Actually, you're not far off being right, but wrongly (if that makes sense...)
Tivo made copies of a painting from a museum - perfectly legitimately, as the museum's principles allowed, nay, encouraged this. They then put them in bags, and sold the bags as 'magic bags' which see into the future, show you the past, and from that learn the things you like to see.
Some strange people got all excited just because the bags had a copy of a painting in them...
Now, for this and other reasons, the museum wants to change their policies. Which is fine. But here's the bit everybody's missing: Tivo are still allowed to reproduce and distribute from the copy they already have!
In any audio application, more is not always better. Past a certain point, more frequency response and dynamic range does not increase clarity.
And for other reasons than you might suspect too.
One of the exercises we did when I was a 'prentice telco tech involved bandpass filtering at 300Hz-6kHz. Turns out it's worse for speech comprehension than filtering to 300Hz-3.4kHz because not only does it let lots of sibilants through, it also cuts lots out - specifically, ones that help your brain interpret the ones left behind. Psychoacoustic test results showed that particular doubling of bandwidth decreased speech intelligibility by ~25%...
On the other hand, while I haven't given up totally on buying CDs, the number I've bought has certainly dropped since Napster et. al. It'd be hard to tell why if you were taking me as a single data point - the.mp3 revolution occurred at about the same time I realised 99% of current music was crap, I'd bought 99% of the back-catalogue I wanted, and I got sick of paying $30 for 1 good track + 1 mediocre track + 30+ minutes of crap - but what it has done is made me much much choosier.
Nowadays I'll fire up a BT client, search for the artist I want, pick 1 or 2 tracks I want plus a couple of others (based on titles - there's a clue there for the record industry!), and download/listen to them. If I like all I hear, I'll go buy the CD - if not, I'll keep the 1 or 2 tracks I wanted and ditch the rest.
It's rather telling that I've bought... ummm, 3?... CDs in the last 2 years. 1 of them just happened to be Top 40 at the time (damn my liking for girlie-pop-punk!), another was a collection of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (bought after downloading the.flacs from BT - i.e. I had no technical/quality reason for buying it!). I don't even remember what the other was, but it was probably disappointing...
Days of work/effort, and completely altering his life, just to skip ads? Did you read the same post I did?
Here's a story: a few years ago I bought a PVR. Apart from the effort needed to get an EPG running (which is a result of the fscked-up legal system and hidebound TV networks here - not even MS could beat them!), it takes no effort at all - the machine records what I want to watch, and when I get a chance I sit down and watch it. About 5 times in an hour long program, I press a button a few times to skip the ads.
Not that I always skip the ads - sometimes during a program I'll think of something quick that needs doing, in which case I'll let the ads run.
Something funny happened the other night though. I happened to step away from studying just as 'Jericho' started, so I sat down and watched it. Each time an ad break started I subconsciously reached for the remote, only to remember I was watching live TV.
I drank more coffee in that hour than I had in the previous 2 days. It occurs to me now that I must be getting old - I forgot about pausing/timeslipping...
BT is almost as easy - a couple of minutes on TPB, a few hours to download (yeah, I'm on 256k DSL), and I've got 40 minutes of fresh-that-day ad free program to watch.
So, back to the hoary old 'but ads pay for the content - so if you skip ads, you're stealing, and the poor content provider will go broke' argument. There's lots of arguments against that, but ultimately they all boil down to the same thing - 'So what if they do? Why is that my problem?".
Doesn't economics as a science <spit!> tell us that where there's a need, someone will step in to fill that need? If people are actively skipping ads, doesn't that indicate there's a need for ad-(free||reduced) content? Why should the market be distorted to prevent that need being met, just so that incumbents can continue without meeting that need?
(Buggy-whip makers are the stereotypical example that's always spouted - I can only assume it's the example given in some countrywide junior high textbook. Time to start thinking - who's the buggy-whip maker in this scenario?)
If my business model was dependant upon not pissing people off so I could sell their eyeball or mind space to others, I'd be doing my damnedest not to piss them off - not trying to socially engineer some econo-fascist system where "you vill vatch ze ads!". But, then again, I'm not a megalith driven by the overwhelming purpose of profit at all costs - I'm somewhat smaller and more complicated than that...
