Interesting the focus on piracy in this article. TV was losing it when their customers started needing a DVR to watch their favourite shows because of counter programming and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV. Now everyone has an average of two of Netflix/Prime/etc. because it's just eliminating the DVR and all the headaches involved and just getting the shows you want when you want them.
TV is still around and will be for a while yet, but it continues to fade.
> counter programming and to skip the 18 minutes of advertising per hour of TV.
^^^This.
I basically can't tolerate watching anything on ITV, Sky, or other commercial TV in the UK nowadays, nor for well over a decade, due to the frequency and quantity of ads. I also strongly object to what I presume is audio compression applied to ads to make them louder than surrounding scheduled programming.
And counter programming is an obnoxious practice.
Let's face it: lots of people have always wanted to watch what they want when they want to. Lots of people don't want to arrange their lives around the TV schedule. Good riddance to it.
When I bought a DVR, some cable networks were starting to speed up scenes of shows in order to fit in all of commercials.[0] I think this started in the late 90's but that's just my personal recollection. I did spot a Reddit thread pointing out this issue seven years ago. I suspect some scenes are cut from syndicated shows for the same reason.
We had 60 years of TV getting to that 18 minute mark per 1 hour show.
I wonder how many minutes of advertising or signups will be involved after 60 years of internet.
I can imagine a 20 years from now - to continue watching Netflix Original Series "Idiocracy Now: Season 2 Episode 7 - Jim invents plastic soil mulch" sign up for this exclusive opportunity to get a new AI robot dog....
I'm honestly pretty hopeful about ads in the streaming era. Netlfix has been streaming since 2007, streaming original shows since 2013, and aside from some admittedly obnoxious ad placements in some shows (Coke in Stranger Things S3), they've resisted the urge to ad up. Some services are dabbling with ad-tier subscriptions, which is worrisome.
I recently realized that you can turn off Netflix preview auto-play through the web app. This setting isn't shown in my smart TV app but turning it off in the web app carries through to other devices.
I was recommended lost in space, but they had some really obnoxious product placement. You don’t go to space and get excited about Oreos. You get exited about space.
A lot of ad volume problems come from failure to normalize audio between what the studio distributes and what the advertiser distributes. Failure to fix something can be innocent or malicious: someone high up can simply not prioritize it, and no one could honestly say it's to serve advertisers without an admission. Some of it is innocent, some isn't. Laws are passed to regulate it, but they find ways past it.
They use psycho-acoustics. It's not actually louder, in the sense of carrying more acoustic energy overall; but the sound-engineer emphasises those parts that we perceive as "loud". Regulators are pwned, and refuse to act.
Movie sound-engineers seem to have started doing the same.
I really don't understand why annoying ads have't become extinct, in accordance with the Darwin principle.
[Edit] And advertisers hire loud, shouty actors to present their ads; it's almost as if they were challenging us to change channel or stick in a DVD.
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> I really don't understand why annoying ads have't become extinct, in accordance with the Darwin principle.
Unfortunately it's because of the Darwin principle. While I hate them to death annoying stuff is more memorable than pleasant stuff - you can sit on a beach all day and get bitten by a mosquito at one point, you're definitely going to remember the mosquito more than hours of pleasant relaxation. Annoying loud crap gets our attention, I think, in part, because things that are annoying and loud are dangerous (both in the modern and historically) so we're trained to pay more attention to them. I wish it wasn't true but Advertising gains effectiveness from obnoxiousness - like if a marketing company could make your house smell like rotten fish every time they were blasting information about their insurance you'd sure as hell remember their name.
If it helps (not that ITV has anything _worth_ watching), I think TV stations recognize this - both ITV and Channel 4 have ad-free on demand options for a few pounds a month
Counterprogramming. That reminds me of a guy who used to come on Johnny Carson's show once a year (IIRC) to talk about the new fall season of TV. He had a big board with all the weekday prime time time slots and a bunch of sticky signs (Velcro? magnets?) for the shows both old and new and he'd do a spiel where he'd shuffle them at manic speed, demonstrating how network execs program prime time. It was quite entertaining. Does anyone else remember this guy ? Any pointers to info about it ?
