In my experience, only people above 30 watch reality shows. Virtually all reality shows are for old people. Real Housewives, everything on HGTV, everything on the History and Discovery channel... the only network that's associated with youth that has reality shows I can think of is MTV, but even that is probably more watched by aging men trying desperately to relive their cool days.
I question the veracity of that statement. Whenever you see a mob of screaming fans surrounding one of the Kardashians they tend to span all age groups. And twentysomethings are always trying to get me to watch the latest E! reality show.
Why not? A relative difference in values is a relative difference in values. "The median of this distribution is a bit larger than the median of this other distribution" sure makes sense to me. Sure, comparing two histograms would be more informative, but also much more difficult to discuss concisely.
Well makes the competition for the top jobs easier top Investment Banks and fast track Civil service still expect a rounded renaissance man or woman - its not that long ago that you where advised by school and parent's to say that you read a broadsheet in an interview.
I suspect that it helps in Oxbridge and Ivy Entrance interviews as well
> And he’s part of one camp that believes young professionals and students will eventually become cable subscribers.
> “We suspect they will trade up,” Skipper said.
The implication here seems to be that cable is the premium/preferred product, and people will switch to it once they can afford a cable subscription. That does not at all strike me as being the case in this day and age.
The internet, and piracy, created an even more extreme shift in how you can consume video than it did for music. At least when you shelled out a ton of money for a CD, you still had the same experience when listening to the music. When you pay for cable or watch broadcast TV, you then not only have to wait for the scheduled viewing time, but you spend half as much time watching commercials as you do watching the actual program (10 minutes out of a 30 minute block).
Then on top of that you have to deal with the famously awful cable companies?
I think piracy + netflix have probably irreversibly changed people's willingness to sit through commercials, wait for the scheduled time slot, and put up with the other inconveniences associated with the whole process.
I understand some of this has gone away through video on demand and DVRs, but I still have to think that Netflix is superior when it has something and Popcorn Time when it doesn't.
It's not even the cost issue either. The cost issue is what got me started downloading music and video when I was a teenager, but nowadays (even though I'd be willing to pay a couple hundred bucks/pounds a month in theory) I've just had too much frustration and annoyance every time I've used a set top box (mostly in hotel rooms these days) to even have it on my radar as something that has the potential to make my life better.
Yeah wow, Skipper is holding on to a legacy business that going to get disrupted from top to bottom. How do they not see that incredibly expensive cable subscriptions that provide scheduled broadcasts with filled with patronizing advertisements is somehow better than something like Netflix, YouTube or LiveStream?
>> When you pay for cable or watch broadcast TV, you then not only have to wait for the scheduled viewing time, but you spend half as much time watching commercials as you do watching the actual program
Hulu+
I've had it for quite a while, beats having to be at home on a certain time to watch a show and also cuts the commercials way down.
It's worth considering that he's with ESPN, and sports is an unusual case.
Television shows and movies don't have nearly the timeliness factor sports broadcasting has. If I see guardians of the galaxy a week after it comes out it doesn't really matter, but there's very little point in watching 'the game' even a day after the fact (unless there's some exceptional reason to).
So in some regards, they do have kind of a stranglehold and are holding out hope that they can capitalize on that. It's funny talking to cable subscribers < 40, because (obviously anecdotal) the majority of the reasons given are 'how else am I going to watch sports?'
Sports is indeed, far and away, the biggest driver of cable subscriptions. Sports is also the reason why most cable packages are so expensive. Licensing sports costs a fortune, and networks who license sports turn around and charge big fees to cable companies. Their parent companies also bundle their other networks with the sports network, so as to raise rates for all of their networks. This is why ESPN is the most profitable network on all of TV (broadcast or cable), and one of the most important jewels in Disney's crown. Disney would probably sell off ABC before it would sell off ESPN.
If you're someone who doesn't watch sports, you also might think about how much a cable subscription subsidizes those who do. If sports franchises ever start moving off cable, the cable industry is in for a pretty rapid readjustment. I assume the sports franchises know and leverage this in their negotiations with cable companies.
The whole LA Dodgers fiasco may be a leading edge indicator of a breakdown between franchises and cable operators. There have to be some conversations within sports teams wondering if they would make more money going direct to fans. On the other hand, it might make both sides more resolved to cooperate for a bit longer in negotiations.
Outside the US, expats (or anyone, I just mostly know expats who use it) who follow US sports can subscribe to streaming packages that are far superior to watching it over broadcast.
I think you can even switch between different commentators as well as a few other options.
As for myself, I'm sure plenty of money from my local taxes, once I move back to the US, will go to subsidizing pro sports teams. I don't particularly feel like doing so with a cable subscription as well.
