sense of "get the three most recent episodes of the show"
* Pricing is a mess. They try to hit you everywhere for all sorts of different things. Six levels of TV service, PPV options, premium channels, rental fees, etc. There are so many things they could do to make this simpler, and yet they continue to make it more confusing, presumably to trick people into being upsold. That can't be sustained indefinitely.
* Content overload - and nothing worth watching (obviously that's a matter of opinion)
* Extremely complicated set-up. All of these digital systems have such poor integration with each other, despite decent attempts to make systems smarter. HDMI was designed in part to alleviate this, but I'm still trying to get everything working in harmony. Even just some UI tweaks and speedups to flip between input sources would be a huge improvement. Why must I slowly (very, very slowly!) scroll through a list of uselessly-named inputs? Just put up a grid of things that are receiving content and let me arrow between them. And for the love of god, make it more responsive.
I may be a poor case study not being a big fan of "I'm bored; placate me with mindless content", and I find TV to be a very ineffective way to get news; however, I can still look at the overall experience pretty objectively. Hulu and iTunes among others are making steps in the right direction, but that experience is still largely limited to the computer, and what's done on TVs is kludgy at best. The AppleTV is decent and the Hulu app for internet-enabled TVs is, last I used it, extremely buggy and also requires a premium subscription.
I've wasted enough time thinking about it for now, but the headline of "TV isn't broken" is just absurd. I can hardly think of an experience that would be a better poster-child of "barely-functional, bordering on unusable".
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
The main reason I watch so little TV? All these crap "reality" shows. They're like an infection. Started by MTV, and now they've taken over Sci-Fi (oh, excuse me... "SyFy" *barf*), Food Network, Discovery Channel and even the History Channel. That last one is especially infuriating... what on earth do all these crap, modern reality shows have to do with "history"? Even their new slogan tries to get them off the hook: "History: Made every day". In other words, "since anything ultimately becomes 'history' eventually, it means we can show whatever we'd like".
Put something worth watching on, and I'll watch more TV. Until then, I'll "suffer" with the bare-minimum satellite package and watch mostly movies.
Why is TV Broken to the consumer? Because no one wants to wait for anything. I want to watch show X *now* and I don't want ads. I want to be able to rewind, pause and everything else that comes great with a TV viewing experience. Has PVR solved this? Kind of, but it still is at the mercy of TV where you only get to watch what you've recorded and space can be limited.
People have realized all these faults. That is why so many people move away from TV now towards over-the-top offerings that have the "on demand" nailed down. How are we going to save TV? By providing features that pre-recorded alternatives can't offer. For the most part that means enhancing Live TV. You want to see sport stats of the player that's up to bat? Good, its right here. Can't decide what to watch? Have your TV remind you when favorite shows are coming on based on your viewing history. Want a little trivia info on the current movie/actor? Bam!
TV was traditionally passive and it failed. I don't want to watch reruns and I don't want to have to wait 15 minutes for the next episode to start because its borrrinngggg. TV needs work to keep people interested or else they'll go to streaming options. Don't fight it. Don't pretend its not an issue because it is. What makes me think I can speak on the subject? I work for an telecom that has IPTV offerings and spent about a year doing application development and server administration for the IPTV service. A lot of that time was dealing with marketing and understanding the trends in the market to keep my job.
The article is about why TV hardware is broken. Not the shows available, which seems like every thread in this post is complaining about.
and to me it just sounds like this guy is channeling the ghost of Andy Rooney. TV is very broken once you start using any device other than an antenna. It takes so much work to make multiple devices work together, and even when you succeed, the chances of family members knowing how to work it is unlikely at best.
Every piece of hardware should have a universal control protocol that allows it to work together seamlessly. When you turn on the dvd, it should set the receiver and the tv input automatically. If you get vendor lock, sometimes you can get such things but even that's rare. Most people struggle with the very concept of tv inputs and when you have tvs with 8 or so, it's easy for mom to get lost.
No matter what, function requires a massive traditional remote control, which people don't use a 1/10 of. I don't know what the solution will look like, but it's nice to think at some point man will advance to a point where they can operate their entertainment system.
The article and the question are referring to the TECHNOLOGY behind TVs. How can we streamline the technology to make the viewing experience better? 90% of these comments are about how bad commercials are and how bad the shows have become. Missing the point a little aren't we? Although I did like the comment about programs from other countries. That would be pretty cool.
I don't watch it. I use internet blogs for aggregated news. I watch movies seldom, but when I do, it's online. Books are still cheap, easy and work when the power is out. Mainstream media has been thoroughly captured by 6 corporations and the members who sit on their boards. Do I need more nonsense propaganda during my day?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
And I don't mean the band.
Television is so chock full of advertising it's almost unwatchable. It's corrupted game-play in sports (TV timeouts) and it's becoming less free than ever before. Most College Bowl games, as an example, are now on cable/satellite channels - channels you have to have a subscription to watch. Several years ago they were on ABC/CBS/NBC, but not many anymore.
HDTV, which was the dream for decades has arrived, but now there's so little worth watching in HD (hey, I can see the pancake makeup on the host's face, yuck!) Writing seems to be at an all-time low in quality, same for acting (good looking or former comedian seems to be the main qualifier)
Can't seem to get that A La Carte bill passed, either. Geez. What's it going to take? Oh, perhaps when the broadcasters and cable/satellite companies aren't twisting arms in capitols... Nice to see the people of the UK have finally won a big one in court, you can watch the continental broadcasts for less than the UK providers for football. That's sweet. Too bad America keeps protecting markets, rather than allowing someone on the West Coast to rather watch a NYC station, because they prefer it over the delivery of the local station.
Yeah, lots wrong with TV. Not likely to get better, either.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
> So, what do you think is broken about TV right now?
Um, most of the content?
But never mind that for now.
The text of the summary sounds like it was written by someone from my generation -- the wireless remote control (Flashmatic) was invented in our lifetimes, and the TV tray was a must-have. We generally turned on the TV and flipped through the 3 or 4 channels looking for something good to watch, and we generally left it on until it was time to go to bed, just watching whatever came up. If it was a show we had to watch, we were absolutely stuck with the network's schedule, and had to sit down at precisely the right time so we wouldn't miss it.
Does anyone seriously believe that this behavior will continue? That mode of viewing started to become redundant when VCRs started to become equipped with timers, and now more than any time in history people have the ability to watch what they want to watch, when they want it, from whatever content source they want to watch it, and network programming be damned.
What's missing now is a high degree of integration between the content providers and the content viewers. Oh, there's hulu and netflix instant viewing and other things, but they're just now starting to get integrated in with the TV in a way that geeks can access. It's not even close yet to something Fred and Ethyl Mertz would feel comfortable using.
So what's needed is a higher degree of integration between on-demand content (from whatever source) and the eyes and fingers of regular non-geek people.
What is *not* needed is (a) higher resolution -- 1080P non-interlaced is enough for any normal sized room for normal people -- or (b) gimmicks like 3D (although that system that uses circular polarized glasses instead of electronic shutter glasses looks really interesting if they could make it cheap enough).
The technologies are there to carry TV far into the future. At least until true no-glasses 3D projection becomes reality, if the audience ever decides we really need that. What is desperately needed now is a degree of integration necessary for my vehemently non-geek wife to pick up a remote, find and play the next episode in season 3 of Mayberry RFD without having to ask her geek daughter for help.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In Korea, only old people still watch television.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Just discovering what programs are available is a huge problem outside of the conventional broadcast TV paradigm.
Set-top box program schedules stink. Nobody buys the TV Guide any more. Yea, there are third-party (and cable-company supplied) program schedule apps, but most of them stink too. (Anybody else try the useless Cox schedule guide on iPad?) If you're really into it, there are web sites that discuss shows ad-infinitum I'd imagine, but most people won't bother, and don't want to sift through the crap.
Finding on-demand programming is a hassle. You have to navigate with a horrible on-screen interface, and most people don't know what network a show they've heard about is on. So, they have to do a search, which is horribly painful. Click, click, click, click, there's ONE LETTER.
Program discovery is so bad that most people revert to "what's on?" and flip through the channels. Even if a show is marketed heavily, and you see a banner drug by an airplane and wonder what's up with the guy that thinks he sees a dog, how many people are going to bother to painfully type-in "W _ I _ L _ F _ R _ E _ D when they get home, and then go through the rigmarole to set the VCR?
The big problem is, there are so many choices that it takes major time to sift through them. You have to know what you are looking for, but how do you know what you are looking for in the first place? Sure, I can go to NetFlix and decide I want to see a Fellini film easily enough. (Though I'd be best served by going to the website and putting it in my Instant Queue than by navigating the horrible on-screen interface.) And, oh, BTW, they're going to have to mail me that Fellini film 90% of the time, so we're Not There Yet.
Now, if the marketing says or even implies it's a prime-time show on a major network - you might remember the time-slot and go surfing for it if it's around that time. Otherwise, it's pretty hit-and-miss.
Clearly, though, ultimately, scheduled programming (other than live events and breaking news) are inevitably going to go away. I think I think that's necessary to prepare the public is to change terminology. No more show times. They're release times.
Every show should be available on-demand in some form. Some people will still eagerly anticipate "release times", and gather in front of the set to be the first to watch a show, just as some go out to a theater to see a movie when it's first released.
The problem is that 'glass teat' is too metaphorical. It needs to become an actual teat.
Sure, I can turn on a TV and find something reasonably entertaining (or functional as background noise) if I'm just bored, but that doesn't solve the problems surrounding the fact that I want to watch certain shows, at certain times. I'm not paying another monthly bill PLUS buying a piece of hardware just to do that when I can get a good selection of TV shows and movies streamed to any one of my computers or my Kindle Fire for a significantly cheaper price.
The industry evolution needs to stop trying to trap people into one delivery system and accept that internet delivery is becoming increasingly popular.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Digital TV in the US is of such low broadcast quality that we were almost better off with analog.
Why (rhetorical) is the image quality in Europe so superior to ours in the US.
Here's what's wrong with TV.
1. You have to buy specialized hardware and cannot watch on other devices (phone, netbook/tablet/portable gaming device, normal laptop or PC)
2. The programming is virtually all terrible, boring lacking in artistic or educational merit, etc. The "news" is fluff and propaganda which may actually leave you less informed for watching. Your only recourse is to change to another channel with the same kinds of dreck.
3. TV ads are constant, annoying, obnoxious, and loud. But Google makes piles of cash, so this is obviously not the only model available
And these things are still true if you pay $80/mo for cable.
I'd like to be able to select only the newscast segments I'm interested in, queue them up, and watch them all at once. In addition to removing bloat and irrelevant segments, it also would cut out those annoying teasers.
Added bonus (next gen): selecting to hear either the long or the short story for each bit.
Here is what I think. Commercials are ruining TV. It seems as though there is a LOT more commercials than TV. So much so that when a commercial pops up I immediately channel surf to fill in the commercial. I pretty much refuse to watch the crap that comes cascading through the screen. If only they made toilet paper for my TV screen. Not to mention abysmal selection of reruns that seem to rerun every 2 weeks or so. No wonder people are disgusted with "TV". Regards, Stewart B Lone
Apple and Boxee are on the right path to convergence. You should be able to view videos and pictures from your phone or cameras on your TV, you should be able to watch your online/offline content whenever you like, you should be able to share content you like with friends and family, and this should all be relatively painless. There's still a lot of room for improvement.