My kids (4 & 6) saw real ads on TV for the first time in their lifes’ about a week ago. Otherwise they had always just watched netflix.
They watched disney channel on TV and were mesmerized by all the ads for toys. „Oh I want this one“, „and this one“, „dad can we buy that one?“.
Was bizarre to see that for them this was somehow really special.
I almost feel like it's part of a "media readiness" thing. I have to wonder what happens to the kids raised on a perfectly curated media diet when they move out and actually drink from the marketing firehose for the first time unattended.
At some point in your childhood, you should desperately want something from an advertisement and get hopelessly let down with it, just so you can learn the lesson that advertisements lie.
“A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience.”
The biggest problem, IMO, with copyright in the current age is that the copyright holders want to adopt business models premised on controlling me and my experience. I’m not reluctant to paying for content, but if you make the experience suck I will work around you.
This is a large part, from my observation at least, of the reason why Game of Thrones was so insanely pirated. If you can recall a few years prior another nerd sensation was sweeping the country (Lost) - but by the time GoT came around Netflix and other streaming services were really coming into prominence. HBO Go in that era refused to offer you a la carte access - instead requiring you to have an account with a major cable company to gain the privilege to pay for access. I think the contrast is pretty clear because now we've got a plethora of independent streaming services with their own costs (like Dropout and Nebula) that don't seem to be having trouble attracting customers - even if it's just for a single series or creator (i.e. Dimension 20).
The ease of access is a key point for me. I am morally opposed to piracy under normal circumstances - but if you're levying a price that I need to pay with my time or sanity I'm going to table flip and go back to the dark side (or, more likely in the modern day, just not watch your crap since there's plenty of stuff out there).
Totally unimportant. Why do you classify GOT and Lost as nerd sensations? GoT I cam understand. It comes from a geeky book series and didn’t start off as the monster it became. GoT also did things [mainstream] tv or media in general did not do. Like killing characters off.
Lost on the other hand was a mainstream viral popular show. Shows like Heroes for a small period of time had related hype. Or a film like Inception. South Park did a good take on Inception before they even watched it themselves. It may be dressed as intellectual, nerdy fodder. The hype of making them seem nerdier than they are is my anal geeky issue.
This entire comment is silly. I’m trying to rationalize my anal elitism with what really good media is. As if I or any one should be the arbiter for such things.
—-
Thanks for the Nebula name drop. The price is really cheap with coupon codes. I’m surprised Dropout is doing well enough. I thought it was effectively dead as the rest of College Humor is. Luckily CH’s big impact on my life, Jake & Amir web seriess, was sold back to the namesakes.
I agree. For the last series of GoT I bought a month pass from a streaming service in the UK--"Now TV" or something--to watch it. It was a reasonable price, so I think they were successful there.
It's a feedback loop. Audiences increasingly switch to streaming, so companies are willing to pay less per a second of advertising. TV stations increase the amount of time dedicated to advertising to compensate, which drives more of the audience into streaming.
This doesn't jive with how pricing typically works. There is no such feedback loop, at least not one that is as simple as you're making it out to be.
Consider that your feedback loop implies a kind of symmetry by which TV stations could presumably also increase revenue by decreasing ads and attracting viewers in the process.
If TV stations have good reason to believe that increasing the amount of time dedicated to ads would increase revenue, they would have already done so a long time ago regardless of streaming.
My suspicion is that TV is increasing ads because people are moving to streaming without any kind of feedback loop involved. Those who are left willing to watch TV will do so regardless of increased advertisements. It's not that ads are pushing people to streaming creating some kind of feedback loop, it's that people are simply moving to streaming because it's a better product across a multitude of factors and those who are stuck with TV will continue to be stuck with it, ads or no ads.
I don't know if it's my imagination but I've noticed this with FM radio too. Sometimes I'll turn on the radio in the car because there's a local station that plays music I like, but it's become unlistenable because the ad:music ratio is about 50% now. And the ads seem to be mostly for things boomers might buy (like hearing aids, luxury cars, and blood pressure medicine), because of course everybody younger never listens to the radio.
