Good riddance. I cut the cord about a year and a half ago and replaced my cable box with a Roku box. There was a brief period where I missed the background noise but now I find broadcast/cable television unbearably grating. Frankly I think the cable companies brought it upon themselves with the constant loud commercial interruptions, the garbage programming, and the utterly miserable cable box interfaces.
I'm in the same position. I cut the cord five years ago and have just been using Apple TV for Netflix.
TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying. When I'm visiting my family I just have to turn off the TV, it's impossible to concentrate on conversation otherwise.
The downside is that cable subscribers subsidize the handful of TV shows I actually want to watch. Individually, every person who quits makes a rational decision, but when everyone quits we don't get a lot of good shows.
Maybe Netflix or Amazon or whoever will take up the slack. Or maybe those shows will just go away.
What I fear is the invasion of advertisers on the online channels. Youtube is already getting there. I just hope that it doesn't get as bad as TV though.
I've recently purchased a Roku as well so I can use Netflix. So that combined with Plex + downloaded content means I hardly ever watch broadcast TV any more.
TV still has plenty of life in it. Be careful of those graphs with a non-zero y-axis minimum.
But there is a shift happening. The biggest question to me is whether brand advertising dollars are/can/will shift with it. We need new ad products. Especially ones that will reach younger audiences who avoid current ad products. Maybe opportunities for Snapchat/Twitter.
Also, content production is going to see some challenges without large amounts of ads to support it. I think there's still --on average -- a big gap in budget, revenue, audience, and quality between successful online-only shows better suited for YouTube and near-filler content on niche cable networks that have managed to stay alive with advertising. Cost of content production is still quite expensive. House of Cards had a $100 million budget to produce 13 episodes. Shows need a lot of audience to make the numbers work, and I'm hoping we see some acceleration here.
TV is in its heyday. Dramas are at the highest quality they've ever been.
The protocol, cable (and satellite), is dying. Almost nobody in my age range, or younger (late 20s), has cable. Everyone has Netflix along with some other streaming services combined with iTunes purchases and such. If you want to watch live sports, the NFL is free over the air, you'll just miss out on the NBA (oh well).
Cable television has no reason to exist. Get rid of it and use the bandwidth for streaming. I just bought a TV after not having one for half a year, and briefly considered getting Time Warner. After seeing what they charge for the basic service, along with $16/month for the "equipment rental," why would I bother? Life is better without cable anyways, the garbage on there just stresses me out and makes me hate our society! You do not need CNN, my life is so peaceful not knowing what their talking heads are spewing off about.
Much of this is true, but I think it's important not to look at the differences just through a lens of production values. Even worse to equation production values with merit or quality of the end product.
There have been several low budget films and tv shows that have become highly successful and well regarded, the same is and will be true in the online realm. Look at Mad Max, which was made for around a third of a million dollars, Primer, or Napoleon Dynamite.
But also it's not just production value or even quality but fundamental differences in character. TV was a different sort of beast than film, and even over the last decade commercial TV has changed a lot. Look at all of the independent content that sprang up on non-network TV channels, especially from HBO. A show like The Wire, or even more so The Corner, was very unlikely to ever be made within the confines of traditional network TV. TV has a different sort of character than film in terms of the sorts of productions that are suited for TV, and online video is different as well, but we haven't seen all of the ways that's so.
One example I'd highlight is the Lizzie Bennet diaries, a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in vlog form of over 100 "episodes" of typical youtube length (~3-5 minutes).
Another example would be Periodic Videos (and related projects). These are educational videos about chemistry but because they don't have the length limits or requirements of traditional TV they can be focused on a single subject without being forced to add in unrelated filler.
Or, there's Lindybeige, who's likes to talk about medieval, classical, and bronze age technology and weapons. It's just a guy expressing his opinions and trying to back them up with experience or logic but it's frequently just as informative and interesting as watching a typical historical tv show.
I think the native advertising trend is taking care of the awful advertising problem. Ads that look and feel just like the product are way more palatable than banners. Only problem now is scaling native ads. The opportunity here is for a native ad network that can work with most of the top Content Management systems of the world
Question is, at what point does traditional TV channels become so unpopular that they're simply not worth operating anymore?
Perhaps the better question is, when does traditional TV become so unpopular those satellites taking up geosynchronous orbit space get dumped into the oceans?
Making me turn on the TV at a specific time and date to watch something is such alien notion to me at this point. All of these shows worry about schedules and what's on other networks, but that's eventually not going to matter at all.
And that's not all! Insane copyright prevents a lot of people from legally watching popular series. I am in Europe and there is no legal way for me to watch say "The Walking Dead" or any other series.
