TV Networks going the way of Newspapers?

Business Insider ^ | 6/7/2012 | Henry Blodget

[djone]

Don't Mean To Be Alarmist, But The TV Business May Be Starting To Collapse, We almost never watch television shows when they are broadcast anymore We rarely watch shows with ads, even on a DVR We watch a lot of TV and movie content, but always on demand and almost never with ads We get our news from the Internet, article by article, clip by clip. The only time we watch TV news live is when there's a crisis or huge event happening somewhere.

[giotto]

Netflix pays to carry them. There’s nothing obsolete about the network at all

Maybe for the time being. But the networks better wake up and smell the coffee. Already, carriers like Netflix are beginning to produce their own content. I'm currently watching the series called Lilyhammer, Netflix' first original series. I saw a blurb at Amazon.com that was calling for scriptwriters to submit scripts for original content to be produced by Amazon. It's the wave of the future.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

What’s the downside?

[discostu]

Netflix isn’t going to ever drop the rest of the world for their own content, they produce their own stuff so they’ll always have something that’s immune to contract negotiations. Look at HBO, they produce tons of their own content, and still buy movies. No matter how much Netflix produces, no matter how good it is, there will still be a market for selling Mad Men and Breaking Bad (or the equivalents in the future), so they’ll either buy that content to sell to us or somebody else will.

[stuartcr]

Good for you.

[stuartcr]

Or the only local newspaper that’s available.

[stuartcr]

Thankfully, I’m not connected to anything that requires a power supply. Besides, I like watching the local news and reading a newspaper.

[discostu]

You’re on the internet right now. You could find out everything your TV and paper will tell you before they do in greater detail without their bias, and all the junk they’re never gonna bother to tell you.

[donna]

The bottom third of the screen is full of moving ads for something else.

Shows start and stop before and after the listed time so you miss a little something each time.

The ads have become too sexualized to watch in mixed company or with children.

The shows are not stand-alone, so no one remembers what happened last week thus nothing makes sense.

They put out a bad product.

[FlyVet]

Could be your local news is better than mine. Here, they are awful. Very little real, accurate, investigative reporting.

1st segment: car crashes, fires, shootings. Carnage for Entertainment Value.

2nd segment: politics, which is, almost always, press releases from various pols' offices. Propaganda which makes pols look good.

Then weather, then sports. They aren't so bad, but again, real investigative reporting? Almost non-existent.

[donna]

And don’t forget the pet in distress.

[stuartcr]

I’m not in a hurry.

Stuff we read on the internet, not biased??!!! How can you determine that...by agreeing with it?

[stuartcr]

Unless you were there, how can you tell news isn’t real or accurate?

[discostu]

By reading multiple sources. Everything is biased but on the net you can easily get news biased in both directions. Or just your favorite direction, which since you hang out here is probably NOT the direction your local TV and paper lean.

[ctdonath2]

Our TV content is exclusively discs and Internet. We watch it on the living room on a 42” HDTV. The Apple TV handles Netflix, iTunes, WSJ and Vimeo streaming. The Sony BluRay player does Amazon Instant Video and discs.

The only content we watch on a 13” screen is The Bachelorette because it’s free via web but $14 via iTunes.

It’s 2012. Plug your TV into the matrix already.

[stuartcr]

I neither notice nor care which way they lean.

[stuartcr]

I neither notice nor care which way they lean.

[pabianice]

Note that you can no longer buy a TV. You can buy a video unit that sounds like rodents in heat. You can then pay the same amount again for a sound unit. I resent that.

[ctdonath2]

Not quite sure what you’re getting at, aside from snide comments about things not being perfect out of the box.

Standard consumer 480i CRT TVs were, on the whole, not exactly exciting in either video nor audio. A low-end 42” 1080p HDTV is far better than the 27” box I paid the same price for 13 years earlier. Of course a $2400 55” LED-LCD panel with a discrete audio system will be much superior, but then you’re paying some 8x as much. Other than the blacks being a bit gray, I had no problem watching _Contraband_ on the aforementioned 42” panel with stock sound ... and I can nit-pick with at serious video/audiophile levels if I want to.

My ideal is indeed to buy a no-receiver no-audio video-only monitor of high visual quality, then deck it out with a good sound system and discrete content processors. I don’t want to pay for OTA/cable TV reception hardware at all, and whatever audio is built into the box _will_ be inadequate. If I resent anything, it’s paying for the bundled mediocrity that forms a “TV” per se.