I still feel more connected to the world when I tune into some FM station than when I am listening to some Spotify playlist. Same with TV: even if I watch movies or series on streaming services, I still watch the news almost every day at 7PM and, during the day I do switch in and out some national news TV network.
Both the TV and FM, even if flooded by ads, still make me feel connected to the world, while streaming services kind of put me in a bubble. Maybe it's worth also noting that in my country(EU member state) the ratio of ads to real program is limited and controlled by government. So stations cannot abuse it and take it to 50/50, the ads are limited to 20% duration (12 minutes every hour).
TV and FM ads are innocent children compared to the shameless promotions in youtube videos, for example, so I've learned to tolerate them, laugh at some of the worst ones, or just ignore/change station when I am not in the mood. TV is not dying in my house nor the radio in my car.
AM radio is even worse. It’s descent into fringe talk radio turned the ad side of the business into prostate pills and ads that are probably fake.
Radio used to mint money. I think what you’re seeing is the decline in the business led to consolidation, and now they are milking whatever they can get until they can sell the spectrum to someone.
A number of times the past few years I have tried turning on the FM radio in my car just for old times sake, or if my phone is dead or something. A vast majority of the time, I will flip through all 6 programmed channels on my radio and every single one is on ad-break.
So I decide to sit on one that I'll just wait through... but then I realize I've sat there for what feels like 5+ minutes (longer than one average song) still being bombarded with ads and justifyingly so decide that radio is no longer for me, and so off it goes for another year.
FM radio probably knows it, but what are they going to do? Nobody is going to start listening if they reduced ads. Best course to just squeeze every last dime out of the current listeners until you can't turn a profit anymore.
You should really read some introduction to economics to get a good mental model of how those things work.
Why wouldnt TV companies do this in the past when TV was in the prime? Just increase number of ads and get more money. Clearly there is some limit as to how many ads to show because I dont believe they want to decrease the viewership numbers
I have an advanced degree in economics, but okay :)
How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining?
I'd say the more likely explanation is that there is a lag between audience loss and advertiser realisation of audience loss. TV stations manage to meet market growth expectations by exploiting this and pumping out overvalued ads to non-existent people. Over time, they've become increasingly reliant on this strategy to keep their heads above water as advertisers catch up to reality.
It can't go on forever, so they've now belatedly started their own streaming services to try and keep up.
> How would you explain the increase in ads then? If there is a clearly understood equilibrium ad time, why has ad time increased? Have audiences become more accepting of ads? Have ads become more entertaining?
It seems possible to me that folks who are still watching tv are more accepting of ads, whereas the folks who aren't/weren't moved to something else.
That'd slow the decrease in overall viewership for sure, old folks homes need to put something on during the day. But the key demographic (18-54 year olds) are likely less ad tolerant, as channels keep upping the ante on ad time they'll lose their most lucrative audience members.
I could work real hard and try to provide more value to consumers and attract more customers, but as I said that's hard work and I'm not very creative so it may not even pan out.
I could also say, "Increase advertising by 5%!" and in the short term gain the same rewards as the other option, maybe even more. Then put that success story on my resume and move on.
At some point shareholders decided they wanted the second option. They all move on quickly as well.
I haven't studied economics at all, but if you could get your academic comrades to stop offering intro courses as one-and-done gen-eds, I bet we'd drastically improve the quality of online armchair economic analyses.
I think we have seen the same drama in newspapers. More ads. Even whole cover page, is an advertisement. Reduced readership, and unlikely to attract more due to high advertising volume.
If there are a limited number of ad spots, the scarcity makes those spots more expensive. And, as you said, the number of ads has a negative effect on viewership which would make those ad spots less valuable as well.
That was past. Now that viewership is declining and alternative mass advertising opportunities are available what we're seeing is the death spiral. There's no natural scarcity making TV ad spots more valuable. Viewership is in decline. The only way to even maintain income levels is to increase the number of ads. If there is a formula on the perfect amount of ads, the inputs to that formula have changed.
TV has always had competition. With anything else you do in your free time. When it started it competed with radio. Later it competed with what you had on the VCR. Then gaming. Then streaming. They always had to worry about losing people to other activities.