There's a market developing in Free software - a small market, mind you, at the moment, but showing every sign of growing - and Microsoft want to own it. It's as simple as that.
Doesn't mean they actually need to produce Free software though - they just need to own the mindspace. Their strategy over the last few years, right up to the recent events, has amounted to
"Oh, but we do embrace free software"
"Uh, but we're cautious because there may be some IP problems associated with it"
"Look - we said there may be IP problems, and we found some!"
The next step being, of course
"Hey, but as long as you stick to MS-brand "Free" software, you'll be fine..."
It may be 4 steps rather than the stereotypical 3, but "Profit!" is still at the end of it...
I recall an issue about 20 years ago involving... I'm thinking Nissan, but it might actually have been Subaru... vehicles and radio transmitters (e.g. Amateur / CB radios, etc). The ignition wiring was insufficiently shielded and RF energy swamped the engine management system, causing the car to stop when you hit 'transmit', drove too near a radar installation or radio tower, etc.
The manufacturer's TSB actually suggested shielding the transmitting antenna!
We're sorry. Well, some of us are - the ones who use Macs because they Just Work Well, not because Jobs bent over to tie his shoelaces and revealed a New Dawn before telling us "just one more thing...". We're trying to stop the second type, but it's hard to contain the enthusiasm of some when they discover they don't have to reboot their machine after installing software, dick around endlessly with bug-ridden drivers, or that opening the lid on their laptop means it will actually resume where they left off rather than farting and falling over.
In return, we'd appreciate it if you would stop trying to push Beige Box Specials as being the 100% equivalent (sans OS X) of a Mac at half the price. We'll try and shut ours up if you try and shut yours up.
PS: We'll get Jobs to cancel the smug Apple ads, if you get Gates to cancel the McDonalds-alike Windows ads.
PPS: Sorry about iTunes on Windows. It really does suck. It truly is much better on a Mac; you should try it there sometime;-)
Love, An OSX on Mac / Linux on SPARC / OpenBSD on Intel / Windows user.
I think it was a Siemens I had with the directional joystick/pressbutton - even with the keypad locked the joystick button still worked. The default (and unchangeable, IIRC) function sequence of the button was "press for menu - press to select camera mode - press to take picture".
Once you filled the phone up with pictures of the inside of your belt case or pocket, the UI became unresponsive. It would quite literally take 5 minutes - longer if you got the sequence wrong; it was quite unintuitive and confusingly labelled - to navigate far enough down into the menus to start deleting photos. Then, about 1/2 the time it would lock up / reboot / shut down instead of deleting anything...
Mobile phone UIs are the worst. I mean, I've seen good UIs elsewhere - a 3 button 2 character display to interrogate certain telecomms gear remains a favourite, especially when you consider the error codes were long strings, not 2 digit numbers - but mobile manufacturers just don't get it. Even Nokia, who once had a deservedly good rep for their UIs, have gone downhill - what idiot decided that the function confirm key should be the same as the function select key? "Delete?" - "Yes", or "Save?" - "Yes", should be 2 different keys - not consecutive options on the same key...
... according to statistics I heard from a Japanese tour guide last year, about 10% of the entire population lives in Tokyo...
That's not so unusual - about 20% of Australia's population lives in Sydney (4.255 million out of 20.264 million). Even on a better metric - population density - Tokyo loses out to New York City : Sydney, 345.7 people/km, Tokyo 5655 people/Km, New York City 10316 people/km.
Country-wide, the figures are : Australia, 2.6 people/km; USA, 31 people/km; Japan, 337 people/km. But that only explains why you don't have better broadband country-wide than Japan, not why, despite having nearly twice the population density, New York City loses out to Tokyo...
I can watch it in full screen, and I just have to sit through a 30 second commercial a few times per episode. I consider that a free trade, considering that if I was watching it on TV, I'd have to sit through FIVE MINUTES worth of commercials several times per episode.
I touched on this in a comment upthread...
Basically, you're watching on abc.com because it hurts less than watching it on broadcast TV, right?
Well, my question is this : why should it hurt at all?
It's not too different to a detainee in Gitmo who prefers to be kicked in the head because it's better than having his genitals wired up to the light socket...