Asking if TV really requires improvement is like asking whether computers really need improvement. After all, computers already compute right? What more could we possibly need them to do?
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Blu-ray player, TV, set top box, games console and surround sound box.
A whole mess of cables and remotes and my Logitech harmony remote is doing a poor job of managing it all, but otherwise I'd have 5 remotes.
I'd welcome a TV that made all the other boxes obsolete.
...never ended up watching more TV.
I had a 27in CRT that I bought Nov. 1998 and I rarely ever watched TV even though I get around 1000+channels and the ones that are, in HD. I mainly played games on it.(Wii, PS2, etc)
I went and bought a new 50" 3D HD in Sept. and I am not watching more TV than I used to, but I am hooking up my computer to it when I play PC games.
Overall, TVs do have potential, but not with what is currently being aired. Change the programming to some quality stuff rather than unoriginal 'hey this is my job' reality crap and it might go somewhere.
"That's right...I said it."
Analog signals got fuzzy, snowy, but rarely displayed the pixelation and halting found in digital signals. If this is how they want to fix it, I say they need to be committed.
So, what do you think is broken about TV right now?
Jersey Shore
TV audience engagement currently requires (positively or negatively) engaging content. That's why you see people using sites & social media to engage around television shows.
Manufacturers & broadcast companies don't HAVE to cater to their users' engagement desires, but I don't think there's much to debate on the value of doing so. Interacting well with your customers and building a strong community around your brand are known ways to develop profit centers.
If TV isn't broke, why fix it? Because the status quo is ok as your business's starting point, but shouldn't be the end goal.
Do you want a demographic that delights in pointing they don't watch TV (bonus hipster points: don't even have a TV) to 'fix' it?
And soon it will be down to two.
Like the old real estate adage location location location In this case it's content content content. Too often the adds are eating up more of show time and the shows they are putting on are crap reality shows. I for one have never had cable or satellite TV. I saw the crappy selections and the game they play in breaking up channels into various packages in order for you to get the 1 you wanted. The whole idea for cable I thought was no commercials at least that;s what I remember from way back when the cable companies started. Now it seems they are just as bad as broadcast TV. And how many reality crap shows and home shopping shows do we really need while great shows like Firefly are not given the chance to succeed. I did go with Netflix last year and haven't looked back. At least there are no commercials and I can watch the shows/movies on my schedule. Nothing like having your wife site through every episode for Stargate SG1, Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe back to back over a few months. Next stop the Star Trek marathon. I would have signed up for hulu to get some of the shows they haven't released for Netflix but they still have commercials and i am not paying for commercials, i can get that for free on the broadcast channel
It's sooo broke I don't even care to spend the money to buy one, or pay for the content that's on it. It's junk and wastes my time. If I want to watch the Colbert Report or Breaking Bad I just get them from online somewhere, probably for free and without ads. I don't ever care to waste my hard earned money on something that makes me watch ads. That's like buying a car that you only get to drive half the time. It's a complete waste. I'd rather buy the content online, without ads, and watch it when I want, and where I want. It's just easier that way and actually worth my time and money. TV is dead, most of the content on it is junk, and the content that is worth watching will sell well online through channels like iTunes and can exist independently of TV.
What a load of "lets make fun of the nerds" BS
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
If it was "our" fault, we would have HDTV back in the 80s. The reason for innovation is the housing bubble drove giant mcmansions which require giant TVs to be in proportion, so sales were great until 2007 or so. Since then... Well boss asks "what can we do to sell more crap, like the good ole days of the global credit bubble?" No one has any idea but the engineer, who suggests that its finally time to try all that 80s stuff, like faster refresh, prog scan, higher res, 3d, 5.1 sound, blah blah. Its not much, but its better than the marketing guy who said "uh, lets make more commercials with cheerleaders and football players har har har".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
A recent South American ad actually had a rendering of the inside of a woman's vagina. With some white liquid flowing in. I kid you not XD
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I can feel brain cells dying pretty much instantly whenever faux news, Jersey Shore, etc are on in the same room. Should be a warning, "Watching this program causes stupidity and ignorance".
Check your premises.
OK, I'll bite and mention one specific thing that's been horribly broken ever since the transition to digital TV -- it's fscking impossible to have multiple TVs tuned to the same channel in adjacent rooms and have them all be in sync, because each one decodes the MPEG-2/MPEG-4 bitstream at a slightly different speed, with different amounts of buffering and processing.
What? Distribute the same source to all the TVs? If you use component video and analog audio, it might... MIGHT... work. But the moment you go digital, it all goes straight to hell, because every component along the digital chain adds its own latency, and even uncompressed video still gets subjected to different amounts of buffering and scaling delays by each TV (in theory, component video can have scaling delays too, but 100% digital seems to be the absolute worst of all when it comes to getting 3 different TVs being fed the same input signal to display the same output in realtime).
What's really needed is some way to broadcast a heartbeat signal through the entire house (probably via power line) every 100ms (5 or 6 50/60hz fields), add a flag into MPEG-2/4 video and raw HDMI that arbitrary tags the first out of every 5/6 fields/frames as "field/frame zero" (the next 5 or 6 are untagged), then have the output devices ("TVs") buffer output fields/frames (and their synchronized audio) in a ring buffer until they see the pulse. In other words, the TV might buffer frame 0, buffer frame 1, buffer frame 2, then see the pulse and output frame 0. From that point, it would continue buffering new frames/fields, and showing the next buffered field/frame with its own timing. It still might not quite be 100%, but at least it would be an improvement over what we have now, where 3 different TVs in adjacent rooms with their own cable or DirecTV boxes can actually be SECONDS apart (especially when a DVR is involved).
Someone with tech ability programs it with things like "watch tv", "watch bluray", "listen to radio", "watch laptop". The person using it just hits the appropriate activity on the touchscreen and it starts up the right pieces of gear and configures all the physical buttons on the remote appropriately. As long as you use that remote for everything then you're good.
I got a refurb for half price, works really well. We no longer need to deal with six separate remotes.
Speed:
Channel switching speed: It keeps getting worse. Analog TV's were instant channel switchers. Even analog TV's with digital readouts were instant switchers. "Digital" TV can't do that. Cable boxes and their insane 'menuing' system. It's supposed to help you see what's on, but it makes 'flipping through the channels' more like 'trudging' through the channels. Even with OTA HDTV, there's a pause while it gets enough signal to show you a picture. They need to be working on eliminating that pause.
BOOT up speed: I'm lucky. I have an HD CRT. There aren't many of those. You push power, the screen makes a funny noise. The CRT warms up in a second or two. You're in business. The experiences I've had with LCD screens aren't good. When you turn it on, you get a POST screen, a manufacturer logo, some other 'boot-up' processes. It takes a LONG TIME. If I had one of those I'd be tempted to never turn it off because I wouldn't want to wait through the boot-up. That definitely needs to be fixed. If there was ever a place for 'instant on' technology, it's in the TV.
Cost:
It's hard for me to complain here because I don't pay for it, but I think the fact that I refuse to pay for it should say something. I've never caved to the 'Pay TV' bandwagon. No cable, no satellite. Over the Air all the way. I actually do pay for TV now. It's called Netflix. It's $8 instead of $50, and I get to pick what's on. (And no commercials.) Pay TV is way too expensive and doesn't make any sense. That needs to be fixed.
Now to be hypocritical. My wife won't watch commercials. She rather skip the program than watch a commercial. Not only is she always annoyed by them, she's often offended by them. I'm pretty sure commercials are the most heavily studied aspect of Television, so I don't really have any suggestions that the 'experts' haven't already beaten to death.
As for Content. I don't think that's part of the discussion. (We'll at least the FA. which I didn't read.) The shows are not the technology. I don't think you can 'fix' the shows. That's like dictating what music will be popular with teenagers. Good luck with that.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
I have had television my whole life. On top of that, I can't ever remember not having cable TV in my home (live in Canada, cable gives us the major US networks). As of today, I pay $75/mo for cable in two rooms in my house with two PVR's, time shifting, some HD channels, and a good chunk of regular programming.
I've found myself for the first time in my life thinking about cancelling cable and going straight with Netflix and torrent downloads for my TV shows. All for one simple reason. Money. The fact is, if I can download all of these shows at no cost, or pay a small premium fee (such as Netflix) to watch them when I want to watch them, why would I fork out $75/mo to watch the news, sports, and channel surf. I don't watch sports on TV and I read all the news online.
I realize that torrent downloads don't help to pay for the shows I watch, or prevent them from being cancelled, but I'm in Canada and our viewing habits do not influence US shows from cancellation. On top of that, there's no good television "service" that allows me to watch the programs I want without commercials. I would gladly pay the $75/mo for my television service if it meant I could watch anything I want, anytime I want, but without commercials.
It feels like people's viewing habits are changing now that television programs are available on demand and that as the demand for on demand (as lame as that sounds) continues, I don't think it's the death of TV, but the death of broadcast/cable television.
No matter how fast computers get, you'll always be waiting - Matt Klem
If I want to watch a live event, such as a sports game, I can always head to the local pub and watch it there.
But for parents who want to watch a live event with their under-21 kids, I've found it harder to find a sports all ages restaurant than a sports bar.
The Television should be a single unit complete with the pause/record/reqind of live TV, integration with home media servers, streaming from content providers such as BBC iPlayer, and it should do it all with nothing more than a power chord and arial cable (optional Arial cable - better to have a wireless Arial) coming off it and no requirement for any set top boxes. (games consoles deliver output by wireless)
All this should be as seamless to use as the original TVs from the 1950s.
In other words, you should get everything right from getting the TV out the box - and to non techs it should be considered magic.
When we can do that lets look at this question again.
In the meantime, look at your nice sharp big screen and how it is freamed with a birds-nest of cables behind it, and arrays of ugly grey boxes. Tell me that cant be improved.
I think the most "broken" thing about televisions is that they exist at all anymore.
I have better than 1080p on my "spare" 24" monitor. What do I need a 46" TV for, especially at 10 x the price? I can watch TV at full resolution (or lower, which is what I usually really want) in a window as I work on my computer. I have a slingbox, so I haven't actually been using a TV to watch TV for years now.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Do I have to mention newspapers?
Engineers don't know what is wrong with TV. And we won't know until after TV goes the way of the horse and buggy.
The people who work for TV don't want to wait. They want to create TV's replacement before it gets killed by whatever's new.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I think that until _all_ TVs have 16:9 screens and _all_ studios broadcast unmodified/uncropped/un-letterboxed content, we'll have the following two problems:
The disparity in video formats and whether they "letterbox" a high-def program for standard-definition channels is frustrating. Most modern studios and news stations in the US are recording in HD, then either letterboxing it for SD broadcast (adding black bars on top and bottom to make it 4:3 aspect ratio), or cropping the left and right side of the image to get the 4:3 image. The former is horrible for people with HD sets that can't overscan (scale up the side of the image so it fills the screen, eliminating the black bars) and you lose effective image resolution... I wish someone would drill it into their heads that letterboxing HD content is BAD for SD broadcasts. Your camera crew should try to capture actors and action within the central 4:3 area of the image so you can crop and scale your HD content for people with SD TVs or receiving SD channels.
