Sunday, October 26, 2008

The conspiracy to destroy TV

The conspiracy to destroy TV, article.
Is the broadcast-watching TV audience (in America I assume) really down to 15%? Sounds incredible to me.

5 comments:

Rick said...

It seems kind of far-fetched to me. I rarely view broadcast television (meaning the 4 major networks in America), preferring the offerings of cable and satellite. I've heard that the upcoming requirement for broadcast television to transmit digital signals is supposed to open up much of that bandwidth for other uses.

Alex said...

I can believe the broadcast audience is down. We ditched cable in '94 because, though we had a cable ready TV, they insisted on us having a cable box to decode a key, since the tuner was in the cable box we could only get one station at a time, and the down time on the system was incredible, at least once every 2 months there'd be an outage for a day or two.

We spent a lot of time out, me working late, DW at evening college. This left little TV time, and we split that between broadcast PBS and ER and Star Trek.

We were without cable, and doing fine on rabbit ears for 6 years. Our new house was beyond DSL, but we could get Cable Modem. Cable costs $10pcm, but with the cable modem was effectivly $6. The communal antenna was in disrepair, and the rabbit ears didn't seem to work, so we are now on cable. I kinda resent the $6pcm, but we have clear TV except on one channel.

Now we have Netflix for $15pcm, and it's cheaper than rental, and provides more content than we can deal with. Also my UK relative send me all the stuff they don't show over here, so we only see about an hour of TV a week, but mostly it's DVD.

Everyone I know is either satellite, Netflix, Cable or doing better things with their time. I can see broadcast going away here.

As for an aggressive take over of frequency, that is a different question, which I don't have answers or opinions on.

As for GPS with Traffic alerts, it's a great system. I was in strange territory for me (I5 LA), and I was told there was severe congestion ahead, count down from 5 miles. The last half mile I backed down on speed, rounded a corner to see a sea of red tail-lights. No surprise to me, and I'd started reacting before I got there.

Another time locally I just had the GPS on for fun and it told me there was a big mess, it also told me that journey time through the congestion was about 22 minutes, and avoiding the traffic would journey time would be 24 minutes. Yup, why face traffic lights when you can take the easy way quicker.

I don't think removing TV would help with that bandwidth since I was getting the updates by some SMS type service.

Monsieur Beep! said...

No TV screen here at all! Ditched and done away with the box a long time ago.
I prefer surfing the net and reading good old paper books (smell smell).

Alex said...

Faber sniffed the book. “Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I
loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go."


I believe this is a quote from a story that was published in Playboy in spring 1954.

The smell of old books is quite intoxicating. I don't like the smell of magazines printed with soy ink though.

Anonymous said...

The smell of old books is quite intoxicating.

If they're properly cared for. The musty smell of ones kept in a cardboard box in someone's basement for 50 years is enough to make a person blow chunks.