Interesting - I didn't know that (ABC.com won't allow me to watch; I'm un-american). So they've revived the "maximum program, minimum ads" model that broadcast TV threw away 20 years ago?
Makes you wonder what ABC.com will be like in 20 years time - 5 ad breaks with 18 minutes of ads?
(It's like that bit in Pratchett's "Moving Pictures" where Dibbler figures that if just one single frame in a movie can entice people to buy things, imagine what a few hundred frames one after another could do...)
Probably best not to think too hard about what broadcast TV will be like in 20 years time...
EVERYTHING IS NOT BINARY! THERE DOES NOT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE ONE WINNER AND ONE LOSER! FUCK!!!!!
There does if even one party has the "must win at all costs" mindset.
Quite frankly, without getting into an ideological argument, this is the Great Failing of almost all human social &/or economic constructs. The typical argument against Communism is "it doesn't take into account human nature and greed" - well, the argument against everything else we've tried on any sort of reasonable scale boils down to "there's always one..."
As for the rest of what you say: well, even though I don't buy into any of the hype that's been bouncing around for the last 10 or so years, I reckon the internet (or something like it) will replace broadcast & cable TV. It'll be over the dead bodies of lots of TV execs - and it'll replace the carriage mechanism rather than the service/content provision mechanism - but it'll happen. Unless the fear of even wider competition causes protective governments (and make no mistake, they all are) to place hard limits on coverage to save "local" players from "unfair" competition. Which will pretty much destroy the internet as we know it anyway, so all bets are off.
You're right when you call this article the rantings of yet another clueless fucktard journalist though. I reckon at least two of those words are redundant...
Eventually they will notice that their business model is not working, so they will change their model.
You reckon? We're already seeing - with supers, product placement & other in-show advertising, threats to use the legislature to ban devices that allow ffwd & channel changing during ads, etc - that they're much more likely to warp your abilities to suit their business model.
As I've said before, where's the modern-day Theseus to battle this Procrustes?
TV is dying because Cable is so damned expensive if I want anything more than the bare minimum.
That might be why cable is dying, but it doesn't explain why FTA TV is dying - even in places with < 20% cable uptake.
Personally, I think viewers are starting to realise the cost/benefit equation is no longer leaning their way. A combination of technology, competing attractions, and network greed has eaten away the foundations of broadcast TV.
You're right when you say they've pushed too far - but it's not just with bundling. They've all pushed too far too fast on all fronts. People remember that even just 10 years ago you could sit down to watch TV sure in the knowledge you'd only be interrupted 3 or 4 times an hour. Now it's 5 or 6, and people feel the intrusions, annoyances, and wasted mindspace just aren't worth it anymore - particularly when there's something else to do.
The technology angle: Why watch the 6 ad breaks / 20 minutes of ads / crap all over the screen / never on time version, when you can just wait for someone to seed an ad-free version on BT, download a couple of episodes, and decide if you want to BT the rest or buy the DVD? Failing that, there's the PVR - record now, watch later, skip the ads.
Competing attractions: you're sitting in front of it right now. And, as mentioned above, it can be used to download TV. It can even be used to obtain / create / distribute ad-free TV - your own or, more likely, theirs.
Network greed: their answer to the above threats? More ads (30 secs -> 20 secs -> 15 secs), more intrusions (over the programs, in the programs, over the credits, etc), change start/stop times and schedules even more, and try to outlaw ad-skipping. The guys who came up with these plans are idiots. The guys who managed to sell the "How do we win? Let's piss off viewers even more!" concept are brilliant. Wrong, but brilliant...
(Myself, in a land of networks that produce nothing themselves that I want to see, then hold off playing new overseas series for 12+ months before playing them at random times on random days in a random schedule with promotional crap all over them, BTs anything I want to watch. Then I order the DVDs - from the original source where possible, not the local distributor. Hurting local industries? You bet - I'm hurting local industries that fsck me around, and rewarding industries, wherever they may be, that don't...)
The real reason is the same as why you can't see a forest: all the bloody trees are in the way.