And as such, they couldn't just run 25 minutes of ads and 5 minutes of show, because people wouldn't watch.
There are more ads now because the people who are left on linear TV are the people who are most die hard about watching it and will take more abuse, or simply don't have any idea what to do with their free time instead.
This is harsh. GP's theory doesn't clash with traditional economics.
One reasonable answer to your question: TV companies didn't increase the number of ads because consumers would switch to a channel with fewer ads. In fact, they showed just enough ads to break even, as the marginal ad revenue per hour tended towards the cost of producing an hour of television (because of the perfectly competitive TV market you posit). Now the cost has stayed the same, but the number of eyeballs has dropped, so TV networks need to show more ads or go out of business.
Tv failing from pushing advertising again is getting relevant to the current state of social media.
The amount of time Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. try to keep their customers away from the content they came for is astonishing.
I recently deleted Twitter because they were spamming me with notifications in the app that they were not able to spam me with notifications outside the app for live streams I never showed the slightest interest in and half the posts were topics I never chose to follow.
Reddit is neatly as bad with their random top streamer stuffed into unrelated subs, daily requests to add more interests, and a popular and news tab that are toxic.
I don’t mind the occasional sponsored item but I am pretty sure Facebook is nearing a 1:1 ratio for junk to content. There most of the content is junk too. I just check my notifications at this point because I can’t make heads or tails of what they show and what they hide or the sort order of what they do choose to present.
It is like they learned nothing from why tv and radio dying and are competing to see who becomes irrelevant the fastest.
A bajillion years ago in HN time, Joel Spolsky wrote about the then-fashionable peer-to-peer frenzy, that everyone was getting Napster wrong: Nobody cared about peer-to-peer, everyone cared about:
“You can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.”
My n=1 anecdote: Soon thereafter, I was typing the name of a song into iTunes, buying it for CAD 1.29, and listening to it right away. I spent hundreds of dollars a year on the iTunes Music Store.
It wasn’t peer-to-peer that some of us liked, it was making the experience as frictionless as possible. Rightsholders hate that, but they lose this argument every damn time. The winners in content are always those who make it easy.
p.s. In the 1950s, TV was the disruptive low-friction experience. You could turn on the set and watch Lucy and Desi right away, without buying tickets, getting dressed, and going to a theatre!
I watched a one-hour show last night (with a 6-minute ad-break) that rolled titles at the 40-minute point. There followed a 10-minute ad-break, and 10 minutes of trailers. All of the ads were low-grade - hearing aids, wills and equity-release, and charity donation pitches.
In the 80s there wasn't much choice, but today you can watch pretty much whatever you want when you want with no adverts, no catering for the lowest common denominator, and at least in the UK TV viewing has dropped so much that it's no longer needed to be social at work the next day (in the 80s everyone cared who shot dirty den or whatever in eastenders, as pretty much half the country watched it. Not so now)
* I wasn't in the mood for that when I scheduled my recordings.
I normally only watch news bulletins live. I don't have a feed of $EVERYTHING; I have Freesat and a bunch of basic Sky channels, with catchup services such as iPlayer. I cancelled Netflix.
I'd subscribe to a service that offered $EVERYTHING, but it doesn't exist.
Apparently £276 a year, more than I pay for netflix, amazon, disney and spend on "other" things (like discovery on apple). And for that price you still get adverts forced down your throat.
I don't follow team sports on TV. But when I worked in an office, I tried to follow Association Football matches, because that's what colleagues would talk about "round the water cooler". Also, my girlfriend enjoyed TV football. Basically, I was faking it.
I think sports on TV are the last remnant of that "who shot dirty den" business.
Then the girlfriend left, and I retired. No more TV sports for me.
I've been rewatching random episodes of The Simpsons recently, and I have noticed that without ad breaks, the pacing is a bit off for a lot of episodes. The shows were designed so you had time to digest major plot points during the commercial breaks.
Don't get me wrong I don't want to watch ads, but it's a strange and noticeable problem.
TV did not lose (just the opposite). We live in a Golden Era of an incredible abundance of great TV (including a large selection of foreign shows which was never possible before). Moreover it is a better business model and content is higher quality (in general). Also, I still enjoy antenna TV because of high def broadcasts which involve less image compression.