Even more frustrating is when I go to a public place with widescreen TVs showing standard-def channels (in 4:3 format), S-T-R-E-T-C-H-E-D to 16:9, so everyone looks fat and square-shaped graphics become rectangles. Half the widescreen "HD" TVs sold now are able to overscan properly, and the other half can't at all (they just stretch the image). A few good brands can do a "panorama" transform, which is a compromise, but makes diagonal lines look curved. There really is no legitimate reason for a TV to stretch a broadcast image horizontally, yet everyone thinks they NEED to do it to "fill" their wide screens with a 4:3 SD image. It boggles me that so many people purposely distort the image just so it can appear "widescreen".
Bulk packages of crap I don't care about to get one channel.
Can we get inexpensive a la cart channel selection already!
Because if you don't/can't be prepared to be eaten alive by Netflix.
First, he describes geeks as wanting to make TV efficient (and easy?), and then says normal people don't want that, because they want TV to be easy.
WTF does that even mean. I don't want easy, I want easy?
Ok, he said "passive", but "not wanting to work at it"... that's what smart people are working on, making it easy!
As if commercial breaks and laugh tracks were not enough, we have old news, puerile humor, fixed scheduling, oppressive DRM, bias, censorship, prudishness and no interaction. In two words: old media.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Firstly, if TV isnt broken, Why have so many of my non-tech friends started downloading instead of watching live?
What's broken? How about the fact that I have to work my life in around their schedules. TV companies are selling me a service (paid for by ads or a subscription), but they dont think it fair for the service to be convenient for the customer?
How about TV shows outside their country of origin? Is it fair for your customer to watch shows years after their release (assuming they air the whole season, in order, and dont change their minds and pull it).
How about, assuming you can organise your life around their schedule, how you have to browse listings or flip channels to find what youre looking for. Give me a search dialog!
How about ads? Advertisement after advertisement for things I could hardly care about. Get rid of ads. If you cant, at least make them relevant to me!
Theres a few, and thats wihout even getting into the quality issues!
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
I won't be happy until TVs look as awesomely designed as tennis shoes and toothbrushes.
1. Dump all "reality" shows.
2. Get rid of the incredibly annoying pop-ups during programs. Seriously, I stopped watching "Rubicon", which had at least some promise, because these are horribly disruptive and offensive.
3. Convince the History Channel, the Learning Channel, the Discovery Channel, to focus on actual history and actual science...and not myth, superstition, and nonsense.
4. Please note that #3 does not cover Mythbusters, which, while occasionally a bit self-indulgent, at least features actual experiments.
5. Try showing movies without censoring, interrupting or editing them.
6. Stop remaking things. Hawaii 5-0 (among many, MANY others) did not need to be remade, and you're embarrassing yourselves, as well as putting crap on the air.
7. Lose the talking heads on news. Lose the theme music, lose the captions, lose the scroll, lose the catchy titles for every major news event. Try something different: sober, reasoned, analysis. Don't tell me that "you only 20 seconds left to discuss this"; you're a fricking network, all you HAVE is time. And stop pretending that there are two sides to every story: when one side is obviously insane, lying, or stupid, there aren't. Instead: call them on it.
8. There are occasional treasures in the archives. Not only should you air them, you should back them up to the world by posting them for free, unlimited download.
9. Run all commercials by a panel of 15-year-olds. If even they mock it, then what reaction do you think intelligent adults will have?
10. Teach everyone on your staff that "/" is a slash, not a backslash. Make it a policy that you will instantly fire anyone who calls it a backslash. If they do so on-air, then armed security should tackle them, handcuff them, and drag them off the set while the cameras are running. (Okay, so this one is selfish. But I would it find it immensely satisfying to watch.)
Wow, thanks so much for making me aware that there is a show called "Lady Hoggers." I have no opinion one way or the other, but the title alone made me smile when I searched and found out it was real.
People still say things like this makes to make themselves feel superior?
There is a thing called too much TV. Some people may be shocked by this...
As for your points:
You need to find better channels, rent a dvd, or *ahem* read a book. There are plenty of interesting shows on broadcast television, not including PBS! Daytime television sucks but that's because they are saving their more expensive shows for times where people are normally home from work. Buy a DVR and let it record the shows while you do something else. Be sure to get a DVR with multiple tuners because all the really good shows come on at the same damn time.
Don't paint all networks with the incompetency that is Fox. USA, CBS, NBC, AMC and ABC to name a few have several good shows and yes they do come on at their regular advertised time. Commercials aren't really that bad live (gives me a chance to get a drink and other stuff), and I fast forward while playing from the DVR. Your examples kinda suck. I was surprised when SyFy cancelled filming future episodes of Eureka but lets be honest the storyline is getting too repetitive. They have new series like Haven. BTW, Eureka, Warehouse 13, etc. always seem to come on during their regular time slot on Mondays. However I will say having the christmas episodes come on a tuesday is confusing.
Exaggerate much? I doubt I have more than 50 unique channels non premium with my cable provider. Price? Broadcast television is free. RedBox is $1 a night. Netflix is $8 a month. You can get basic cable if you are desperate for more recent episodes. Even if ala carte pricing was feasible, the cable company would have to charge a minimum. I doubt the minimum would be less than limited basic cable. Television studios shoulder most of the blame since they insist on requiring the cable companies to carry all of their channels even if only one is popular.
TV is a box with moving pictures. It has a power button, channel up, channel down, volume up, volume down and picture controls. What you are talking about is the cable provider. If you don't like your current cable provider then find another one. Grandmas have no problem using that cable box so I think you are making a tempest in a teacup here.
Seriously... You need to buy a DVR.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
My IBM 360 punch card computer isn't broken either, why fix it?
One that intelligently skips over commercials, likely showing me my second and third favorite shows or bounces to a favorite news channel.. even weather.
One that record anything at anytime I want and even grab what I missed. Well they might give me that if I succumbed to the advertising.
One that put up whatever scene I wanted when I wanted. One which would integrate with other units seamlessly to follow me through the house... eventually smart enough to support the time lapse lost out of view should I request - go back
The TV I want cannot exist because the problem they seem to be trying to solve is how to prevent me from seeing any show I want when I want unless they can burden me with commercials.
Your choice, if I have to pay to get in my home I want it commercial free and when I want it and what I want, if you PAY me to put here you can decide.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This comic sums it up nicely.
Regardless of the method of transmission, television is dying, and the culprit is dumb content. People have more entertainment choices than ever before and television just can't keep up.
One major problem is that television content is dumbed down. Advertisers know that their commercials have less effect on intelligent people who are better at critical analysis, so they instead target kids, teens, seniors and the unwashed masses. Broadcast networks need content that will pull in those demographics. Make your content too complex and nuanced and you'll lose your targeted demographics. The result is a partnership between networks and advertisers that aim for the lowest common denominator sitting in front of the screen.
For a few decades, we had niche programming channels that offered something that wasn't stupid, but those channels have mostly been bought out by networks that have discovered that the LCD model is more profitable. Now those stations are content deserts, filled with little else besides reality shows about midgets, vagina clown cars, crabs and motorcycles. PBS is still around, but their programming is a niche within a niche. So we get this downward spiral where smart people are turned off by television, content gets dumber, more mainstream people are turned off by television, content gets dumber, and the IQ bar keeps falling.
The other major problem is that the way we receive content is dumb. Intelligent people have been buying gadgets for years that give us on-demand access to information. As the price has come down and those systems became more mainstream, everyday people got used to it as well. But television content mostly comes from unintelligent sources. On-demand IPTV might change that, but the content owners are fighting it. It is why streaming sites like Hulu and Netflix, as well as cable TV on-demand systems are hodge-podge patchworks of content.
I can't count the number of times that I have been frustrated because of the distribution methods of media. Netflix will have a series available for streaming, but then you hit one episode that is available only via disc rental. Hello, Bittorrent. Hulu will have content for streaming, but then you missed the cutoff for how long a new episode remains up. Hello, Bittorrent. I'll want to record two shows to my DVR that play the same time/night, but I only have one tuner card in my PVR. Know where I'm going by now?
The last problem is more of an issue limited to North America, but our OTA DTV system just doesn't play well with small, portable devices. We have too many channels that broadcast on VHF bands that require large antenna. The ATSC standard doesn't work well in areas bombarded with multipath interference or with moving devices (although it has gotten much better). Granted, the VSB standard was picked because it is more efficient over large areas, but it would be nice if any ATSC extensions would add OFDM as well. Large cities could have a low power UHF OFDM SFN (single frequency network) mesh for mobile handsets and apartment dwellers, while suburban and rural areas would still receive the main transmitter on the VHF-Hi VSB bands with their roof mounted aerials. Too bad that DTV for the VHF-Lo bands sucks and that the military occupies the area right above channel 13 on the VHF-Hi band.
I pay a content provider a subscription for a show. For instance, $0.75 for a season of House without ads, or $0.05 for a season of House with ads. $1.50 for a season of "The Daily Show" without ads. $10.00 for a restart of Firefly without ads (Yes, I went there), and so on. The greater the demand, the less the cost (and, obviously, the greater the show run, or the more cost to create, the higher the subscription cost). This will put much more money in the hands of the content providers directly, rather than having the cable middlemen taking a large chunk, and will still keep all but the most obsessive tv-watcher's cable bill at about the same price as it already is.
Content providers can poll me on my interests for new shows. They can also use those interests to customize the ads I get, if I am agreeing to get ads.
The content provider releases episodes on their regular schedule via a private BitTorrent tracker (or similar methods) in a DRM-unencumbered format, so I can watch it on any device I choose. This releasing is done using a customized-to-the-user RSS feed (only the shows I subscribe to from that provider appear in that feed), which is secured using HTTPS and a unique "user key". Trailers and pilot episodes for new shows can also be published on the RSS feed (especially if they may match my recorded interests). Keys cannot be shared, and abuse of such will result in the key being revoked (or at least, changed, so the user has to update his client with the new key if he wishes to continue, which will make it difficult enough to make sharing of feeds like this unfeasable).
News channels and current events can be subscribed to for live streaming using Multicast (preferably) or Unicast systems, in much the same way.
Cable companies can then become "content aggregators" or local CDNs, So rather than having to go to hundreds of different content providers, you can just subscribe through your cable company, and they aggregate all the available feeds for you and serve your content to you from local servers. Of course, going directly to the source is still an option, if you wish to track more directly, or if your particular cable company doesn't carry that provider's content. Cable companies can then either add a small surcharge to the price of each subscription, or charge a "content distribution" fee for running the local cache.
Emergency broadcasts can be implemented with special RSS feed items, or signed and timestamped playlist files that point to a live stream, to be picked up and (dis)played immediately by boxes or computer systems. This is about the only part that isn't possible right now, and I shouldn't think it'd take that much work to implement.