There is a Microsoft religion. And you're soaking in it. It has many churches (e.g. the Church of Dell, the Church of HP, the Church of Gateway, etc) and a few cults (e.g. Lian-Li-ologists, The Supreme Media Centre Truth Cult, etc) - all effectively the same with only slight distinguishing features (e.g. I don't believe HP has a communion service...), but ultimately interchangeable. They use large impressive buildings (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) with lots of decorations and shiny gilt (obscure/useless features, Clippy, Waldo the Fsckwit Dog) to attract new converts, and keep the faithful through fear of the unknown (Apple = expensive & incompatible, Linux = high TCO & too hard to use, etc).
Do you want to live like a 22-year old again? In a tiny apartment with a roommate or two and an old beat-up car in the parking garage? Having to borrow from family to buy any big-ticket items? With no health insurance? Being on the bottom rung of pretty much everything? Only without as much energy, naive optimism, or potential for growth?
I'm 40. I live by myself in a 5 room/2 bedroom apartment a stones throw from the city. I have a 2 year old car, bought new. I've already bought all my big-ticket items; I only need to replace them when they die / become obsolete. I have private health insurance (and a government scheme to fall back on; YMMV in the USA). Bottom rung? Nah...
And, while the flesh may be a little weaker than it was 20+ years ago, the spirit is more than willing. I have more energy, naive optimism, and potential for growth than I did back then - and now I have the added advantage of being aware of that.
And I also have 20+ years of experience of the things to avoid.
1. Keep your job - stability is fleeting and you will be glad you stayed with it when you are finally outsourced or laid off
Having been through something similar recently (22 years in a job, or "14 good years + and 8 shitty ones!" as I said in my goodbye email;-), let me say that there can be a huge personal and emotional advantage to not hanging onto that job. There's nothing quite like making that decision; it can be a real release and catharsis to make the decision to leave on your own terms rather than having it forced upon you later. It was helped, in my case, by being offered a worthwhile sum of money to leave...
As I sometimes explain it to my friends, I went from dealing with hundreds of little niggling unsolvable and intractable issues and problems which I had no control over every single day, to just one - "what am I going to do now?" - which I did have control over.
In my case I jumped from the micromanaged-to-death, daily threats of outsourcing, in the throes of privatisation world of electronics / telecomms - to studying science. I get to learn something new that I've always had an interest in, meet interesting people who are either on a similar journey or who want to help us on that journey, and meet lots of cute girls (who, unfortunately, are mostly young enough to be my daughter...:-()
So, to play devils advocate with a term that was all the rage a few years ago, in order to create a "level playing field" advertising should either be socialised or outlawed?
(Yeah, I know about real 'level playing fields', opportunity, access, etc. I'm using the term in the same way it was presented to the public back then; the "let us do X because we don't think Y is fair!" sense...)
Yes, advertising does "create value". In theory, it does it by affording companies the opportunity to inform consumers of their worthy products.
In reality, it does it by distorting markets almost to breaking point, by convincing people without the time/inclination/wherewithal* to research every purchasing decision that Product A with a huge marketing budget is better than Product B with a slightly less huge marketing budget. Over and over, again, and again, and again, 5 or 6 times an hour even while you sit stationary in front of the television.
The fact is that modern advertising - since the 50's at least - is a gross and unhealthy economic aberration, which actually has a negative effect on the world as a whole...
And, frankly, I don't care for the "without advertising you would have wonderful things such as product/service/website Y!" argument. If I didn't know I needed it, I didn't need it; sure, new things are nice, but not at the expense of my time / money / mindscape - unless I so chose. It's the non-stop inescapable ubiquity of advertising, on everything everywhere - and the fact that it's not only becoming accepted as natural, but that attempts to reduce/remove/avoid it are starting to be seen as wrong and verging on the criminal - that is the problem.
(* And how can even the experienced and dedicated research choices properly anyway? Tried using Google to research any commercial or personal decision lately? Between the spam blogs, fake product "reviews", and out and and out advertising lies, it's impossible.)
If Hitler was running against John Howard and polls showed they were neck-and-neck, would you still vote for some other candidate?
Yes. Because, in Australia's proportional voting system, there remains a chance that a "3rd party candidate" (as Americans quaintly and disparagingly put it) can in fact win.