Higher quality in general? No way. There's way, way too many streaming shows that aim for the middle. Tons of reality/competition shows, tons of superhero shows where dialog and plot take a backseat to looking cool. TONS of garbage animation and children's shows.
From where I sit, it's way easier today than 5 years ago to find something new to watch, but way harder to find something great.
It's anecdotal but as a kid we had japanese anime on tv. There was a surprising amount of quality (considering the tech used for production). And some animes like saint seiya, have .. to my half educated ears.. world class OST [0]. Others like Space Adventure Cobra also featured very fancy jazz funk. It's somehow unbelievable that at the time, companies would allocate money for such features. Maybe it was the spirit of the era.. a kind of spiritual drive in the air (new technology, promises of the post war future, rising tv market) making people doing their best.
And I can't help thinking that this energy is gone. It's done, known, technology made everything available so there's no real drive needed to try setting up a show and broadcasting (an few iphones could do).
Rose tinted glasses. I too have watched anime since I was a kid and the quality of what they’re making in the last few years beats what I grew up with. Animation quality, plot complexity and diversity, soundtracks, voice acting - everything is as good or better. Compare anime that have been remade, like Fruits Basket. The recent version is vastly superior.
Look at the top 50 anime on MyAnimeList, probably the most used anime site. (https://myanimelist.net/topanime.php). This would be the equivalent of IMDb top 250.
- pre 2005 - 8
- 2006-10 - 5
- 2011-15 - 10
- 2016 to date - 27
You’d expect some recency bias but not to this extent unless recent anime was really good. I’ve seen most of these and they certainly deserve to be up there.
Look, I don’t doubt that you enjoyed shows from when you were a kid. I was obsessed with dragon ball z as a kid. But try watching it now, it’s just not that good. Nostalgia makes them better in our memories than they actually were.
I didn't mention dbz btw. If you have soundtracks of those I listed, feel free to spam me.
I admit having next to no knowledge of today, beside a few returns from people watching animes (less positive than you). And in any case I don't think SS OST is bound to relativity, it's really instrumentally and harmonically extraordinary. I'd place it near or even above John Williams...
Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood. The best anime by any measure. The soundtrack is extraordinary.
#1 all time on MyAnimeList and #19 all time on IMDb.
By the way I know you didn’t mention DBZ. It was an example of a show that I thought was incredible as a child and simply doesn’t hold up today. I speculate that some of your favourites could be the same.
The golden age was caused by cable networks venturing hard into original programing and it started right around the Sopranos. But the golden age ended 5-7 years ago as talent got spread too thin, the number of shows exploded, and the streaming services started pivoting to mass entertainment rather than critical acclaim.
But prior to the golden age, TV was very lowest common denominator. Almost everything aimed for the middle. Of course, there were great shows in all eras, but TV is much best post-2000 than pre-2000.
Maybe I‘m that ‘middle‘, but the shows of the last couple of years have spoken me about as much as those 5-10 years ago. Queen’s Gambit, Mr. Robot, The Expanse, Sex Education, Chernobyl, Dark, Russian Doll, Maniac to name a few IMO very high quality ones.
more options at the high end, I'd agree with the general point. check out the Topic app, which distributes a highly curated set of quality foreign shows. Insane level of quality across the board.
Digital broadcast used to be the best image source available to watch on your TV. As you say, far better than cable or streaming because of the lack of compression. Is that still the case?
Back in 1988, at the height of TV viewing, these scene on Star Trek TNG seemed massively futuristic. Imagine TV ending by 2040
DATA: Is there something wrong?
SONNY: Wrong? Only that your computer here fixed about the best martini I have ever had. I just might get to like this place. Let's see if the Braves are on. How do you turn on this teevee?
RIKER: TV?
SONNY: Yeah, the boob tube. I'd like to see how the Braves are doing after all this time. Probably still finding ways to lose.
DATA: I believe he means television, sir. That particular form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year two thousand forty.