So what do I do when I don't get proper service? Piracy - it gives me on demand HQ content.
I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century. The next network delivers cheap, on demand HD content worldwide will make a ton of money :)
We have an Apple TV which plays Netflix, Hulu, PBS, Rented Movies, Music and YouTube.
After 2-3 months of us never switching off of the Apple TV HDMI port, I told the kids I was going to cancel cable which they could never find anything of substance to watch anyway and they didn't even put up a fight.
None of us watch sports so there was virtually no reason to keep cable anymore.
What I found slightly disturbing was how hard it is to setup an over-the-air TV setup. It's going to cost about $200 in equipment and another $100 to setup on my roof. It seems almost insane how expensive free TV has become to get. It'll still pay off because we were paying over $100 for TWC; it's just strange to see something that used to be so simple become so complex and I didn't care about it because I thought I would just have cable the rest of my life.
Have you tried using a cheap box and rabbit ears? You probably don't need a fancy setup unless you're in a building that blocks reception or MANY miles from a major city.
Over the air has been exceedingly hit or miss for me also. Even after the equipment the actual delivery seems very scattered. I know in my head that the delivery of digital with correction should be better than analog, but the experience simply is not.
I am not a electrical engineer, so can anyone shed light on why the range for channels on digital is so much lower than it was with analog, also is weather much more impeding for digital than analog?
This sort of thing just makes me more upset about youtube. Google has the future of video in the palm of their hands but they don't understand and don't care. Typical of a bloated empire.
I just hope that google doesn't destroy their golden goose merely because they are too incompetent to understand its value or importance.
Edit: Unrelated, I was annoyed by the quality of the "net subscriber adds" graph since it's obviously dominated by an annual signal, so I created a smoothed version (the raw data should be accurate to within ~5-10 pixels give or take): http://i.imgur.com/ffBzR8g.png
I would be cautious about drawing too many conclusions from that. Younger viewers are also more likely to have school work as kids or college students, and as young adults they spend more time running around exploring the world, seeking a mate, and so on. On the other hand, when they settle down viewing patterns can change. Also, bear in mind that now many current shows are competing with older shows available through services like Netflix; they make less money up front, but the 'long tail' gets fatter for quality or cult shows.
Well, that is not the full story though...
I expect older people to watch more TV. All my grand parents basically sit in front of the TV all day... I would expect I would watch a lot more if I was older currently, even simply because I would have a lot more free time.
I think most of the networks stream their shows for a short time on their web sites. At this point I just wonder, why not just cut out the middle-man and get on with it? I'll pay for subscriptions, but not for endless commercials and 490 of 500 channels that I don't even watch. Not for TV shows that have stupid animations in the corner every five minutes. Since the cable and satellite companies refuse to give us the choice we want, we simply choose to opt-out. Once communities start installing their own low-cost fiber and free wi-fi en-mass without the litigation, the last hope of Time Warner and such fossils will be gone. TV isn't dying, it is dead and just too stupid to realize it.
"The old way of watching TV" is dying, and TV itself is just aging, and finding its place among Internet options it seems. It's now just another option among many, but I don't see that as meaning it will "die".
I subscribe to Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Cable TV.
This way of getting entertainment is actually frustratingly expensive.
And to make things even dumber, sometime NONE of these services have what I want without an additional convenience fee. So my wife and I will stop at a Red Box and get a movie for about $1/2, LOL. It's crazy.
When 3 or 4 more $10 per month options pop-up, and everyone is watching some great show exclusive to that service, then what? Things get WAY worse.
Someone needs to start a company where I pay $80-$100 per month, and I get EVERY one of these services streamed through 1 site to every room in my house :) Someone get started, make the deals, get this going, OK. Good luck.
The total number of hours watching video is still increasing through. You also have to consider that the cost of production is dropping, and the number of big players in the TV market is still tiny. The huge players are (Disney/ABC, NBCU/Comcast, Time Warner, Fox/Newscorp, CBS/Viacom) and they own an enormous percentage of TV Networks and TV production, both domestically and internationally.
So individual shows rating may be dropping and rating for networks may be going down, but they are spreading their revenues across a lot of the more niche properties. They also make a huge amount from Cable licenses for the whole package of networks to ensure they have as many channels available to viewers as possible.
They are now learning to monetize their properties across digital media, and you will see that growth into online media and consolidation there soon.
I work with major media groups helping them with social media and the growing time-shifted audience, so I've heard a lot of the plans for the future. They see the writing on the wall, and while broadcast and cable might be shrinking, the content creation and advertising around video entertainment will keep growing, of that I am certain.
"TV is Dying" isn't the crazy part of this article.