There's also the fact that Australia doesn't have direct election of the PM (rather obviously; it's hard to imagine John Howard winning any more than a door prize on bingo night based on his charisma and telegenic properties) - if Hitler stood against John Howard in his electorate of Bennelong, and the voters there didn't like either of them, then regardless of what the rest of Australia wanted, an Independent/Green/Democrat/Raving Looney Party candidate would win - and the National Socialists or Libs, if they won enough other seats across Australia, would have to pick someone else as PM. Goering, perhaps, or Peter Costello...
Conversely, if Bennelong did vote for one of them, then it's up to the rest of Australia to not vote for those parties. And, if they did win both their electorate and the overall party vote - well, just because you don't like the result doesn't mean it wasn't democratic (a lesson the USA could stand to learn and apply in other parts of the world - Venezuela, for instance, or certain parts of Asia & the Middle East).
... he was part of an international conspiracy whose entire purpose was to break the law, not just in the U.S., but of almost every country where they resided
You left out "sapping and impurifying all of your precious bodily fluids"...
The Australian court system isn't crooked and corrupt, so what's the problem with having the trial in Australia under Australian law?
A cynic would say "because the Australian court system isn't crooked and corrupt"...
The slightly less cynical and more curious me wonders if there hasn't been a similar sort of cross border case - involving, say, Nazi memorabilia looted from Germany and sold in France (both of which have similar laws regarding such goods) by a French citizen - and how it was resolved.
Slashdot Mirror
(If you really liked the man, you'd buy him a Toohey's Old instead!
Actually, you're not far off being right, but wrongly (if that makes sense...)
Tivo made copies of a painting from a museum - perfectly legitimately, as the museum's principles allowed, nay, encouraged this. They then put them in bags, and sold the bags as 'magic bags' which see into the future, show you the past, and from that learn the things you like to see.
Some strange people got all excited just because the bags had a copy of a painting in them...
Now, for this and other reasons, the museum wants to change their policies. Which is fine. But here's the bit everybody's missing: Tivo are still allowed to reproduce and distribute from the copy they already have!
One of the exercises we did when I was a 'prentice telco tech involved bandpass filtering at 300Hz-6kHz. Turns out it's worse for speech comprehension than filtering to 300Hz-3.4kHz because not only does it let lots of sibilants through, it also cuts lots out - specifically, ones that help your brain interpret the ones left behind. Psychoacoustic test results showed that particular doubling of bandwidth decreased speech intelligibility by ~25%...
It would certainly make the front page quicker to load...
You are not alone...
.mp3 revolution occurred at about the same time I realised 99% of current music was crap, I'd bought 99% of the back-catalogue I wanted, and I got sick of paying $30 for 1 good track + 1 mediocre track + 30+ minutes of crap - but what it has done is made me much much choosier.
... ummm, 3? ... CDs in the last 2 years. 1 of them just happened to be Top 40 at the time (damn my liking for girlie-pop-punk!), another was a collection of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (bought after downloading the .flacs from BT - i.e. I had no technical/quality reason for buying it!). I don't even remember what the other was, but it was probably disappointing...
On the other hand, while I haven't given up totally on buying CDs, the number I've bought has certainly dropped since Napster et. al. It'd be hard to tell why if you were taking me as a single data point - the
Nowadays I'll fire up a BT client, search for the artist I want, pick 1 or 2 tracks I want plus a couple of others (based on titles - there's a clue there for the record industry!), and download/listen to them. If I like all I hear, I'll go buy the CD - if not, I'll keep the 1 or 2 tracks I wanted and ditch the rest.
It's rather telling that I've bought
Days of work/effort, and completely altering his life, just to skip ads? Did you read the same post I did?
Here's a story: a few years ago I bought a PVR. Apart from the effort needed to get an EPG running (which is a result of the fscked-up legal system and hidebound TV networks here - not even MS could beat them!), it takes no effort at all - the machine records what I want to watch, and when I get a chance I sit down and watch it. About 5 times in an hour long program, I press a button a few times to skip the ads.
Not that I always skip the ads - sometimes during a program I'll think of something quick that needs doing, in which case I'll let the ads run.
Something funny happened the other night though. I happened to step away from studying just as 'Jericho' started, so I sat down and watched it. Each time an ad break started I subconsciously reached for the remote, only to remember I was watching live TV.
I drank more coffee in that hour than I had in the previous 2 days. It occurs to me now that I must be getting old - I forgot about pausing/timeslipping...