Yet here we are, 24 years on, with just 18 years to go to that 2040 date, and it looks like it may well work out about right - as in TV as a passive viewing habit (rather than actively seeking out an episode of the Mandalorian or Tom Scott or what-have-you)
To be fair in the Star Trek universe there was a lot of global thermonuclear war going on so it makes sense that broadcast TV would die out as the spectrum became too noisy to effectively transmit signal.
That's an interesting scene, but it's not a passive viewing scenario. I do agree that passively turning on the TV just to see what's on is virtually extinct.
As a side note, it seems very unlikely that a baseball team named the "Braves" will exist in the far future, even if baseball itself is still played in some form.
TV really seems to be in its twilight. When I happen to chance to watch it, I'm seeing basically the same 4 commercials and they are all geared toward elderly populations. No one I know has plain broadcast TV on in their home anymore.
I wonder at what point will it become unprofitable to operate a TV station. In my location at least half of the OTA channels are religious broadcasting stations. Will non-profits take them over completely at some point?
HBO just announced a new season of "Sex and the City" on HBO Max. It occurred to me that although I've never watched an episode of the original series all the way through, I know all the characters names and their basic story arcs - the show was just part of popular culture when it was new and you couldn't help but hear about it. There's nothing like that now. My kids couldn't even tell you what shows are on - I doubt they could even name the broadcast stations.
I lament this fact often. We no longer have a shared cultural experience around media. Very occasionally something pops up that everyone seems to know about, like Squid Game or The Mandalorian. But it isn't like the old days, when anyone would talked to saw the latest episode of I Love Lucy or Friends or Seinfeld.
There are so many choices and it's so fractured that there are no "big winners" anymore. But that's also a good thing, because the big winners weren't winners because they were good, they were winners because a network executive decided they would be winners.
This happens with music too. The Spotify wrapped posts with my friends are completely different, whereas ten or fifteen years ago we would have watched the same Top 10 videos on MTV a half a dozen radio stations that were not much different with each other..
When I watch football, I catch some ads for the current CBS and Fox shows that are in the old money spots of weeknight primetime. They look absolutely awful, and I've never met anybody who has ever admitted to watching any of them. It feels a little bit like the Rick and Morty interdimensional cable episode.
Those CBS shows just look so wildly awfully. Last year they showed ads for the queen laitfa cop show or like the big bang theory at the end of seemingly every single commercial. I have to assume that only old people are watching this stuff because there are just so many better options.
I don't know what you are talking about. I can tell you the rough plot of Stranger Things, Squid Game, and Tiger King despite never having seen a single episode of those series.
Shows are still part of popular culture, it's just streaming instead of timed TV.
Hm, ok I guess you've got a point there. I took the post as being about "why TV Lost (to streaming services)", which I consider Netflix to be one of. But you're right - those are more or less "shows" the way "Friends"s was, more than Logan Paul and PewDiePie and the other stuff I'm too old to "get" that have replaced TV in popular culture.
Really? I don’t have that impression—part of popular culture. I tried to watch it once and lasted about four minutes. I’ve heard people refer to it a few times, but know nothing about the characters nor anything else. Contrast the Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Friends, for examples (the last also dreck that I never watched, but recognize as part of popular culture).
"In my location at least half of the OTA channels are religious broadcasting stations. Will non-profits take them over completely at some point?"
I don't know how the situation is in other countries, but down here in Brazil, 2/3 of OTA channels have become religious channels in the last 10-15 years.
And those channels are DEFINITELY FOR PROFIT. It's a disgusting scam, ripping off the elderly, the poor and the overall dumbest segments of the population. I have nothing against religion, I'm not religious myself but I can see how it can be beneficial for a lot of people. Having said that, the religious channels as they exist in Brazil should just disappear, and the world would be a better place. TV must die, it serves no useful purpose anymore.
Live sports is really carrying cable subscription packages at this point, and I get the feeling that a lot of people who watch it would consider it a bridge too far if the major sports leagues decided to ever adopt a full pay per view model.
But the format of a cable subscription doesn't need to match current form factor. For the past few seasons we've bough Youtube TV during the NHL playoffs, and canceled after. I'd just as happily pay NHL directly (probably a lower cost for me, and higher margin for them) but their current offering has blackouts for exactly the games I want to see. Another example, we buy Disney+, but not their ESPN package. But we would it they had coverage of the teams/leagues we care about.