This way, when you go to the TV, there's always something you're interested in watching available. You never miss an episode of your favourite shows, and you directly support the people who make it.You don't have to get, and don't have to watch, anything you don't want to, and you can do whatever you like with what you've paid for. It also means that niche shows don't get canned, and providers have a completely accurate dollar-based view of just how popular shows really are (rather than having to rely on a very limited number of Nielsen households), and it also means that shows aren't competing for ratings by being forced into a timeslot, giving a false impression of popularity (or lack thereof). It would also make it easier for indie TV producers to get up and running. You'd probably also have a fast addition to Google in the form of "Which provider makes this TV show".
Unfortunately, the way Hollywood, and the MPAA/RIAA/Media fatcats see the TV industry, and television consumers as a whole, this will never come to pass. They are so much more fond of their walled gardens and "Prime time slot"s that the idea of abandoning them and allowing people to live their lives not beholden to their scheduling whims is abhorrent. It would be so very nice, but I hold out little hope in it happening. And
Well I’ll comment more on the TV as a multi-purpose viewing device, and less on the larger context of Television programing in the traditional sense. There will be some overlap of course.
Content Organization: Content itself is pretty subjective, but I’ll go out on a limb and argue that most people want to watch programs on their own schedule. HBO GO is a great example of how traditional content providers are moving in this direction. As TVs integrate with internet connectivity, it will no longer be necessary to have a PC/Tablet bridge something like HBO GO to your TV.
Form Factor - Though TVs are pretty sleek now, there is a lot of upside in the actual chassis of a TV. Fictional depictions of futuristic viewing devices generally make the ‘screen’ entirely integrated into the surrounding environment. ‘Screens’ are built into a window or wall panel, or simply projected into the air.
Control – I feel lazy and fat just saying this, but who wants to deal with a remote? I’m not sure I’d want to rely solely on voice controls, as they would often clash with the media itself, but there is lots of room to improve the basic remote. Using a high dollar integrated controller or tablet is nice, but it’s the same basic technology as a remote. I suspect a combination of control strategies could improve the TV experience (voice, touch screen, spatial recognition, more tablet like remotes, etc.).
Immersion - As mentioned, the current limitations to 3D TV are harsh. This will undoubtedly improve as time goes on. This really overlaps with Form Factor, as one annoyance is the need to arrange a room around the TV. As technologies improve both the immersion and Form Factor issues could be solved by something like holographic projections, glasses with built in displays, etc. Of course you can push immersion down the slow road toward VR.
Interactivity – This is a pretty huge content and technology hurdle, but could ‘Television shows' have interactive plots? I think this already exists in the game world and could really be exploited by coupling an MMO and a TV series. I’m not sure if interactive stories could ever really supplant scripted programing for a variety of reason (not all of which are technological), but there is room for improvement here.
Maybe you don't remember the programming in the old days. It was horrible. It seemed like there was one or two shows a decade that were worth watching. The movies were bad too. We see old movies and old tv shows now that are chosen because they were the watchable ones.
Today we are spoiled for choice. There are lots of shows worth watching. Sometimes two a day on the same channel. And there are more than 3 channels now. There used to be very few channels.
My in-laws are the problem with TV in my house. If I had cable and a big screen they'd visit and stay forever with the volume turned up to 11. No cable means they drive 5 hours to come here on Friday evening, say hello to the grand-kid just before bedtime, have lunch with us the next day -- dutch treat -- and drive back home to watch the shows they missed before their recorder is full.
That and there's no more Arrested Development.
I am not a crackpot.
Get rid of all the crap that is not part of the show. Logos, ads onscreen, etc.
My TV watching reduction started when they appeared. Recently I watched something (unusual for me) on TV and about a third or more of the screen was blocked by an ad. Next thing I know, there's people walking around in the ad. Very annoying.
I don't know why anyone would watch and put up with that kind of crap.
I have no desire to make copyright barons (murdoch/comcast) richer for a few shows i hear about.
We assume we have 'power' over what is seen - i doubt that, liberal arts majors can be stupid.
My newspaper does not cover all the channels on offer for 'free'
If ac nelson can prove to some tv retard that 'dancing with chickens' is better than star trek.... in the 1960's
There are some producers of tv content that do deserve support, however if the copyright barons, and demographics co's decide its not getting enough tampon purchasers and kill it then i honesty dont see it as my problem.
My big problem, aside from content issues, is set top boxes.
There once was a time you plugged your TV into the wall. You turned the dial and you got different channels. Instantly. Now, there's always a delay as you rapidly switch through channels (often negotiating HDMI). Often the box will get bogged down and not respond to your requests for awhile. Or you'll need to reboot it, and it will take 15 minutes for it to finish the boot sequence. They need to stop adding options and functionality and buckle down and get these machines working better. Respond instantly. Quick boots. Intelligent sleeping to save power (with instant wake up). Instead my cable company is letting me play Bejewled on my TV with my remote.
You used to buy a TV box for a few hundred dollars, then your only expense was electricity. Not enough profit.
Today, a home theater system can cost thousands, and then $150 a month for the cable - and you still have to watch commercials.
I want to have just the shows I want to see available on whatever normal release schedule the studio has, commercial free, on any device I own in the optimal resolution. I want them to still be available if I miss several shows. To that point it is all similar to what Apple provides on Apple TV. The kicker is that I want all of that without paying per show. I don't mind paying per month. Once I watch a show I don't need to watch it again so I have no desire to own them. The price does need to compare reasonably to current cable pricing (and yes I realize the advertising subsidy is part if that).
What frustrates me about Apple's offering is the high price per show vs subscription.
What frustrates me about online viewing is that older episodes disappear or the viewer is awful with odd forced ads that sometimes mess up the playback.
What frustrates me about on-deman viewing via my cable company is the poor UI and lock-in to my cable box.
So yes there is plenty of room there to fix TV.
-Xen
too many buttons. WAY too many buttons. how about we go back to channel and volume. i could live with pause and play.
take a tip from the apple remote. that's how it's done.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Every device I plug in seems to have its own way of communicating. Each needs its own remote. Why can't electronics manufacturers come up with a standard so that their equipment is recognized by any modern remote? I had a remote die and it was cheaper to get a new tv than fix the remote.
What's broken with TV is that it hasn't followed technology like computers have. Where our "You might also like"? Where's our search engine? Where's real customization and international options? When TVs have the flexibility and efficiency of computers, then all we'll be talking about are specs and which models play which games. All in all, if TVs weren't broken, there wouldn't be Apple/Google TV, Tivo, PVRs, VCRs, BluRay, etc...
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
It ain't engineers or technicians that want to change things. As is common with these things, it's being driven by the people that want the money.
Us engineers and technicians understand the whole, "If it ain't broke, why fix it?" mentality.
Now, with that said; there is a problem with modern TV. It takes too damn long to change channels. Seriously, it takes a couple seconds per channel. To me, that's a critical design flaw that needs to be fixed, especially since that's a recent development with cable boxes. So there you go, the industry created a real problem. Now they need to fix it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The problem with TV is shit content. Whats the point in Full HD and 3D TV if the majority of tv content is reality shows and other various trash? The only thing I can think of is using the HD resolution to read text on web pages and the 3D for console gaming. Why still call it a TV when it should be a monitor/all-in-one pc that just happens to have video input and a tv tuner?
Like Henry Fords second great invention after his assembly line innovations was to come out with different models every year to stimulate sales. A form a social engineering coupled with sales and profit motive. Sell people on the idea of having the latest and greatest. It churns the sales. This has been good for the economy for about a century. The other innovations to support that model which changed the way manufacturing has been thought of is "Planned Obsolescence".
This made sure that you could use the flimsiest and cheapest materials to make sure that people had to buy new product. I worked for a specialty steel company that was approached by an automaker who wanted a stainless steel muffler. They made one that would outlast the car. They came back and said, no we want one that will only last 5 years.
As the junk piles up in our landfills and we start to run out of cheap energy that is wasted in the manufacture of goods planned not to last, and we wake up to the fact that our consumer society is in trouble, something will have to drastically change. I hope not catastrophically.
Anyway, it is the same economics that are driving the push to get the government to crack down on IP piracy that is driving people to re-invent the TV. They want to keep their business profits rolling in in the face of the steam roller of history starting to bear down on them.
And we need cool jobs making cool stuff and getting paid.
There's nothing broken with TV's not even my old CRT model. What's broken is the business models, and distribution networks, especially cable.
C|N>K
The real problem that these companies are trying to work on is simple:
"I'm not getting a [big enough] cut of the revenues from TV"
That's the fundamental problem they're all trying to solve. That's not to say that there aren't problems with TV, but I think the problems are probably too bound into the TV ecosystem to be fixed and I don't think anyone is interested in fixing the real problems because it wouldn't be profitable to fix them.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I agree, we decied some years ago to let go of our TV... coudn't be happier. Kudos to you to bad for everybody else.
Tomorrow is another day...
I have to agree with the overall content sentiment. I'm dismayed by the lack of an a la carte option for television. Honestly, I'd gladly pay for a channel that did nothing but just play re-runs of classic sci-fi series. Also, the few sports events I do watch, I'd prefer to be able to purchase individually (or even in bulk as a season). All of this, sans commercials, I would gladly pay a premium for; if only for the privilege of being able to do so.
Unfortunately, it looks like companies want to expand television into the interactive realm. While I can see a few possible improvements here, I don't think the television is the device for it (what's the advantage of having it in the television as opposed to a tablet PC?). I certainly don't look forward to media companies leering behind my television, waiting with frothing mouths and sweaty palms to harvest my clicks and present me with more ads for shit I couldn't possibly want any less.
The obvious solution is that you need to eliminate the cable companies ( I can't get FIOS ). Why is it that every TV I have requires a big ugly loud cable box that uses more electricity than my refrigerator, even when off! Also I'm paying a ton of money for channels I don't watch just to subsidize Cablevision's salary structure.
Plus it all runs over this crappy coax network in my house (even though every place I have a coax jack I also have an ethernet jack. I run into problems trying to add extra tv sets since the splitters are all dumb.
The internets role has been to eliminate middle men in all fields, I can't wait until the crap accumulating, junky hardware renting unnecessary appendage that the cable companies have become are gone.
Early adobe/Palm e-book efforts were dismissed, original Kindle peaked people's attention, now Borders is gone and most people associate reading with iPad, Nook or Kindle Fire. You may not see the point of the 1st generation TV from Apple. But someday your current set will break down and you will get a product that requires only a single power cable and WiFi and delivers news, sports, movies, gaming and videoconferencing for the fraction of the cost of current cable subscription. You will then thank early adopters who answered the "why" question on your behalf.
*- so says my wife, who wanted the return of TV in our living room for some time. She did not want to "watch stuff from the internet", but "sit on the couch, relax, and watch whatever is on". So I hooked up the air antennae and showed her how to switch to our LCD panel to "TV mode" -- "But... there is nothing on", was the argument, and the "TV mode" was never used again
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem! We want to relax and just watch what we want, when we have time, and preferably without 50% of show time sold to commercials.
In terrestial radio, you have maybe 6-10 distinct things to watch/record at given point of time.
If you pay a *whole* lot more for satellite or cable, you get one order of magnitude more stuff to watch at a given point of time. If left to 'surf', this is also 10 times more work to trudge through.
