Posted on 01/26/2013 3:52:18 PM PST by PJ-Comix
Veteran programmer Rob Barnett recently attended a breakfast meeting of television executives where the talk turned, as it almost always does these days, to “disruption,” the industry buzzword for the way new technology is upsetting the TV applecart. From somewhere down the table, he heard a question: “Has anybody here cut the cord?” — that is, dropped cable service in favor of just watching TV through the Internet? Barnett shrugged and raised his hand. “Mine was the only one,” he recalls. “But when it went up, I saw beads of sweat break out on the foreheads of some of the guys across the table.”
When Barnett and 5,000 or so others gather Monday for the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) convention at the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach, there will be plenty of sweaty foreheads, some acquisitive smiles and — perhaps most numerous — blank looks of confusion. Not since cable turned the old three-channel TV universe on its head in the late 1970s has the industry been in such a state of disoriented befuddlement.
New technologies that give viewers more say in what they watch, where they watch and how much they pay for it are great for consumers. But they’re inducing a collective nervous breakdown among industry executives, who have to figure out new ways to make money in a business facing serious threats to its traditional sources of revenue — advertising and cable-TV subscriptions.
(Excerpt) Read more at miamiherald.com ...
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What's your view???
and the premium channels are worse than ever when it comes to showing adult-type shows at all times of day.
You would at least think one of them (HBO, SHO, MAX, STARZ) would have added a channel specifically for foreign films, they seem to have channels for everything else.
Maybe TV people should stop covering half the screen with logos and flashing/moving ads that pop up right at the moment of suspense in every show.
I do like my DirecTV. But I end up watching more net on the thing than my dish!
DSL
BTDT - what did you find worthwhile on AppleTV?
I can do that already. I want a system that I can buy into whole networks or drop them.
I canceled my cable when I retired, to cut expenses. Without cable, I am doing just fine. Put an antenna in the window to pull in the signal, antenna looks like a closed laptop, in other words it looks elegant not ugly. Pulls in 19 channels incl. all the local stations and the three sub-stations that play oldies TV, local college sports, and the country music station. Bought the antenna for under a hundred bucks at Best Buy, it’s attached to a flatscreen and all you need is two plugs in the wall. BTW I pay for WiFi as part of my phone bill and I’m using the WiFi and my laptop to access FR and You Tube and watch movies and many TV shows thru Amazon Prime, costs $79. a year.
They cable companies better watch it because as wi-fi gets more powerful, cheaper and reliable (4G and beyond) they’ll find themselves as the next dodo bird.
I cut the cable TV cord and land-lines a long time ago. I get my TV via the internet and my calls via Ooma and I’ve haven’t looked back.
Why? Right now, I’m watching the Saskatchewan women’s curling championships for free on my 50” internet TV....and the curling content is getting more diverse and better. The only way to watch curling in the States was to wait every four years for the Olympica or get a Canadian “grey” dish. Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Vudu provide a lot of content for reasonable prices. YouTube has a lot of interesting stuff (love Bill Whittle’s content) and to top it off, there are websites on the internet that provide nothing but free video links to events all over the world.
As soon as a TV show is over it’s available at a “link site” for streaming or download. (”letmewatch” is the big one at this time.)
Episodes on the link sites have no commercials. It’s great not to have to sit through the ads but since the networks can’t seem to shut these sites down why don’t they try for legislation to get the ads included so they can charge a few more bucks for the ads?
Half a loaf is better than none.
And how much does DSL cost you per month?
If I lived alone, I doubt I would even have a TV at this point. What am I going to watch, Military channel, History Channel?
don’t forget ROKU
I gradually lost interest in watching tv a while ago. It just required too much of an investment in time. The last show I watched was about the mid 90’s. I still had a tv but didn’t do anything with it, until I gave it away in 2004. Since then, all of my information comes from the internet. I don’t miss it.
Not sure, I think voice and internet are 44.00 monthly on a 2 year contract, but I don’t pay much attention, so ymmv.
You’re like hubby, we had a set up like that, it worked pretty OK, but I did find it confusing.
But we were still running it off comcast, then he got mad at them and now we are back to Directv. Sunday ticket is the best, that I must say.
So he got rid of all the computer hook up (I think, maybe it’s still there, we’re all still screwed up from Sandy anyway so who knows?) and hard drive, we are just using the DTV DVR, still not as good as teevo and not as good as what we had with the media center thing-y either.
But I clicked on this link because today I was able at my weekend job to log onto Hulu and did very well with it.
I watched a glee re-run and then it went automatically into Nashville. I’d never seen that show, but I was instantly hooked, I’m probably going to go watch more episodes RIGHT NOW.
I liked it so much I almost considered hulu plus, and maybe I would do the free week and catch up with the story. Although I sort of disapprove of doing stuff like that and I’m too broke to fork over the dough to really sign up.
It is all pretty complicated, I’m almost missing those old 5 channel days, but not really.
I have noticed that Korean shows are online immediately (licensed sites like Viki and DramaFever pay for them with a few ads) upon airing and volunteers add subtitles to them.
This would work for US shows too, I would think
Got cable, don’t watch it, keep paying Comcast. Why?
I found DSL was a little too slow for streaming and went to downloading shows and movies with “Orbit” and then watching them with “VlC”.
Fine by me. My disgust with cable is the way that a large portion of the high “cost of the bill” was actually due to the network carrying fee for a lot of vile, left-wing trash channels that in many cases I didn’t even subscribe to, much less watch.
In other words, even though I was only watching a tiny few limited networks, I was basically “subsidizing” a whole host of deviant, liberal garbage. I cut the cord then and there. To blazes with them. I’ve been vastly better off ever since, amassing collections of dvd sets to watch. Preferably older shows and movies, reflective of when America’s culture wasn’t such an abject sewer. Haven’t gotten around to streaming yet.
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