Really the blackout exclusions that leagues have that allow them get higher cable revenue deals are the problem. But if that dynamic shifts and the deals are exclusive, I would expect the league-direct streaming services to become competitive.
I have to think live sports will move to streaming services that package betting on the same screen and allow different announcers. There's just so much money to be made off controlling gambling.
> Will non-profits take them over completely at some point?
No the broadcast frequency is too valuable. Right now TV stations are just holding on to their spectrum until they get a chance to sell it to cell phone companies and cash out.
Generally they can barely support one. Also while everyone thinks of Nova and Masterpiece Theater a lot of local PBS content is cheap talking head shows or at least it was historically.
I bought a new TV about the time this article came out. I think I’ve watched maybe a dozen shows on it via the tuner. Every single other thing has been either optical media, gaming, or streaming.
The replacement I bought this year will probably never have anything connected to its coax jack.
> The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. But they're still dragging their heels.
True, it took them about a decade for legacy TV networks to finally start offering first-party streaming apps (Peacock, CBS All Access, etc.)
We are heading back toward the "TV" era... Where speech is controlled/censored 98% of the time. Take for example /r/politics where 10-25% of daily front page posts are talking against Trump and anyone going against their ideology will get banned.
>We are heading back toward the "TV" era... Where speech is controlled/censored 98% of the time.
That's an odd assertion to make when you're talking about Reddit, where anyone can fork a subreddit at any time, or even the web where anyone can launch a website for free or without much expense that can be seen by almost anyone on Earth, or even Donald Trump whose every word and deed still makes headline news and who is currently launching his own multimedia platform.
Speaking of which, Trump and his followers have to be the least censored "censored" political group in history. They're constantly shouting from every social media platform and every comment section about how censored they are. It's ridiculous.
Trump is banned from at least Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube- so it's not like Trump supporters have zero basis for their complaints. I think these platforms are generally considered mainstream, so being forced out of them can be pretty impactful censorship. How many platforms have Biden, Obama, or any previous president been banned from? This censorship of major political players is unprecedented in US history afaik.
Trump wasn't banned for his political beliefs, he was banned for violating the TOS. Trump's supporters conveniently forget that he was allowed to run rampant across social media for four years and given far more leniency than anyone else, and of course they're pushing the narrative that his ban was part of some vast leftist conspiracy, but the reason he was banned and Biden, Obama and others weren't is because Trump was raving like a lunatic and seemed like he was about to start a civil war, and Biden and Obama have done nothing of the sort.
And what has been the impact been of Trump's ban? He's still perfectly capable of getting his message out. His followers are perfectly willing to move to non-mainstream sites like Parler and Gab, and they're still all over the mainstream sites to boot. He's still the overwhelming favorite for the GOP in 2024, and he's starting a social media platform and possibly a streaming TV deal. Trump simply not being President anymore has had a bigger chilling effect than being deplatformed.
As always, the right's hatred of the left has led them to overplay their hand. It's obvious to everyone that neither Trump nor his supporters are oppressed, suppressed or censored in any meaningful way, and certainly not to the degree that they claim.
> It's obvious to everyone that neither Trump nor his supporters are oppressed, suppressed or censored in any meaningful way, and certainly not to the degree that they claim.
Well, I'm not a Trump supporter, and have no horses in the left/right race- however, it seems obvious to me that there is censorship involved, given Trump is literally banned from those platforms. Anecdata- the only time I ever saw anything Trump had to say was on Twitter, and since his banning, he might as well not exist in my own infosphere. It's amazing to watch the pretzels people tie themselves in trying to justify their ideology.
Trump was given more leniency then his opposition for years. Where his detractors were blocked and censored for same things, he was not because of his political power.
I presume Trump supporters are all about keeping the government out of private business matters, so they do seem to have zero basis for their complaints.
Another example is Google heavily censoring search results.... it is spreading everywhere. The top websites all do it.
I do use Yandex and other websites when what I'm looking for is hidden (but the list of websites that aren't censoring (or are censoring different stuff) is shrinking).
TV is still around and will be for a while yet, but it continues to fade.