In order to watch something I like, I can either align my schedule to it or have my PVR attempt to record it only to get out of sync due to a baseball game (or else have them cancel that showing entirely, which means no way of watching what I wanted whether I liked the baseball game or not). The logistics of broadcast television are a pain with PVR as a hackish workaround.
Meanwhile, any arbitrary video stream accessible from hulu, youtube, or netflix out of *thousands* is immediately available, not tied up in arbitrary 'channels', not bound to a restricted broadcast medium.
I suppose the only thing that's missing is the 'I don't know what to watch so just spew something at me'. Hulu desktop almost does this but generally just throws movie trailers at me. Something like Pandora mechanics would probably outdo television for a contiguous stream of stuff that keeps me engaged, since a television channel frequently has no theme consistency timeslot-to-timeslot.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
But nobody seems to be able to answer the big question: what exactly is so broken about TV anyway?
This irks me. Not even addressing the content available on TV, let's just look at what's wrong the device itself: Cost, form-factor, size, energy requirements, ergonomics, useless remotes...for starters. Seriously, this sort of nonchalant attitude about consumer devices is why consumer devices suck.
Now I have other first-world problems to go complain about...
Let me see here.
TV
For: Free
Against: Lousy TV reception (where I live, anyway), non-optional programming (you can't pick what's on), advertising.
DVD
For: Optional "programming", no advertising, no reception issues.
Against: Costs money.
How much? Newly-released box sets go at about $70 per season. Wait five years, and you can probably pick up the box set for about $30. So, an entire series of 7 seasons costing $210 for less than fifty cents per hour. Not bad, and you get to watch it again for no extra charge whenever you want.
If you don't particularly want to collect DVD box sets, you can also rent them for far less money.
It isn't broken any more.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
"TV" was a push based, realtime entertainment with very limited bandwidth. Much of the programming had to be halfway decent, and the talent was a lot better, as it was competing for that tiny timeslice. If you missed some thing, you truly did, and you'd be out of the loop come water cooler conversation time. Today, with thousands of channels, the talent has gone way, way down. There are so many ads you NEED a DVR to watch anything...I can't recall the last time I watched a cable or OTA show in real time that wasn't a sports match. Since all those holes need filling, we've gone from Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore to....Snooki and the Kartrashian clan. TV is now just a big screen. Ask my kids, who don't watch ANY OTA or cable in real time either. The networks are screwed...note all the ads are for drugs for old folks....no one under 45 watches "the news", and no one watches anything in real time anymore.
About 10+ years ago when MPEG-2 decoder cards and ADSL appeared, I thought finally, we are on the verge of having "content providers" who basically just host all the films and shows they can pile up and we can watch whatever we want, whenever we want, flexibly being able to choose whether it's ad-supported, a monthly subscription, or per viewing. I grossly underestimated old media and people's addiction to the boob tube. I don't watch any TV at all anymore. I don't even have a tuner of any sort. There's just too much other more interesting media out there nowadays to compete against the old "plop yourself on a lazyboy and watch whatever's on for hours and hours" patheticness. The once-a-week 25 minute show with 20 minutes of ads is just not something I will ever, ever, ever return to. I'd rather not watch at all. I download or buy all my films/shows and watch exactly what I want, when I want, and that's the only way for me, and it looks like this perspective is becoming more and more popular. Finally.
Should not be hard, apart from the legal nonsense.
It just might be that it's the economics of your wish list that is nonsense. You want unlimited, high-quality, affordable content. You get what you are willing to pay for. It sounds like you are a bit reluctant to pay for unlimited, high-quality content.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
What's wrong? I'll tell you what's wrong. It's the year Two Thousand f***in Eleven, and I still have to memorize channel numbers! If I want to watch Comedy Central, I should be able to tell the stupid box that I want to watch Comedy Central, not have to type in a four-digit code that I still can't remember after all this time. Yeah, there's the "Favorites" function which shortens your search, but why should I even have to mess with that? With the current state of technology, why is there no better way of locating channels other than assigning each one a number?
Current TV is premiering some new programming and is using their website to educate viewers on "how to find" their network. That's just obscene. Nobody should have to hunt through 1000+ channels to find what they're looking for.
------RM
I just cancelled my cable. The cable company's subscription model meant I was spending $$$ every month for half a dozen programs, spread across three different tiers of channels. Since I can get everything I want over the air, streamed or on iTunes, I pulled the plug. I supplement this with (mainly overseas) DVDs. Anna Pihl can arrest me any time she wants. :-)
Unlike others around here, I actually like Pan Am. It passes an important test, though without ads, the run time is a paltry 40 minutes. That's an awful lot of ads in an hour. Ouch!
...laura
1> Cover an entire wall (no more repainting or physical wall paper!!!), while supporting touch. 2> Be able to act as a screen to any wireless device. Why can't you "project" your Android to your TV.
Regarding content: all TV needs to be on-demand, except for live events, of course. We're progressing here.
When we accomplish these things, then, perhaps, we can say we're done improving the TV.
Of course, at this point, we might want to consider burning books, perhaps converting our fire departments into book burning units.
Open Standards Portal
TV used to be great; when it was free. After they went digital, it is almost impossible to get a signal over the airwaves that creates watchable television. When it was analog, you could watch free television almost anywhere, if you didn't mind a little snow.
Nowadays, you have to pay for tv on top of paying for internet (and you still generally end up watching ads). So the problem is that I want free tv. Especially if it has advertising.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Discussions like these show just how far Slasdot is alienated from regular society.
TV is:
- the NFL (National Football League -- football is a sport),
- other stuff.
After the NFL, there are other sports and other shows. But the ratings are dominated by NFL games. Any talk about TV content and pricing without the NFL is missing the real picture. If you don't pay attention to the NFL, you're going to have a hard time understanding the TV business. If you don't value sports, your cable plan wasn't designed for you. Your cable bill includes a large amount of money to pay for sports programming.
- advertising. Ads before the show, ads after the title sequence, ads throughout the show. Recap after the ads with product placement. Animated ads that appear at the bottom of the screen, often covering up crucial content. Ads after the show when they cram the closing credits to the left of the screen and show an ad on the right half of the screen.
- Ever try counting the amount of actual non-recapped content in a mythbusters episode?
- Regular shows that start a season, do a few episodes and then go on hiatus for months at a time, then reappear for 2 or 3 episodes, then go on hiatus again (Big Bang Theory). No longer can you grab some popcorn and sit down with your wife to watch an episode together because it might not be on this week (or next, or next)
- Content providers electing not to allow other countries to have their content until a year or two or three later. The internet has made friendships that are international... So when your friends are all laughing at the latest thing that happened on whatever show, you, as an out-of-country friend, have no way to participate in that discussion because you won't see the episode for two years. Or when the news-streams tell you how ended, it ruins it for you since you won't get the content for another year or two, if ever.
The political layer has ruined TV. The greed layer has ruined TV. Bittorrent and MythTV have saved TV for me. Until content makers, content providers and content distributors get back to the task of making/presenting TV in a way that customers want instead of investors, they can all go fuck themselves and I will continue to steal their content and view it in a way that's convenient _for_me_.
who thinks that 20 year old TVs (with the analog knobs and all that) were a LOT easier to use compared to the TVs we have today? Have you ever had to do "TV tech support" for someone in your family? I swear, the UIs are progressively getting worse and most people don't know about 90% of features in their TV or how to use them. Hell, *I* probably don't know half the features of my TV and how to use them and I am rather technically-inclined 28 year old male.
> So, what do you think is broken about TV right now?
No one combines internet TV guide info with over the air channel info. I get better OTA than cable, so this would be nice.
I torrent absolutely everything that I watch. For me, TV is better than it has ever been, but I admit that it's non-ideal. Ethical issues aside (I consider torrenting analogous to having a neighbor tape a show for you, and then fast-forwarding through the commercials REALLY fast), I find that I miss out on not seeing ANY ads. Other than checking movie trailers on apple.com, I never know about new, upcoming movies. I never know about new fall line-ups, or upcoming sales from local retailers.
None of these are crucial, and I'm fine without them, but I find some ads/commercial breaks to be as useful as checking dealnews.com daily, or the Sunday ads in the paper (which I also do not subscribe to.)
I think that I would actually be willing to selectively watch ads (those that interest me) periodically, just to stay up on things. I don't want or need to see ads for herpes meds, adult diapers or panty liners with wings, but I might just want to know about a sale from a local retailer, a new ride at the amusement park, or a discount day at a ski resort.
I don't know the solution here, but I think ads are the biggest problem with TV. Who wants to watch an advertisement for something that isn't even relevant for their life situation?
BTW, I also don't like the fact that I have gigabytes of brain memory storage taken up by toy/toothpaste/cereal jingles from the 80's. It's disgusting how may cereal jingles I can sing from my childhood.
Oh, and as for the VOD, it's awesome to be able to watch what I want, when I want without having to remember to set a timer or schedule a recording on a device.
sig: sauer
It would cost you about $50,000 a year, plus books and fees.
Well, maybe not now, but you can bet some University Administration would decide that's what has to happen.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Not directly, anyway.
Television in most of the world is utter crap because it is funded by advertisements. The ad market doesn't work by crafting entertainments that people pay for directly (and, if it's not to their likely, they don't). Television shows exist as ad delivery vehicles or as something that resembles a gaudy variation on popular entertainment from state-sponsored, tax-funded stations.
Television will work again only when one buys direct access to a show (or series of shows). Unpopular shows that can't make their production costs back won't be on the air for long.
Advertising can so very quickly debase the relationship between purchaser of content and its creator. That link needs to be restored. Quickly.
The pipe-owners - Comcast, Sky, TimeWarner - can only further distance us from choosing our entertainment with our money.
This works at the cinema and it's the way television should work, too.
As someone who provides support to customers for televisions, the overriding problem seems to be that the TVs are too complicated for a lot of people to change settings on/navigate.
In a sense, the "TV repairman" is back.
New TVs have gotten sufficiently complicated that my Mom can't use hers without occasional house calls for the kind of things you describe. I'm 6 hours away, so this means pestering my sister to come over or calling the neighbors for help. I guess that's OK if the whole TV industry is cool with equipment not really being general consumer tech anymore. She's probably not a desirable demographic anyway.
I am not a crackpot.
First, you can't stop geeks from geeking the TV. That's the free market. Secondly, the fact that they're geeking the TV, the content sucks, and the Internet is fragmenting the audience leads me to a conclusion. There is no longer the same critical mass of viewers that there once was. Thus, TV won't be the same cultural touchstone that it was when we were all watching Happy Days on Tuesday nights back in the 70s.
A few months ago a friend comes out and he's like, "there's this show called Breaking Bad..." and he proceeds to tell me about this and that, and the other; but it's a dead-end conversation because I refuse to pay for TV. That's one division right there--those of us who pay for premium content and those who don't. Then there's those of us who have broadband and watch YouTube vids (that'd be me). I'd probably not connect as well with somebody who has satellite TV and dial-up Internet.