BT is almost as easy - a couple of minutes on TPB, a few hours to download (yeah, I'm on 256k DSL), and I've got 40 minutes of fresh-that-day ad free program to watch.
So, back to the hoary old 'but ads pay for the content - so if you skip ads, you're stealing, and the poor content provider will go broke' argument. There's lots of arguments against that, but ultimately they all boil down to the same thing - 'So what if they do? Why is that my problem?".
Doesn't economics as a science <spit!> tell us that where there's a need, someone will step in to fill that need? If people are actively skipping ads, doesn't that indicate there's a need for ad-(free||reduced) content? Why should the market be distorted to prevent that need being met, just so that incumbents can continue without meeting that need?
(Buggy-whip makers are the stereotypical example that's always spouted - I can only assume it's the example given in some countrywide junior high textbook. Time to start thinking - who's the buggy-whip maker in this scenario?)
If my business model was dependant upon not pissing people off so I could sell their eyeball or mind space to others, I'd be doing my damnedest not to piss them off - not trying to socially engineer some econo-fascist system where "you vill vatch ze ads!". But, then again, I'm not a megalith driven by the overwhelming purpose of profit at all costs - I'm somewhat smaller and more complicated than that...
There's a market developing in Free software - a small market, mind you, at the moment, but showing every sign of growing - and Microsoft want to own it. It's as simple as that.
Doesn't mean they actually need to produce Free software though - they just need to own the mindspace. Their strategy over the last few years, right up to the recent events, has amounted to
- "Oh, but we do embrace free software"
- "Uh, but we're cautious because there may be some IP problems associated with it"
- "Look - we said there may be IP problems, and we found some!"
The next step being, of course- "Hey, but as long as you stick to MS-brand "Free" software, you'll be fine..."
It may be 4 steps rather than the stereotypical 3, but "Profit!" is still at the end of it...I'm wondering if "exhaustion of rights" (the EU equivalent of the doctrine of first sale) applies to CDs in the UK...
If so, how long before we see "Mr Wow's online second-hand (unopened, still in plastic wrap) CD store" popping up to service the UK/EU market?
I recall an issue about 20 years ago involving ... I'm thinking Nissan, but it might actually have been Subaru ... vehicles and radio transmitters (e.g. Amateur / CB radios, etc). The ignition wiring was insufficiently shielded and RF energy swamped the engine management system, causing the car to stop when you hit 'transmit', drove too near a radar installation or radio tower, etc.
The manufacturer's TSB actually suggested shielding the transmitting antenna!
Dear PC users,
;-)
We're sorry. Well, some of us are - the ones who use Macs because they Just Work Well, not because Jobs bent over to tie his shoelaces and revealed a New Dawn before telling us "just one more thing...". We're trying to stop the second type, but it's hard to contain the enthusiasm of some when they discover they don't have to reboot their machine after installing software, dick around endlessly with bug-ridden drivers, or that opening the lid on their laptop means it will actually resume where they left off rather than farting and falling over.
In return, we'd appreciate it if you would stop trying to push Beige Box Specials as being the 100% equivalent (sans OS X) of a Mac at half the price. We'll try and shut ours up if you try and shut yours up.
PS: We'll get Jobs to cancel the smug Apple ads, if you get Gates to cancel the McDonalds-alike Windows ads.
PPS: Sorry about iTunes on Windows. It really does suck. It truly is much better on a Mac; you should try it there sometime
Love,
An OSX on Mac / Linux on SPARC / OpenBSD on Intel / Windows user.
I think it was a Siemens I had with the directional joystick/pressbutton - even with the keypad locked the joystick button still worked. The default (and unchangeable, IIRC) function sequence of the button was "press for menu - press to select camera mode - press to take picture".
Once you filled the phone up with pictures of the inside of your belt case or pocket, the UI became unresponsive. It would quite literally take 5 minutes - longer if you got the sequence wrong; it was quite unintuitive and confusingly labelled - to navigate far enough down into the menus to start deleting photos. Then, about 1/2 the time it would lock up / reboot / shut down instead of deleting anything...
