Is TV on it's last legs?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Gustav Bertha on March 17, 2008 at 9:32

I don't think sites like youtube will replace going to the cinema. Films made for the big screen are never the same on a laptop or even a large widescreen tv as they are in the cinema.

Who knows if that will change with home cinemas getting better, but there is something about actually going out to watch a film.

They'll partially replace tv for sure if they haven't already.

The potential on YouTube is incredible. If you could just do one quirky little video that catches a wave you can reach millions. But then it's a bit like writing a hit song. It seems simple until you actually try to do it.

As always being found amongst the many millions of other people producing stuff is the really tricky part. As a musician who as been loading music to the web for ten years now I can testify to that.

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Permalink Reply by Paul Hutchinson on March 17, 2008 at 10:35

We just upgraded our TVs to HDTV.
So... no, I don't believe TV is on the demise.
It's going to have to change with the times.
HDTV is one way it is going to.
Watching high quality programmes like LOST in Hi-Def and surround sound at home live is not something you can duplicate on the web, period.
They need to put out more HD content on TV though.
Maryland Public Television has this annoying habit of showing HD content on an HDTV channel in letterbox 4:3 format.
And they told us there was not enough content to sustain HD broadcasts (ha!).
WITF-33 shows all HD, which I love, but it's tough for us to get the signal.
We're 40+ miles from any antennas.
I have a home theater with 12'x6' home made laminate screen and surround sound for the movie experience.
That's replaced going to the cinema for me, for the most part.
Our daughters still go, that's for the social element.
True enough, we are watching more online content, like hooking up the MBP to the TV so we can catch up on The Colbert Report or The Daily Show from their online sites.
However, so long as they put enough HD content on the TV, the web is not going to entirely replace it for the foreseeable future.

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Permalink Reply by paul nicholls on March 17, 2008 at 13:56

I can see traditional TV changing, beyond doubt.

I can see a one stop console being the norm for music, video, browsing and the ole thing being completely interactive. That's a reality for some folks now anyway; the integration of all things entertainment into one system.

Whenever I'm away, I often take some DVDs and watch them on the laptop - I'm disinterested in the content on the TV for the most part anyway, and I'm sure that's the case with a lot of folks who read this post.

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Permalink Reply by Brad P. from NJ on March 17, 2008 at 14:31

I definitely see the distribution media changing a lot over the next few years. They've already drastically changed for me.

I stopped listening to live radio in April 2005. We turned off our television signal in January 2006. All of our media comes into our house via PodCasts, VidCasts, Blockbuster.com, or torrents.

I think that the biggest change coming will have to be in the content that's served up via the channels. Either, the content will go way south and become something like 'Ow, my Balls' from Idiocracy, or the stories will become amazingly well developed in an effort to compensate for not having production dollars for high-end computer graphics and the like.

Does that make any sense?

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Permalink Reply by Tim from Radio Clash on March 17, 2008 at 21:00

Hmm dunno - I think a lot of people are leaving TV for the web. DVDs, on demand programming, although that might not totally happen as like cinema there is a social aspect - people like to talk about events - did you see the TV last night? Sometimes I suspect this is the only reason people watch TV - the programming apart from a few exceptions is so bad I don't miss giving it up about 4-5 years ago.

People ask me how I have time to podcast and do other things, I usually respond 'I don't watch TV' - it's a passive time-sink. It'd be great if everyone went to an active model, but the lack of ideas of most things on YouTube show that might be not so great.

Cinema will stay around because it's an event, a special social thing - which is weird because the actual event is anti-social (you can't chat).