Anyway, the "fragmented audience show" must go on. You pop the popcorn...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
1. CableCo's charge too much! FAR FAR too much.
2. CableCo's charge EXTRA for HD... who the hell has a NON-HD TV these days... all TV stations are broadcasting in HD. They need to do more work to downgrade the signal to SD so they can give me that and charge extra for the HD channel.
3. Internet based TV like NetFlix and Hulu work great and are cheap BUT only when you use them through your PC. Trying to find an elegant (read simple to use and usable) solution for the big screen that doesn't require a little screen (laptop) next to the big screen is like pulling teeth. Hey guys it really needs to be as easy as running the PVR.
4. Since there is no one integrated solution the various boxes needed to implement the home theater need to get along better. HDMI-CEC may help but it appears to be early days for this (Western Digital and Tivo ARE YOU LISTENING?)
5. Presets. We want presets. There are several common things we do that we don't want to have to navigate too EVERY TIME WE WANT TO DO THEM... Turn on the News. Turn on Netflix. Turn on my favorite radio station. These need to be simple and accessible from the remote without having to interact with the TV.
I'm just going through the process of down grading my CableCo to Internet Only status... I am getting 10+ OTA channels. Feeding that into a Tivo. The Tivo works better than the old (Motorola) PVR the CableCo provided.
We're going to Netflix for the movies. But that is painful on the Tivo... (effectively go to the office, find a movie, add to instant queue, go back to living room, go through a bunch of menus to load NetFlix program, find the movie in the instant queue and voila! five minutes later you are watching a movie!)
The WD TV Live Plus is slightly better. But unless you leave it on 24/7 it takes some time to turn on. Then you need to scroll down to Internet Media, then down and left to find NetFlix... Load up, and then find the movie in the Instant Queue.. It does have a Search option though. So possibly almost worth while.
And some other simple things.Presets... when the TV is not on we like to have the receiver set to FM and bring in some nice Jazz station... used to do that by tuning to a station that the CableCo brought in. Can't get that OTA here... so I need to do that via the Internet. Both Tivo and WD TV Live are more than happy to do it too. But you can't do it through the remote to a preset... Turn the TV on. Select source (Tivo or WD), make sure they are on... fumble through the menus to find the application you want for that Internet Media source (e.g. Tunein) and run it... Fumble through that set of menus to get to your presets and hey presto five minutes later you now have your music... Just turn the TV off and you are good to go.
The most flawed paradigm is that there has to be a TV to enjoy the content made for it. TV is just one of the screens to which stream data. In Finland all of the major channels provide many of the shows (own or bought) for free on their dedicated online streaming sites (http://areena.yle.fi/, http://www.ruutu.fi/ ...) The quality is not 100% of course but it's enough - and the quality baseline gets higher as the technology advances.
Besides the same kind of subscriptions as you described are available (although I don't know if any of the providers stream online content too).
The only quirk is that the households with TV sets need to pay a TV fee. It is to provide the public broadcaster its funding (like BBC). The fee is about $0.90 / day at the moment. It is however slowly transforming into a media fee to reflect the changing media environment.
The Tsunami that is the Internet has washed over industry after industry as it's speed and reliability has improved. TV now finds itself the next set of businesses suddenly knee deep in an ocean of rising cheap bandwidth. How will they fair compared to their fellow media companies that lived a little lower down in bandwidth requirements such as the newspapers, music labels, and telephone companies?
Now toss in Moore's law and how I have a camera in my phone that can shoot HD video and edit and distribute and do a better job then I ever could 15 years back with $20K worth of gear.
Change will be coming.
Internet Video has been my life's work.
I write a blog on this http://www.videotechnology.com/
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
People still say things like this makes to make themselves feel superior?
People say that [they don't watch TV] because they discovered how much free time they recover by forgoing the stupid box. Some of that time they may spend on the Internet, but at least they can choose the level of stupid that they are comfortable with.
How is it unlimited? He would only be able to watch exactly the same quantity of video as he can on a $29.99 basic cable subscription. You are pretty much restricted to the number of hours in a month multiplied by the number of TV's in the household.
How about even just getting staff to say only "slash" and "backslash" instead of pedantically saying "forward-slash" every damned time.
So far the only answer to these problems has been BitTorrent.
Or official catch-up services, like the BBC's iPlayer. When I used to have a TV (with signal) in the house, and I was more aware of what I was missing, I used it fairly often to watch things at my convenience, on my choice of device. (Having realised no one in the house watched live TV, we stopped paying for the license and disconnected the aerial. So, I'm no longer aware of what I'm missing, and look at what's available on iPlayer etc. I look occasionally, but don't seem to miss out on much.)
Has anyone implemented the patent (software patent, yuk) I had the "idea" for, when I was working one summer for an electronics company? The TV/box to record things that you might be interested in, based on what you've previously watched, and what other people watch? One more step from "other people who viewed XYZ also watched". But that's just a temporary measure until bandwidth is great enough to just store everything centrally anyway.
Why should I pay increasing amounts for channels I don't want to watch under bundling arrangements, just to get the 2 or 3 channels (and half-dozen programs) I do watch? Why am I restricted to what my particular cable provider wants to give me?
Seems to me we need to look at TV 'signals' like the Internet, and separate bandwidth providers from content providers.
TV has a content problem. Most of the content sucks. And when you see the advertisements, you know that the world is crazy out there. I switched away from TV about 8-9 years ago. First, I watched series when I had time to borrow a tape, a DVD or download the stuff elsewhere. Over time, I moved to an online TV recorder. So know I record the stuff I want to watch (or select it for recording after it run on TV (really cool feature)) and I watch it when I have time. Some stuff like news or TV-series from public/state TV are freely available on the sites of those stations. So I can get my watching stuff when I have time. What I lost is zapping. But zapping is a good way to destroy lifetime. You watch without watching and it takes time. The focus on the TV shuts your brain down. So you cannot think about yourself, the world, or anything what really matters. You even forget the dirt in the kitchen. And after the zapping you still feel exhausted. So the broken thing about TV is zapping, the advertising, and most of the content.
As I do not watch TV advertisements, when I go to the cinema, I often do not understand the adverts there, as they tend to tell stories and build on top of them. Now I missed some years of TV ads and I cannot understand the direction of some of the ads. But I can understand what they want to sell me and which tricks they want to use. The same happens when I see ads from the US. Living in Europe gave me a different context and therefor, I see them from the outside. The ads producers must really think US citizens are simple and naive. And I know we pay twice as much for a Kindle and less for our mobile flat. ;-) And I know they try to sell crazy abnormal cars.
In short: TV is broken, as it is not watch when you want what you want. And it will be gone someday and only people who need to disable their brain will have one.
TV Isn't Broken, So Why Fix It?
It is reasonable to assume that priority order of human endeavor starts with the things that are most broken. That makes sense from an objective efficiency perspective, but not from the perspective of pragmatic business. Pragmatic business is focused on maximizing shareholder value. The priority ordering of pragmatic business is highest profit first. In an efficient free market, that would be the same as most broken first. In a market with biasing factors, however, the highest priority markets -- the markets that are most profitable -- are those which benefit most from those biases.
One broad market that has been the benefactor of shifting public resource investment is intellectual property. We have been granting longer and broader monopoly rights, and becoming more narrow in our interpretation and protection of competitive and consumer rights in IP. We have been investing public resources in making IP more profitable. As with any market, IP has ancillary markets. Those ancillary markets benefit from increases in the profitability of the primary market. In the case of IP, one example is television.
Investment on enhancing television, despite the fact that it is more than adequate to home entertainment wants, is a side effect of our public investment in increasing IP profitability.
Television is far from the only such example. Another excellent one is IP law enforcement. We have been investing a lot of effort on "fixing" IP law enforcement, which some would say was not broken. From the RIAA's lawyers and lobbying expenditures to ICE's budget, we spend a great deal of our national income on IP law enforcement.
The increase in IP law enforcement naturally returns us to the beginning of this essay; increasing investment in IP profitability. That is true in the direct sense that our investment is resulting in the capture of more of the potential profit. It is also true -- in proportion to the corruptibility of our government -- in the indirect sense of creating new IP privileges and new potential profit.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I may have forgotten a few eyesores,though.
Fearmongering local news in the evening, and airhead yukfest local news in the morning?
I can see the fnords!
Fortunately, the actual content may not be nearly as expense as the current typical method of delivery (namely cable). If there's anything that you can get cheaply on DVD, you're much better off just buying stuff outright and "deleting" that particular show off of your list of reasons to bother with cable.
Plus you get it uncut.
Butchering re-runs has nothing to do with any PVR arms race. It predates PVRs entirely.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Too bad there's so many holes in it's content offerings.
Plus there's the whole pricing problem. Much of the content is available only as a "purchase" that is often more expensive than what you can buy physical media for. It may not even be price competitive with cable.
Plus you have the whole "streaming bandwidth" problem.
You're probably far better off with a Tivo.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
This. The day I got my Roku is the day I decided there would never be any reason for me to get a DVR. Why should I have to store a copy of a show in my living room? I'll let the provider know when I want to see it, and he can send over the bits at that time.
1) First off I'm not buying another damn box for a box. And no I'm not renting a box for a box either. I read plenty of books. Brandon Sanderson, William Gibson, RA Salvatore, Proust (way back in college), and even the late Anne McCaffrey sit on my shelf. Regardless, I don't watch a lot of TV. I read far more.
2) The examples provided are about the shows I actually gave a damn to see. There are far more that have been cut short, and I'm not going to pull out a TV history encyclopedia to find out how many were cut in recent memory that were great shows. Judging by the flack I hear from coworkers and superiors, I'd say there were plenty of bullshit bad decisions.
3) No, I don't think the television studios are to blame here. I believe a la carte is totally possible when I take telcos and totally cut their greedy, and monopolistic asses OUT of the picture. Give me your bandwidth and be gone. Don't give me the shit line about "we're not dumb pipes" defense. Everyone knows their not, but don't defend their abuse of a system that sucks to try to compete in. Do something honest and right for once and provide a service that actually serves. Not enslaves.
4) Don't try and simplify the remote control, cable UI, and/or any smart/dumb television. They are piles of confusing shit any 4 year old needs to sit down and watch mom and dad use for a full 90-120 days before even feeling comfortable touching a button w/out daddy getting pissed. I've seen it.
5) No, I don't need to buy shit. Telcos need to stop raping the country. We paid their asses for fibre to the curb, decent bandwidth, and a neutral internet. What do we got? A bullshit farce. This is just one more slap to the face. I don't even pirate shit and I still have these pathetic caps that make our country look like shit in the face of the likes of Ukraine and South Korea.
6) iTunes is the way to go, and yeah, when Apple DOES indeed come out with an a la carte solution I'll be the first one on the bandwagon to say "Cancel your shit cable b/c this train is going to the moon and back." Will it kill jobs? Maybe. Will people value bandwidth more than cable? Yes. Will networks and telcos both get what's been coming for 30+ years? Yes. All I have to say is that payback is a bitch, and when the consumer pulls that plug - oh - I will savor it.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
Overscan is mostly visible on the inputs (from PC), but it is present also on cable and air broadcasts.