It claims people are chucking broadband subscriptions and using tablets and mobile internet, or more often, just free wifi from Starbucks (or neighbors?).
Fascinating. If everyone dropped broadband, TV, and phone lines into the home, what's that world look like?
They promise a graph showing in hard numbers that broadband subscriptions are down, but never actually provide one. They just provide a graph showing, as best I can tell, that total customers for cable companies are going down. In fact, they confusingly state that customers are moving from cable with broadband to "telco companies like AT&T and Verizon who offer TV as a package with high-speed internet access."
From the description, this apparently isn't referring to mobile Internet, but AT&T U-verse and the like. So high-speed Internet from AT&T doesn't count as broadband on the grounds that they're a telco.
My best guess is that when this whole article is founded on the strange understanding that TV through a cable provider is the only real TV while getting the same content through satellite or what-have-you is "mobile," and cable Internet is "broadband" while anything from a "telco" like AT&T is a totally different thing. A rise of alternative providers is an interesting story, but it's a pretty different story from the one they're trying to tell here where everybody is just taking their iPads to Starbucks and watching cat videos.
I cut the cable TV cord three years ago, when it was costing me over $100 a month. I don't miss it one bit. In fact, when I go over to a friend's house and watch some TV I feel like it's just grating noise.
I have broadband Internet at $35 a month (about 20mbps), Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and Netflix, and I have more than I need. I spend a lot less time wasting time flipping channels and watching commercials. I total about 3-4 hours a week of watching anything on TV.
Who needs stats... my teenage kids pretty much ignore 200 satellite channels and instead watch youtube, read forums and IM their friends.
When they were growing up I allowed them to be bombarded with information - TV on, web access, phones from an early age - and they've developed the ability to filter it quite well and just ignore things that don't interest them.
The only down side is:
"awww dad I didn't get anything done today"
"why, son?"
"some Internet happened"
I don't think TV will ever die because when your kids will be bored with forums, or have nothing on their watch list they will switch on their TV. When TV came, people thought it was an end to the film industry but nothing like that happened. Though, statistically speaking the future seems obscure for television and usage is declining but I am sure something for it will come up that may revive it.
When we stayed in a hotel and my preschool kids were subjected to cable, they were confused and angry. Why couldn't they choose the program they wanted? And on e they found a program that was acceptable, why did it keep stopping? They actually thought we were punishing them with commercials and could not figure out what they were doing wrong. Interesting to see it through their eyes.
These were preschool kids right? Confused and angry ... Is that uncommon for preschool aged kids? What other kinds of things can we learn about the world based on these data points ... ? I feel like there is a Malcolm Gladwell book here ...
Good at lying with statistics. The plots don't say what the text does. Non-zero y axis makes tiny effects look big. Worst culprit are the age plots, which show retirees watching more tv than young'uns. It doesn't change over time, but text claims youngsters do not do tv.
Sorry, and on a more serious note, I should hope this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone.
Moving out a few years ago I ordered a 25/25 fiber line and completely dropped any form of cable/satellite package.
Norway, similar to the UK and probably many other countries, has a "TV Licence" which I still gladly pay, even though by law I am not required to do so as I don't technically have any TV channels in my house. NRK (Norwegian "BBC") provides a fantastic internet service on par with BBC's player, that does not require me to handle the archaic technology that is decoders and their 1990's era hardware running millennium software.
Of course it is dying, and I'm glad it is. TV is one of the most obnoxious formats of distributing information, shoving adds in your face without giving you a chance to turn them off or skip them and forcing its schedule onto your limited time.
[+] [-] shiftpgdn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interpol_p|12 years ago|reply
TV commercials are impossible to put up with. They are almost painfully annoying. When I'm visiting my family I just have to turn off the TV, it's impossible to concentrate on conversation otherwise.
[+] [-] jseliger|12 years ago|reply
The downside is that cable subscribers subsidize the handful of TV shows I actually want to watch. Individually, every person who quits makes a rational decision, but when everyone quits we don't get a lot of good shows.
Maybe Netflix or Amazon or whoever will take up the slack. Or maybe those shows will just go away.
[+] [-] deepGem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul9290|12 years ago|reply
With this set up I can watch marathons of whatever TV show I want on various legal streaming sites. Thus providing same background noise you speak of.
[+] [-] ajtaylor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaz|12 years ago|reply
But there is a shift happening. The biggest question to me is whether brand advertising dollars are/can/will shift with it. We need new ad products. Especially ones that will reach younger audiences who avoid current ad products. Maybe opportunities for Snapchat/Twitter.