Mobile phone UIs are the worst. I mean, I've seen good UIs elsewhere - a 3 button 2 character display to interrogate certain telecomms gear remains a favourite, especially when you consider the error codes were long strings, not 2 digit numbers - but mobile manufacturers just don't get it. Even Nokia, who once had a deservedly good rep for their UIs, have gone downhill - what idiot decided that the function confirm key should be the same as the function select key? "Delete?" - "Yes", or "Save?" - "Yes", should be 2 different keys - not consecutive options on the same key...
Country-wide, the figures are : Australia, 2.6 people/km; USA, 31 people/km; Japan, 337 people/km. But that only explains why you don't have better broadband country-wide than Japan, not why, despite having nearly twice the population density, New York City loses out to Tokyo...
Basically, you're watching on abc.com because it hurts less than watching it on broadcast TV, right?
Well, my question is this : why should it hurt at all?
It's not too different to a detainee in Gitmo who prefers to be kicked in the head because it's better than having his genitals wired up to the light socket...
Interesting - I didn't know that (ABC.com won't allow me to watch; I'm un-american). So they've revived the "maximum program, minimum ads" model that broadcast TV threw away 20 years ago?
Makes you wonder what ABC.com will be like in 20 years time - 5 ad breaks with 18 minutes of ads?
(It's like that bit in Pratchett's "Moving Pictures" where Dibbler figures that if just one single frame in a movie can entice people to buy things, imagine what a few hundred frames one after another could do...)
Probably best not to think too hard about what broadcast TV will be like in 20 years time...
Quite frankly, without getting into an ideological argument, this is the Great Failing of almost all human social &/or economic constructs. The typical argument against Communism is "it doesn't take into account human nature and greed" - well, the argument against everything else we've tried on any sort of reasonable scale boils down to "there's always one..."
As for the rest of what you say: well, even though I don't buy into any of the hype that's been bouncing around for the last 10 or so years, I reckon the internet (or something like it) will replace broadcast & cable TV. It'll be over the dead bodies of lots of TV execs - and it'll replace the carriage mechanism rather than the service/content provision mechanism - but it'll happen. Unless the fear of even wider competition causes protective governments (and make no mistake, they all are) to place hard limits on coverage to save "local" players from "unfair" competition. Which will pretty much destroy the internet as we know it anyway, so all bets are off.
You're right when you call this article the rantings of yet another clueless fucktard journalist though. I reckon at least two of those words are redundant...
As I've said before, where's the modern-day Theseus to battle this Procrustes?
Personally, I think viewers are starting to realise the cost/benefit equation is no longer leaning their way. A combination of technology, competing attractions, and network greed has eaten away the foundations of broadcast TV.
You're right when you say they've pushed too far - but it's not just with bundling. They've all pushed too far too fast on all fronts. People remember that even just 10 years ago you could sit down to watch TV sure in the knowledge you'd only be interrupted 3 or 4 times an hour. Now it's 5 or 6, and people feel the intrusions, annoyances, and wasted mindspace just aren't worth it anymore - particularly when there's something else to do.
The technology angle: Why watch the 6 ad breaks / 20 minutes of ads / crap all over the screen / never on time version, when you can just wait for someone to seed an ad-free version on BT, download a couple of episodes, and decide if you want to BT the rest or buy the DVD? Failing that, there's the PVR - record now, watch later, skip the ads.
Competing attractions: you're sitting in front of it right now. And, as mentioned above, it can be used to download TV. It can even be used to obtain / create / distribute ad-free TV - your own or, more likely, theirs.
Network greed: their answer to the above threats? More ads (30 secs -> 20 secs -> 15 secs), more intrusions (over the programs, in the programs, over the credits, etc), change start/stop times and schedules even more, and try to outlaw ad-skipping. The guys who came up with these plans are idiots. The guys who managed to sell the "How do we win? Let's piss off viewers even more!" concept are brilliant. Wrong, but brilliant...
(Myself, in a land of networks that produce nothing themselves that I want to see, then hold off playing new overseas series for 12+ months before playing them at random times on random days in a random schedule with promotional crap all over them, BTs anything I want to watch. Then I order the DVDs - from the original source where possible, not the local distributor. Hurting local industries? You bet - I'm hurting local industries that fsck me around, and rewarding industries, wherever they may be, that don't...)