1. 2. 3. Broken: FullHD 1920x1080 screen, FullHD 1920x1080 signal, and still the TV's SW will "zoom in" (to remove 5-10% of the margins). WHY???? Why 1 pixel from source signal is different than TV pixel? I understand that on 480i and 576i "offscreen" space was used for syncronisation (deployed in early 1900s), but 720p and 1080p were deployed when TV's and HD sources (even converters) had enough processing power to eliminate it. For 1$/unit?
You will never see a FullHD movie as crisp as it can be until overscan is eliminated.
4. Oh...and why do we have 1360x768 (or 1366x768) panels instead of 1280x720.....and whoever says "Windows", I'll shoot them (in reference to 2nd XP standard resolution: 1024x768).
5. Advertising is gone too far: when a 1h30m movie is scheduled for 2h30m. 1 minute of advertising is probably acceptable by anyone. Maybe even 2 (the money really comes from somewhere)....but having 10 minutes of advertising after 20-30mins of the "content" (movie or show).....I wonder why I even watch it.....but now we have DVRs, so I do have around 30s of advertising at high speeds....if I don't watch live.
TV is too much of a linear experience. You sit down, show plays beginning to end, and you watch it. You can't interact with the content. A lot of people will say "So what." These people are old. They'll die eventually. The younger people who remain are going to want more from the experience. My four year old almost never watches TV, but he uses the Internet every day for fifteen minutes or so. The times when he does watch TV, he is confused why it seems like such an inert experience. He wants to make it "do something" and is frustrated by the fact that it just sits there and plays.
What's broken?!?! Not enough quality content, too many commercials, not playing when I am ready to watch, hardware nightmare of too many remotes and input modes (TV, Cablebox, DVR, DVD/Bluray, Stereo, game console, Rovio, etc.). HDMI blocking digital content with DRM methods. DVR recording (former TiVo owner) doesn't cut it. I cancelled my cable TV last year and haven't looked back.
Solved the TV problem already. Oh, I don't actually watch Live TV any more. I watch TV Shows and Movies minus commercials, advertisements, trailers you can't skip through, etc. I don't watch the news, I don't watch sports, I don't watch reruns, unless I really want to. I can get everything I care about online within an hour of broadcast, dumped to a small household SAN. I just input what I want to capture and automated systems retrieve it for me. The content is out there floating around the Interwebs free for the taking. I stream locally over my own private network to the multitude of televisions and iPads in my home. I use my iPhone as a remote control for the TV's. I can pause a show in one room and resume it in another. I can also stream web shows like Revision3, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Pipe my music through the same system and family photos / videos on the TV. I can capture funny web clips using a browser and view them on the TV later. I have one remote control per room. It's so dang easy to use, my wife understands it! I even have her shows available.
You're a bunch of Geeks, figure it out. The tools are all there for the taking, I just happened to find the right combination of existing systems that work well together. It is like one big happy Unix command prompt, piping content metadata from one system to another. But like Fight Club you don't talk about this...
I would gladly pay for an on demand subscription based system where I specifically choose the shows I want. I would even consider watching advertisements. But I want the freedom to watch what I want when I want. I want to start up a show mid-season two or three and get all the back episodes without having to wait months or years for the show to hit DVD. But that is not what I am offered. I have to choose a package that gets ridiculously expensive and includes boat loads of channels and content I do not want. Then shows get blacked out for political station to station infighting, etc. The networks stream shows but it sucks with the ads and the Flash interface is crap. You can't pickup where you left off. You can't send the content to a TV. Another issue is they don't offer all the back episodes only a handful of episodes. So how am I to find out about a show late and get caught up? The Season DVD's won't ship until the season ends.
I believe that Apple is the only one to solve this problem. They haven't done it with iTunes TV shows yet, still too expensive. It's like buying season box sets at a slight discount. I don't need to "own" the shows, but I do want to stream them whenever I want. I think iCloud is going to make that happen. I would plunk down the dough if Apple produced a full solution. I am already using several Apple systems in my architecture of the ultimate Internet DVR. I want to go legit, but because of my skills and knowledge I found the solution, it's just not for everyone. It's highly automated and works 99% of the time. I come home and I've got new stuff to watch. It was not easy to setup and get it all working but once I did, it's like an appliance. Apple could deliver a similar mechanism and rescue the dying TV business in the process. The one area this breaks down is live sports games of which I am not a fan. But it's a very important category to millions of fans. MLB/NHL functionality on AppleTV2 is darn close. But it's still restricted to blackouts, etc. Why not deliver the ultimate viewing experience. Watch the game and switch from stupid over the air commentary to technical feeds on a side bar. Run your own instant replays and camera angles, etc. It could be so very awesome! Build in
Like the in Canadian system that let you buy the cable box with no per box outlet / mirroring fees.
also we should have more choice over what channels you want to have as part of your package.
I think we need to get rid of the remote. It's an old technology that needs to go the way of VHS. Universal remotes haven't caught on (at best they reduce the remotes down to one), and even the idea of a smart phone app for replacing remote seems out of date. There should be a new interface for 'surfing' as well as programming PVR/DVRs. This needs to be fixed since we're seeing more of the streaming options becoming more integrated into TVs nowadays. Media interfaces like AppleTV and BoxeeBox are great, but again they add another remote to the situation. Solutions like modding xBox's Kinect may be the next step. having a gesture controlled TV may be the next innovation. I honestly think the best interface would be a voice system like Siri. Something that might be able to integrate computer systems, handheld devices, as well as other electronics. However, I wonder how far off we are from that?
I cancelled my cable subscription 10 years ago, and have never reconsidered. The TV I own, is really just a big monitor for displaying content from my computer and AppleTV box (the latter being quite rare too.) The cable subscription model is what is broken because at least in Canada:
1 - I would have to pay for basic content that I do not want
2 - Most premium channels are only available as a subscription bundled with other channels I don't want
3 - There are really only three or so shows per season I actually have time to watch. Why do I have to pay for the rest of the garbage?
4 - I want to pay for the content. I don't want the advertisements, or the restrictions. I would rather and do actually pay for the DVD box set or even the iTunes subscription to content.
5 - I want my money to go to those who produced and made the show, I don't care about the distribution system. I don't care about the broadcaster or the cable company. Why anyone would want any dollar to go to them beats the hell out of me.
I love watching movies by the way and have no problems paying for the experience. I also stopped going to movies, because the theatre experience sucks. I didn't pay a sizeable sum to be: ripped off for crappy food/beverages, to watch 30 minutes of advertisements, to be reminded again and again about anti-piracy.
Could corporations stop screwing their customers?
I actually think using advertising to fund television is a horribly dishonest way of doing it. I don't give two shits about car insurance or toothpaste or ready brek, and the more I hear about any of it, the more I actually resent the lot of it. How is that supposed to benefit a product?
There is also the problem of shows that I might actually have an interest in being thrown under the bus by some self important company exec instead of being given a fair chance. Futurama for example. It stitches me up, then it gets taken outside and shot. Somehow, lucky enough to cheat death, but that is the exception rather than the rule.
This is supposed to be the social networking era, where is my ability to cut out the useless middlemen and throw my money straight at the actual producers of film/television projects? If there was more direct connection between the audience and the creator, then I bet all of this god awful insipid reality shite - designed cheaply as possible purely to fill an arbitrary weekly schedule - I bet it would wither on the branch within a week. I don't need 500 channels of smug pricks going 'I'm on telly!' - they aren't worth the time I spend scratching my bollocks!
One of the silliest ideas to come around in the last few years is broadcast HD. The intersection set between people who are dependent on broadcast TV (vs cable/telco or other wired provider) AND those who care about HD is practically NIL.
Smartest thing to do is to leave those few users who are dependent on plain old fashioned low-def broadcast TV alone and not make them buy or use converter boxes they don't want and leave that old VHF and UHF spectrum alone. AND free up the HD broadcast spectrum (take it back from the networks) which hardly anyone is consuming and make it available for some real useful purpose.
What SHOULD happen is wireless spectrum should only be used for mobile applications. Fixed sites should use cabled connections.
It's not the content that's the problem, it's how it's delivered and the cost for that delivery. I'm not happy to watch just anything. I want football on Sundays, tennis during the Opens, Daily Show and Colbert, and like two other TV shows. And someone thought that was worth $700/year and I can only watch the shows when someone else tells me to. Unless I use the DVR, which is another $60/year. And there are times where I can't watch the TV shows AT ALL because they aren't available anywhere but a P2P network.
Fix this.
34% of the population has an IQ between 85 and 100 - and most people (68%) have an IQ between 85 and 115.
Just over 2% of the population has an IQ over 130.
So TV caters for the IQ 85-115 crowd and not for the IQ 130+ crowd ... and only occasionally for the IQ 115+ crowd (16% of population).
Smart people are a minority. TV is not "dumbed down", it is just catering to the average, that is, to the largest audience. Like most people who belong to niche groups, you have to find your own entertainment.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Jersey Show is still on the air and Firefly was canceled in the middle of the first season.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Or the zombies wake up and eat your brain too!
\m/
How is it we've gotten so sucked into (y)our cable connections? I'll admit: I'm very faithful to my net stuff, but for cable? PSHAW!
Let's lighten things up, people. I read books, do crosswords, and look at articles on-line. Where's the stuff of naturalism on the web????!!!!!! =)
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
In the end, it was because there were ONLY 800 channels (ok, I've never had more than 150 available). It seems that we need at least some milions of channels for that.
Rethinking email
"There's 57 Channels and Nothing on"
The problems I have with TV as an Australian:
1.All the good Australian shows get canceled (or get moved around so much they may as well have been canceled)
2.All the good foreign shows get taken off (or get moved around so much they may as well have been taken off)
3.Where there are good things on, they end up being on the same night (like having ST:TNG reruns on one channel and CSI:NY on another channel on the same night) and then there are nights with nothing at all to watch.
4.It can be months after a show airs overseas before a local network starts airing it. Sometimes a local network will "fast-track" a show but then they will skip a week or more and get out of sync because of "summer non-ratings period", "easter non-ratings period", "school holidays", sport or some other big event (on the same channel or on another channel) or any number of other reasons.
5.The same garbage gets repeated over and over again whilst they never even think of showing any of the GOOD shows from the archives (how many times do we need to see the same damn episode of The Flintstones or I Dream Of Jeanie or The Brady Bunch or The Love Boat or Everybody Loves Raymond?)
Although some of that may have to do with the fact that a lot of the good shows cant be shown in those time-slots due to classifications (e.g. M rated shows cant be shown in those slots)
What needs fixing is that I have 5,000 channels but my DVR only can remember 50 shows to record. Engineers ain't smart enough yet.
TV does have a couple of technical advantages. First of all it's completely DRM free. You can simply have your DVB-S card and record whatever you like, you have access to the EPG so you can use it like a "torrent". Then it doesn't have as many boundaries as "legal" Internet distribution. I can easily watch the BBC over satellite, but I cannot access their iPlayer.
There's also one big difference in financing. TV is financed like a public good, like roads. That's why piracy doesn't matter as we all payed for it anyhow.
It's broken because last year I was spending over $90/month for all of a few channels... and then only a few programs on those channels. Why on earth would I do that? It's like paying for a whole cupcake when all you do is eat the sprinkles. And an overpriced cupcake at that!