Also, content production is going to see some challenges without large amounts of ads to support it. I think there's still --on average -- a big gap in budget, revenue, audience, and quality between successful online-only shows better suited for YouTube and near-filler content on niche cable networks that have managed to stay alive with advertising. Cost of content production is still quite expensive. House of Cards had a $100 million budget to produce 13 episodes. Shows need a lot of audience to make the numbers work, and I'm hoping we see some acceleration here.
[+] [-] cylinder|12 years ago|reply
The protocol, cable (and satellite), is dying. Almost nobody in my age range, or younger (late 20s), has cable. Everyone has Netflix along with some other streaming services combined with iTunes purchases and such. If you want to watch live sports, the NFL is free over the air, you'll just miss out on the NBA (oh well).
Cable television has no reason to exist. Get rid of it and use the bandwidth for streaming. I just bought a TV after not having one for half a year, and briefly considered getting Time Warner. After seeing what they charge for the basic service, along with $16/month for the "equipment rental," why would I bother? Life is better without cable anyways, the garbage on there just stresses me out and makes me hate our society! You do not need CNN, my life is so peaceful not knowing what their talking heads are spewing off about.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
There have been several low budget films and tv shows that have become highly successful and well regarded, the same is and will be true in the online realm. Look at Mad Max, which was made for around a third of a million dollars, Primer, or Napoleon Dynamite.
But also it's not just production value or even quality but fundamental differences in character. TV was a different sort of beast than film, and even over the last decade commercial TV has changed a lot. Look at all of the independent content that sprang up on non-network TV channels, especially from HBO. A show like The Wire, or even more so The Corner, was very unlikely to ever be made within the confines of traditional network TV. TV has a different sort of character than film in terms of the sorts of productions that are suited for TV, and online video is different as well, but we haven't seen all of the ways that's so.
One example I'd highlight is the Lizzie Bennet diaries, a modern adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in vlog form of over 100 "episodes" of typical youtube length (~3-5 minutes).
Another example would be Periodic Videos (and related projects). These are educational videos about chemistry but because they don't have the length limits or requirements of traditional TV they can be focused on a single subject without being forced to add in unrelated filler.
Or, there's Lindybeige, who's likes to talk about medieval, classical, and bronze age technology and weapons. It's just a guy expressing his opinions and trying to back them up with experience or logic but it's frequently just as informative and interesting as watching a typical historical tv show.
[+] [-] majani|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrkristian|12 years ago|reply
Perhaps the better question is, when does traditional TV become so unpopular those satellites taking up geosynchronous orbit space get dumped into the oceans?
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluthru|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purringmeow|12 years ago|reply
So what do I do when I don't get proper service? Piracy - it gives me on demand HQ content.
I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century. The next network delivers cheap, on demand HD content worldwide will make a ton of money :)
[+] [-] alfiejohn_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ufo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowlofpetunias|12 years ago|reply
Of course, the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is an anachronistic bit of nostalgia for many reasons.
[+] [-] ljd|12 years ago|reply
We have an Apple TV which plays Netflix, Hulu, PBS, Rented Movies, Music and YouTube.
After 2-3 months of us never switching off of the Apple TV HDMI port, I told the kids I was going to cancel cable which they could never find anything of substance to watch anyway and they didn't even put up a fight.
None of us watch sports so there was virtually no reason to keep cable anymore.
What I found slightly disturbing was how hard it is to setup an over-the-air TV setup. It's going to cost about $200 in equipment and another $100 to setup on my roof. It seems almost insane how expensive free TV has become to get. It'll still pay off because we were paying over $100 for TWC; it's just strange to see something that used to be so simple become so complex and I didn't care about it because I thought I would just have cable the rest of my life.
[+] [-] hayksaakian|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul9290|12 years ago|reply
If it's available in your area.
[+] [-] frankydp|12 years ago|reply
I am not a electrical engineer, so can anyone shed light on why the range for channels on digital is so much lower than it was with analog, also is weather much more impeding for digital than analog?
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|12 years ago|reply
I just hope that google doesn't destroy their golden goose merely because they are too incompetent to understand its value or importance.
Edit: Unrelated, I was annoyed by the quality of the "net subscriber adds" graph since it's obviously dominated by an annual signal, so I created a smoothed version (the raw data should be accurate to within ~5-10 pixels give or take): http://i.imgur.com/ffBzR8g.png
[+] [-] pan69|12 years ago|reply
A little more reasoning would be appreciated.
[+] [-] bd|12 years ago|reply
http://www.bloomberg.com/infographics/2013-10-21/less-time-i...