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Permalink Reply by jamesH on March 17, 2008 at 22:03

With all due respect, I think all of the contributors to this debate - which includes me - are at one, rather pointy and exciting end of the digital divide; Eastenders is still enjoyed by millions of people every night, not much less than it did at its inception in the 80s, although iPlayer picks up maybe a couple of million on a good day, I believe the passive medium is likely to prevail over the breadth of choice for the medium to long haul, because it's a no-brainer for them... you'd be surprised how many people struggle to set a PVR. The same, I think, goes for radio (a subject far closer to my heart :D) - with the recent rocky road onto which the 'only-a-little-bit-different' DAB has turned (yeah, I know, not least because it was a half-arsed platform to start off with) the hours and reach of liner-monkey commercial radio has changed very little over the years, and is unlikely to, simply because people don't want to put their mental effort into changing it.

For what it's worth, in terms of podcaasting, it takes me the best part of ten minutes a day to select the podcasts I want to listen to, since I have to weed out the stuff I'm not interested in from the invaluable Britcaster feed.. it's the main place I look for new podcasts.. how much more of an investment of effort is that than, oh, choosing what's on from the AppleTV menu..? And how many Apple TVs have been sold?

More and more, I'm finding myself wanting one of those lovely little micro-ITX PCs for my TV cabinet... why? So I can stream telly to the mac while the children are in the kitchen (I know.. sad, isn't it?) or to watch downloaded content on the big TV without having to plug my laptop in. The world isn't even ready for *proper* HD yet (except, perhaps, the Japanese).. preferring to watch horribly mashed-up MPEG streams squeezed through their DTT box, and there just aren't that many Media Centre/ers in sitting rooms..

Hell, I'll stand here and take the brickbats if, in ten years time we're still here and I'm wrong. But I might be dead by then, because of eating too many sausages. A lesson to us all, there, I think.

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Permalink Reply by Tim from Radio Clash on June 26, 2008 at 0:16

Hmm I think YouTube is making surprising inroads, and not into the 'digitally converted' set either.

Ditto radio - the 'play again' feature is well known, even my partner knows about it, and he doesn't podcast nor frequent YouTube - or watch TV for that matter.

Don't think that many Apple TVs have been sold, and tbh I don't think it matters - P2P and torrent 'tv' is here to stay, along with Flash video TV - I mean I spent ages watching the clips on this:

http://www.neave.com/television/

So you can even bring on teh random even with the new technology...I'd watch a channel like this, whereas trad TV is just banal. And not in this sort of strange, surreal arty way either...

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Permalink Reply by Neil Fairbrother on June 25, 2008 at 20:10

Yes, trad TV is deffo entering the "decline" stage of its market lifecycle. However things won't really take off until we kick the copper habit and have fibre to the home delivering 100Mbps services as a minimum.

Cheers

Neil

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Permalink Reply by fatBuzz on June 25, 2008 at 21:06

Amen to that, Neil.

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Permalink Reply by Tim from Radio Clash on June 26, 2008 at 0:19

You don't need 100Mbps anymore - MPEG4 et al stream at much lower rates.

If TV got over the 20+ year technology and the HD cul-de-sac (people will watch low quality clips IF the content is good) then yes most of this would be possible at ADSL2 speeds.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Fairbrother on June 26, 2008 at 5:40

You can never ever have too much bandwidth - just as you can never ever have too fast a processor, too much RAM or too big a disk.

FTTH with 100's of Mb/s or even at Gigabit/sec speeds will radically change the way we use the internet - in ways we can't even imagine now.

I spoke at the recent ITP conference in London where the keynote was given by the Chairman of BT and for the first time I heard a senior BT exec agree with me that FTTH is inevitable - it's not a question of if, but a question of when.

The business case was written by BT 22 years ago...

Cheers

N

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Permalink Reply by Tim from Radio Clash on June 26, 2008 at 9:04

"The business case was written by BT 22 years ago..."

Funny when my partner consulted with them in the mid 80's, they didn't agree with that - they were really proud of their copper cable network, which he told them was not their biggest asset, it was actually their biggest downfall - he told them to move to fibre.

Good to see they finally listened - several years later...

And now I'd say a fibre network would be your downfall - it's going wireless/wimax/HSPA-type technologies.

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