I don't give a shit who said "TV is a passive experience", because that's not the way many of us want it to be 100% of the time. I want content I pay for. I want to be able to look for it in an engaging way without channel surfing. And, the technology has come to a point where we are able to get the content on the spot without futzing around with crappy DVRs. It opens up new worlds and possibilities. Suddenly, content publishers don't need (or they shouldn't anyway) extensive contracts and agreements with broadcasters just to get their stuff on the air. Suddenly, publishers can be in more control and get a bigger cut... and probably with less ads. Everybody wins. Maybe this way we'll get something worth watching instead of Ghost Hunters 47, season 15 of survivor, or the next "reality" TV show following the latest waste of space that calls themselves a celebrity.
My question is: what the hell isn't wrong with TV as it is now?
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Makes sparks and everything. Ik kind of miss it as a virtual fireplace...
It keeps people stupid, and makes them want to buy stuff.
I want faster zapping.
E.g. with dual tuners.
I usually push P+ when I want to see something else.
So put 2 tuners in, the inactive one always tunes to the next channel.
Or even 3 tuners, if I decide to backtrack.
And also an intelligent zap, if there are ads on the next channel, skip it
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
... a garbage can. It fulfills it's role: containing garbage.
When "good enough" becomes a target, you get a major reduction in innovation and improvement. This is what happened with the auto industry, and it took a financial crisis to change things. The big question is why you don't want to see improvements to the technology, rather than asking how TV can be improved.
So, higher refresh rates...for a 1920x1080 display, you really do not NEED 240Hz, but if you think about it, if 240Hz were the norm, then that would enable higher resolution displays, which SHOULD be the goal of manufacturers. When computer displays for the most part are limited to 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 due to trying to share technology with the TV industry, that is where we should ALL be asking for better and better TV technology.
Many people I know never saw a "need" for stereo TV back when that first started showing up, and many people today don't see a need for surround sound, even when it DOES enhance the experience. Going 3D, in terms of having objects that pop out of the screen at viewers is useless, but well implemented 3D is more about depth of field, and giving that sense that what you are seeing has depth. Or even the move from regular resolution to HD, many initially didn't pay attention to how much better things look on a HD display compared to the older SD displays, but now, they would never want to go back.
Content is content, and that is not where you see change. Going from mono to stereo to surround sound may not have been NECESSARY, but it did improve the experience, and isn't THAT what it should all be about? Progress...why is that so horrible? For computers, we are generally happy that computers have gotten more powerful and allow for doing more things at home today than professional level computers could hope to do back in the early to mid 1990s, yet the only people who complain are those who don't like the idea of progress, or that it makes it so buying something new is a positive experience, rather than just throwing money away to get something that is in better condition, but is no better than what they had previously.
I have a general rule about purchases, and that is that expensive purchases SHOULD give you the sense that not only are you getting a refresh of what you had before, but the new item should be BETTER than the old. From cell phones to computers, or even to cars, wouldn't you feel you wasted your money if you are buying something, and there has been NO improvement? For televisions, if you spend $1200 today, and you spent $1200 four or five years ago, wouldn't you expect the new one to be better for the same price? Larger, or better quality, or more features, or better refresh rate, you want more for your money, because you expect there to have been progress.
In general, what is broken about TV is how the networks are generally aiming for the lowest common denominator, and are afraid to upset the "delicate sensibilities" of the people in the midwest of the USA. We should see a lot more programming that is aimed at adults, even without needing "adult content" to get there. People use profanity in the real world, it is all around us, yet TV programming does not properly reflect this. You want to know why people are drawn to the premium channels, it is because the original programming THERE has not been toned down.
... the business model where I am the product to be sold to advertisers. I prefer a business model where I am a customer of the content. -- Hiten
How is it unlimited? He would only be able to watch exactly the same quantity of video as he can on a $29.99 basic cable subscription. You are pretty much restricted to the number of hours in a month multiplied by the number of TV's in the household.
Yes, and I want a Mazerati Granturismo but only pay the price of a Ford Focus.
You are getting $30 worth of entertainment with basic cable. You want the "high quality" stuff? Well, just like with cars, that's going to cost a little more than the mass-produced pablum for the masses. That's why the "unlimited (24/7 * n), high-quality, affordable content" doesn't make economic sense.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
The delivery is.
I DVR everything now, I don't even bother with on demand (don't get me started with FOX's bullshit policy of disabling fast forward on their on demand.). There are PLENTY of watchable shows on TV. The problem is they are scattered about on different channels and shoved between drivel. The educational networks are as far from educational as possible and plenty of sitcoms aren't worth the digital tape they are recorded on.
But I am not one of the TV is for the mentally incapacitated. On the contrary, after a day of engineering work as well as having hobbies such as FPGA design, embedded hacking (arduino/mbed-ARM) antique semi truck and machinery restoration; its good to just plop down and numb your mind for a few hours before bed. I watch a wide variety of programming even some "kids" shows on cartoon network (adventure time, regular show and the new thunder cats) as well as some of the remaining interesting stuff on the "educational" channels and action/adventure like Dr. Who and Burn Notice.
I am satisfied with the shows on TV. There is plenty to watch but no perfect way to watch it when I want. DVR's are the key to my ability to watch cable TV, if they didn't exist or were banned I would drop cable in a heart beat. I can come home after a days work, putter around and be guaranteed I have recorded a few hours worth of stuff to watch. But they leave some thing to be desired and some of their functionality is pretty shitty.
I recently moved to an apartment in a friends house he just bought. He had FiOS installed and I got a DVR. Previously I had Time Warner Cable and I liked their DVR but it had some limitations that I hated. Now, the FiOS DVR makes the Time Warner DVR look like alien technology. The Fios DVR has two major flaws that make it far inferior to the TW DVR:
Lets say you pause a show to use the toilet or grab a snack. You let 5-10 minutes pass and then un-pause the show. You are enjoying it then suddenly it cuts to the next show and your now watching real time. You try to rewind to actually finish the show but you cant, the hour long buffer is gone. WTF happened? It turns out that when the FiOS DVR is about to record a program on that channel you are watching, it just cuts to the recording wiping out the hour long buffer. TW allowed you to watch that hour buffer regardless of what was happening. If you were at the very tail of the buffer (1 hour delay) and it started recording, you didn't even know. If it is recording, you can rewind back into the buffer.
The next major flaw is if a show in the buffer is past its time slot (eg the program you are watching aired at 5:00-5:30 PM yet it is now 5:40PM) you cant record it. Even if the full show is in the buffer, you can't record it because its a past show. Fuck that, TW lets you record any show in the buffer, even if its the last 10 seconds of the show, it saves it.
The biggest annoyance is the eSATA port that sits unused on many DVR's. An HD DVR with 20 hours of HD recording is shit. Why not let me plug in a 1-3 TB disk and have 100+ hours of DVR? Granted, disk prices are through the roof but that will be fixed in the coming months. FiOS has its eSATA port enabled yet TW does not.
And the last few gripes is the FiOS remote, a nicely laid out remote that only six or so fucking buttons light up. I memorized some of them by feel but I still sometimes hit the wrong button. TW has a fully illuminated remote that has a separate light button so I can light the key pad before pressing a button and then shut it off. It also has more functionality. The FiOS DVR VFD clock/channel display is brighter than the sun. I have to cover it at night because it lights the entire room up. I have enough electronics that I have to tape over lights, the cable box is yet another example of indoor light pollution. There is probably a dim option but I have yet to find it.
So that sums it up: let me watch what I want when I want. DVR's have really bought that ability to the masses but they are far from perfect. And I am not go
TVs either need to go one of two ways:
I'm personally for #1. Lets stop kidding ourselves that the TV is ever going to be good at content. Give me a good screen with an HDMI in and I'll handle producing the content for it.
I do security
The user-interface sucks moose balls. Let's take DirecTV as an example. Surfing is tedious at best and I almost never attempt it because it takes so damn long for the system to lock into the next channel and display an image. Then there's the channel guide. There are over a hundred channels but I only regularly watch maybe a dozen of them. Why do I have to be bothered with the other crap that's on there? At last count, there were about 36 shopping channels, which is frightening in and of itself. I want to block all of these from ever showing up in the guide and not just grey them out. I want a really condensed guide for selected channels. Now, if you extend this to internet-based content, why not allow for creating a custom channel/guide entry that shows me what's on Hulu or something?
From a technical point of view, the user-experience blows chunks. Here is where Apple can kick ass. When they apply their genius to a TV, that could be really excellent.
As far as content goes, the only way to get better content and more of it is to do away with residuals. Non-reality-TV shows are expensive to produce and license because of residuals. Sure, nice work if you can get it but broadcasters can't afford it. There would also be an added benefit to getting rid of royalties and that is you'd dramatically reduce the number of filthy-stinking-rich, full-of-themselves, self-righteous, ignoramus actors/producers/writers/directors.
How many of those shows would you buy the DVDs for so you could watch them whenever you want. They may have shown brightly compared to the other shows that were on, but watch them now. Its painful.
It's not just $30 but $30 stretched over his ENTIRE lifetime and that of all of his friends and family.
That actually ads up to quite a bit.
Fortunately for Corporate America, math education really sucks in this country and people are anti-intellectual above and beyond that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It has a karaoke machine in there. I saw it on a commercial. They may have been singing to karaoke videos on YouTube, but goddam! Having a karaoke machine in there has to be worth something ;-)
"Quality" is a very subjective term, especially when applied to the television network. Some people only consider $billion/episode shows "high quality", others prefer the cheaper, yet WELL WRITTEN stuff like simpsons (the originals were cheap) redgreen, etc. There are only 2 channels outside the "basic" range that *I* find even worth looking into, everything else up there is sports and movies and I could get through other means (netflix or the network's website).
I assume he wants NEW content over his ENTIRE lifetime. The cost of that content, along with the maintenance cost of the systems to deliver that content, adds up to quite a lot. And his friends and family do not want the same content that he wants. They want something completely different. His mom wants soap operas and Lifetime movies, dad wants all the sports channels and fishing shows, his brother only wants Japanese Anime and fetish porn (but not the same fetish porn he watches), and his niece wants Sesame Street and Sponge Bob. And since they are in the same household, they want all of that (plus all movies in HD the same day they hit the local cinemas) for $30/mo.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Based on my understanding of the legal notices on Pizza Hut's menu, restaurants In Indiana must not only sell food but also sell at least a certain substantial percentage of food in order to allow minors onto the property. I also remember reading something in the Indiana Code about restaurants that serve hard liquor needing a second dining room separate from the room with the bar. A few establishments that I might characterize as restaurants are too small and/or do not sell enough food to qualify and thus have the 21 to enter sticker on the door.
TV's problem is content. Not high-definition TV or 3D TV technology. Content is going to drive HDTV and 3D technologies. Entertainment, news and video gaming are only the tip of the content iceberg. Information and educational content will now have the technologies they need to provide rich and mind expanding experiences to the consumer. Providing a wealth of higher education and information content will revolutionize education, arts and crafts, technology, engineering, health care, manufacturing, construction, transportation, career training, historical reference, skill set training, and various services for our ever growing technological needs.