Rant: Charge me or charge the advertisers — NOT BOTH

[Nick Griffin]

Wow, Tim! What a detailed and cogent analysis of the whole situation. You should be the COW’s Editor In Chief! Oh… wait a minute. You ARE the COW’s Editor In Chief, not to mention an incredibly prolific contributor.

The fact of the matter is the world has changed and continues to do so at an ever-increasing pace. Various business models for the delivery of content will be explored. Some will succeed and some will fail. I don’t have to like it, but it’s the truth.

For what it’s worth I’m in the very distinct minority who would happily pay more for content without the commercial, or promotional for that matter, spots. I spend something like $216 a year for HBO, probably half that for Showtime and $83.88 a year for NetFlix. I’m not paying CBS for what I can already DVR.

[Tim Wilson]

[Nick Griffin] “I spend something like $216 a year for HBO, probably half that for Showtime and $83.88 a year for NetFlix….”

I keep trying to come up with ways to spend less (“hmmm…maybe now I can drop HBO”) and keep finding ways to spend more (“hey, wait, Redbox means I don’t have to wait for it to come on cable….hmmmm, maybe now I can drop HBO”).

Thanks for the kind words on my psychotic post! I really do find this stuff endlessly interesting. With so many things having changed, it’s easy to forget all the ones that haven’t. We’re going to be in advertising’s thrall until programmers can find more someplace else.

I’m curious if there’s an age-gap in this. You and I are toward the upper end of the COW’s age spectrum, we pay a lot for content, and we’d like to skip commercials. Younger folks are less inclined to pay beyond Netflix, many have never had cable at all — so I wonder if they see ads as a problem, or if they just roll with it.

Too bad no young folks post in this forum. LOL Although if you’re out there, I’d love to hear your thoughts….

[Bill Davis]

[Tim Wilson] “Too bad no young folks post in this forum. LOL Although if you’re out there, I’d love to hear your thoughts….
“

All this content represents a WAAY too long a scroll on their phone screens, I suspect.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Tim Wilson]

Luc Besson said that when he makes movies (specifically speaking of The Fifth Element), he WANTS people to be pissed off when they see his movies at 16:9, to say nothing of 4:3. He wants people to be SO outraged at how much of the picture they’re missing that they insist on the full aspect ratio he shot at….and to ensure they’re outraged, he packs the frame as full as he can, intentionally placing key elements outside the mask.

Me, my posts aren’t as good as The Fifth Element. LOL But I can live with somebody deciding to skip my whole post more easily than I can live with leaving part of it out. LOL

Otherwise, scroll on, punks. It’s the only exercise some of you are getting. You’re welcome.

[Kylee Pena]

Or maybe they’re put off by the number of posts that say things like this about them.

To answer the question as a designated young(er) person, I haven’t had cable in a couple of years. I have Hulu Plus, Netflix, Amazon Prime. I borrow HBO Go with HBO’s apparent blessing but I’ll subscribe when it’s available.

I don’t really care about the ads. Obviously on the surface, watching an ad while using a service I pay for seems stupid. But it’s just more about access to me. Netflix is cool and has no commercials but everything on it is a hundred years old. Hulu Plus has fresher content without the cable bill.

If I didn’t have access to these services, I would probably still not have cable anymore. I think I’m in the minority there, but I’m cheap and work a lot and I pretend to value things like “outside” and “books” while I read trash on the internet.

Sent from my iPhone

blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com

[Jason Jenkins]

I’ll throw my thoughts in here, even though at 42 I’m not young anymore. We have no cable, no antenna, no subscriptions. We average less than 1 movie rental a month from iTunes. Watched on either my 17″ Macbook Pro, or more recently, a 40″ HDTV hooked up to my Mac Pro in my home studio. We also get out 2 or 3 times a year to see movies in the theater.

With five kids ranging from 11 to 1 yrs, we have built-in entertainment 24/7!

Jason Jenkins
Flowmotion Media
Video production… with style!

Check out my Mormon.org profile.

[Todd Terry]

[Jason Jenkins] “With five kids ranging from 11 to 1 yrs…”

Hmmmm… Jason, maybe you should have been watching more TV….

I too do not have cable.

When I moved into my present house four years ago, it was not wired for cable… and every place that I wanted a TV jack was on an interior wall. I knew that I had to do all the cabling myself for it to look/work right, and by the time I got around to that a couple of months later I was too used to not having an expensive cable bill.

That’s when it occurred to me that I should be able to get a great over-the-air signal… I can stand in my back yard and on a clear day I can see three of the four broadcast towers in this market. So I thought, “Lets go back to 1959 and get an antenna!” Except… I can’t have one. My house is in a downtown historic district where antennas (and dishes) are verboten. On a lark I tried a little fifty-buck interior HD antenna from Radio Shack (about the size of a paperback book), and voilà!… it works like a charm and is actually a much better picture than cable (and since all the TVs are cabled together it works on every set). Plus, since the transition to digital broadcasting, each of the four network stations in our market has at least two or three sub-channels with pretty interesting programming.

I have to say, though, in my house we live and die by Netflix. In my living room it comes in via hardwired ethernet to the Blu-ray player… on the other TVs I have little wireless receivers made by Phillips. The better half is addicted to “Orange is the New Black” on Netflix, but I personally find it to be worth more than the subscription price for Dragnet alone.

In the car, though, I’ve gone completely the other way… I exclusively listen to satellite radio now. With the exception of some NPR shows like “Car Talk” or “Wait wait don’t tell me,” I couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to broadcast radio.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Mark Suszko]

ATT U-Verse here, cable/internet/phones not the most expensive package, which irks me, because I’d trade ten sports channels I never use, for the NASA channel, which I can only get on the next tier up, an I don’t want to pay that tier price.
But the Cisco DVR that came with the U-verse completely revolutionized our TV lives. Got into a huge fight with a workmate recently, because he insisted to his dying breath that you could only get a DVR by subscribing to a service of some kind. We all told him, not so any more: you can buy a stand-alone DVR and record shows off the air without needing a cable or sat service. He wouldn’t believe it until he started looking up DVR’s on his smart phone.

[Todd Terry]

[Mark Suszko] ” Cisco DVR that came with the U-verse completely revolutionized our TV lives…”

See, what I would like to have is a DVR that is completely stand alone and owned by me… and is not subscribed to any service… that will work with a cable or off-air signal.

Does such a thing even exist??

I briefly researched it a while back, and in my (admittedly lightweight and non-exhaustive) search only found solutions that were PC-based… I didn’t see any kind of set-top box that would do that.

Is there such a thing??

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Tim Wilson]

[Todd Terry] “Is there such a thing??
“

As a matter of fact, here’s an article from just last month. Take a quick look and report back to the class. 🙂

I like that a number of these now integrate streaming options with OTA. Very cool.

FWIW, the computer ones work really well, especially if you have Google Chromecast. You need good bandwidth, but playing any browser tab, including a full-screen movie in a browser tab, on your TV is beyond painless now. Heck, it’s faster to set up than a new cable box.