Younger the viewers, less TV they watch.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ollysb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisNorstrom|12 years ago|reply
When I was a kid we came home and watched Pokemon, CardCaptor Sakura, Yu-Gi-Oh, every afternoon. All those cartoons are gone now.
[+] [-] mstrem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyl|12 years ago|reply
Per week. I had no idea.
[+] [-] FrankBlack|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpcan|12 years ago|reply
I subscribe to Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Cable TV.
This way of getting entertainment is actually frustratingly expensive.
And to make things even dumber, sometime NONE of these services have what I want without an additional convenience fee. So my wife and I will stop at a Red Box and get a movie for about $1/2, LOL. It's crazy.
When 3 or 4 more $10 per month options pop-up, and everyone is watching some great show exclusive to that service, then what? Things get WAY worse.
Someone needs to start a company where I pay $80-$100 per month, and I get EVERY one of these services streamed through 1 site to every room in my house :) Someone get started, make the deals, get this going, OK. Good luck.
[+] [-] eikenberry|12 years ago|reply
That's because you still have cable. Dump it and you'll get down to a reasonable cost.
Hulu + Netflix + Prime is around $23/month.
[+] [-] mickdarling|12 years ago|reply
So individual shows rating may be dropping and rating for networks may be going down, but they are spreading their revenues across a lot of the more niche properties. They also make a huge amount from Cable licenses for the whole package of networks to ensure they have as many channels available to viewers as possible.
They are now learning to monetize their properties across digital media, and you will see that growth into online media and consolidation there soon.
I work with major media groups helping them with social media and the growing time-shifted audience, so I've heard a lot of the plans for the future. They see the writing on the wall, and while broadcast and cable might be shrinking, the content creation and advertising around video entertainment will keep growing, of that I am certain.
[+] [-] brownbat|12 years ago|reply
It claims people are chucking broadband subscriptions and using tablets and mobile internet, or more often, just free wifi from Starbucks (or neighbors?).
Fascinating. If everyone dropped broadband, TV, and phone lines into the home, what's that world look like?
[+] [-] chc|12 years ago|reply
They promise a graph showing in hard numbers that broadband subscriptions are down, but never actually provide one. They just provide a graph showing, as best I can tell, that total customers for cable companies are going down. In fact, they confusingly state that customers are moving from cable with broadband to "telco companies like AT&T and Verizon who offer TV as a package with high-speed internet access."
From the description, this apparently isn't referring to mobile Internet, but AT&T U-verse and the like. So high-speed Internet from AT&T doesn't count as broadband on the grounds that they're a telco.
My best guess is that when this whole article is founded on the strange understanding that TV through a cable provider is the only real TV while getting the same content through satellite or what-have-you is "mobile," and cable Internet is "broadband" while anything from a "telco" like AT&T is a totally different thing. A rise of alternative providers is an interesting story, but it's a pretty different story from the one they're trying to tell here where everybody is just taking their iPads to Starbucks and watching cat videos.
[+] [-] antidaily|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jstalin|12 years ago|reply
I have broadband Internet at $35 a month (about 20mbps), Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and Netflix, and I have more than I need. I spend a lot less time wasting time flipping channels and watching commercials. I total about 3-4 hours a week of watching anything on TV.
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnorourke|12 years ago|reply
When they were growing up I allowed them to be bombarded with information - TV on, web access, phones from an early age - and they've developed the ability to filter it quite well and just ignore things that don't interest them.
The only down side is:
"awww dad I didn't get anything done today" "why, son?" "some Internet happened"
[+] [-] shubhamjain|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clarebear|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dinkumthinkum|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cybp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkmurakami|12 years ago|reply
TV shows may die, but our need for storytelling will survive.
[+] [-] pan69|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jredwards|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brent_noorda|12 years ago|reply
Comcast: OK... Done. We'll miss you as a Comcast customer. Will there be anything else?
Me: Yes. Please sign me up for internet service. I'm going to watch TV over the internet.
Comcast: OK... Done. We'd like to welcome you as a Comcast customer.
[+] [-] hrkristian|12 years ago|reply
Sorry, and on a more serious note, I should hope this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone. Moving out a few years ago I ordered a 25/25 fiber line and completely dropped any form of cable/satellite package.
Norway, similar to the UK and probably many other countries, has a "TV Licence" which I still gladly pay, even though by law I am not required to do so as I don't technically have any TV channels in my house. NRK (Norwegian "BBC") provides a fantastic internet service on par with BBC's player, that does not require me to handle the archaic technology that is decoders and their 1990's era hardware running millennium software.
[+] [-] donquichotte|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctdonath|12 years ago|reply
One word: Kodak.
(They had no idea customers would turn to digital photography so fast and so completely. World-dominating brand now defunct.)