The real reason is the same as why you can't see a forest: all the bloody trees are in the way.
There is a Microsoft religion. And you're soaking in it. It has many churches (e.g. the Church of Dell, the Church of HP, the Church of Gateway, etc) and a few cults (e.g. Lian-Li-ologists, The Supreme Media Centre Truth Cult, etc) - all effectively the same with only slight distinguishing features (e.g. I don't believe HP has a communion service...), but ultimately interchangeable. They use large impressive buildings (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) with lots of decorations and shiny gilt (obscure/useless features, Clippy, Waldo the Fsckwit Dog) to attract new converts, and keep the faithful through fear of the unknown (Apple = expensive & incompatible, Linux = high TCO & too hard to use, etc).
But ... that leaves no room for the "Jar Jar Christmas Special"!
And, while the flesh may be a little weaker than it was 20+ years ago, the spirit is more than willing. I have more energy, naive optimism, and potential for growth than I did back then - and now I have the added advantage of being aware of that.
And I also have 20+ years of experience of the things to avoid.
As I sometimes explain it to my friends, I went from dealing with hundreds of little niggling unsolvable and intractable issues and problems which I had no control over every single day, to just one - "what am I going to do now?" - which I did have control over.
In my case I jumped from the micromanaged-to-death, daily threats of outsourcing, in the throes of privatisation world of electronics / telecomms - to studying science. I get to learn something new that I've always had an interest in, meet interesting people who are either on a similar journey or who want to help us on that journey, and meet lots of cute girls (who, unfortunately, are mostly young enough to be my daughter...
So, to play devils advocate with a term that was all the rage a few years ago, in order to create a "level playing field" advertising should either be socialised or outlawed?
(Yeah, I know about real 'level playing fields', opportunity, access, etc. I'm using the term in the same way it was presented to the public back then; the "let us do X because we don't think Y is fair!" sense...)
Yes, advertising does "create value". In theory, it does it by affording companies the opportunity to inform consumers of their worthy products.
In reality, it does it by distorting markets almost to breaking point, by convincing people without the time/inclination/wherewithal* to research every purchasing decision that Product A with a huge marketing budget is better than Product B with a slightly less huge marketing budget. Over and over, again, and again, and again, 5 or 6 times an hour even while you sit stationary in front of the television.
The fact is that modern advertising - since the 50's at least - is a gross and unhealthy economic aberration, which actually has a negative effect on the world as a whole...
And, frankly, I don't care for the "without advertising you would have wonderful things such as product/service/website Y!" argument. If I didn't know I needed it, I didn't need it; sure, new things are nice, but not at the expense of my time / money / mindscape - unless I so chose. It's the non-stop inescapable ubiquity of advertising, on everything everywhere - and the fact that it's not only becoming accepted as natural, but that attempts to reduce/remove/avoid it are starting to be seen as wrong and verging on the criminal - that is the problem.
(* And how can even the experienced and dedicated research choices properly anyway? Tried using Google to research any commercial or personal decision lately? Between the spam blogs, fake product "reviews", and out and and out advertising lies, it's impossible.)
There's also the fact that Australia doesn't have direct election of the PM (rather obviously; it's hard to imagine John Howard winning any more than a door prize on bingo night based on his charisma and telegenic properties) - if Hitler stood against John Howard in his electorate of Bennelong, and the voters there didn't like either of them, then regardless of what the rest of Australia wanted, an Independent/Green/Democrat/Raving Looney Party candidate would win - and the National Socialists or Libs, if they won enough other seats across Australia, would have to pick someone else as PM. Goering, perhaps, or Peter Costello...
Conversely, if Bennelong did vote for one of them, then it's up to the rest of Australia to not vote for those parties. And, if they did win both their electorate and the overall party vote - well, just because you don't like the result doesn't mean it wasn't democratic (a lesson the USA could stand to learn and apply in other parts of the world - Venezuela, for instance, or certain parts of Asia & the Middle East).
The slightly less cynical and more curious me wonders if there hasn't been a similar sort of cross border case - involving, say, Nazi memorabilia looted from Germany and sold in France (both of which have similar laws regarding such goods) by a French citizen - and how it was resolved.
Or some of the reasoning behind the High Court decision in the Joe Gutnick defamation case?