I recognize that I'm in the minority, but tape delay is the only way that I'll watch sports. I don't really mind the commercials, but fast forwarding through them let's me watch a 3 hour game in 2 hours -- that's significant. It also makes it easier to avoid the dreadful commentators like Don Cherry.
That doesn't really change your point though. I typically start watching after about an hour -- I'm highly unlikely to watch the game if I've already seen the score in the newspaper.
Paying >$100 a month to watch a couple of games a month sure is expensive, though. It'd be cheaper to watch them live, if watching them live wouldn't require plane tickets most of the time...
And watching live sports is often a social experience - big games are fun to watch with friends and family. Sometimes it's just fun to watch with strangers who are also invested in the game's outcome. I've never had cable, but often I've gone to bars alone to watch a big game like a gold medal hockey game or the world series; Grab a few beers, order a pizza or something, and it's a lot of fun.
I like that I can buy my two sport channels, Eurosport 1 & 2, for £3.99 a month. I can watch with a 15 second delay from the tv version (which means no tv license - £150 per year I think), I can watch up to three hours delayed, it's in HD (which is extra on cable) and I can watch on my PC, phone, tablet, xbox and more.
In college I lived in an apartment that provided cable TV as part of the rent and I never hooked it up. Even though it literally cost me nothing, I still wasn't interested. I preferred the flexibility of Netflix (and pirating) to watch what I wanted, when I wanted, and the fact that a full third of airtime on cable is dedicated to showing commercials is a huge turn-off for me.
People don't rip CDs anymore? You can't depend on a streaming service to stream your favorite content forever. Also, you don't actually "own" your DRM-riddled digital downloads from Amazon, iTunes, etc. What's more, CDs and Blu-rays offer high resolution content than any streaming service currently offers.
For the HN crowd, I thought ripping would be a no-brainer.
> Also, you don't actually "own" your DRM-riddled digital downloads from Amazon, iTunes, etc.
iTunes downloads aren't DRM-riddled (which is why my entire iTunes library is now part of my Google Play Music library.)
> For the HN crowd, I thought ripping would be a no-brainer.
Buy individual tracks and archiving them to your own media is a no-brainer, but ripping CDs isn't necessary to that when the major music download services all are (or allow you to export) portable, DRM-free copies.
>I think piracy + netflix have probably irreversibly changed people's willingness to sit through commercials, wait for the scheduled time slot, and put up with the other inconveniences associated with the whole process.
I was telling my 7yo about this yesterday. How in the old days, you couldn't just watch videos on YouTube or download whole seasons of Pokemon. No, there were only three channels, and things were shown at one time, and you had to be watching then or you'd miss it, and you couldn't watch it again. And it was horrible!
(Called my dad today, he was most amused too.)
This was provoked by having to explain to her that we couldn't just get all of Season 17 X and Y, because it hasn't all been broadcast yet, that there's just a new one every week. And of course it's unavailable in the UK ... except on the net.
She watches lots of CBeebies/CBBC. So I pay for a TV licence even though we don't have a TV. Because the BBC is worth it.
I don't understand why older people hang on to less optimal way of doing things? I hope I never do this. Being able to watch content at any time you want is better than having to schedule your time around broadcasts. No advertisements is better than having to endure advertisement breaks in the middle of a show.
Same with newspapers. You can't share newspaper content easily. You can't click on a word and Google it or look up information about Ukraine's president while reading the news paper. Newspapers take up space in your house and unread newspapers are a huge waste. I get some people like distraction free reading, without a glaring bright screen so the case here isn't as clear cut as with a TV, but the point is valid.
Older people, by virtue of having been around longer should be more capable of recognizing the pattern of new innovation leading to improvements, and not get stuck. I just don't get it, and I hope this doesn't happen to me, I'm already nearly in my 40's so we'll see.
Because in a lot of ways a decent smart TV at say 50 inches with iPlayer is lot less fuss than messing about with a pc and a much smaller display an suboptimal sound.
I wasn't trying to be a jerk, I should have explained myself better. Basically using a smart tv is analogous to young people using the internet in this situation because
A. You are picking and choosing your content.
B. You aren't exposed to advertisers (unless you are using hulu but even then you are picking what show you want to watch)
C. You aren't paying a massive monthly subscription.
D. It works using the internet, not cable.
The article isn't so much about using a TV (the actual device that displays the picture) or a computer monitor as it was about watching "traditional" tv (the content, shown in a scheduled manner)
>> I don't understand why older people hang on to less optimal way of doing things?
They have less to do, and probably don't care as much about maximizing every minute of their day. They probably also like a routine. Dinner at 5:00p, Matlock at 6:00p...
>> Newspapers take up space in your house and unread newspapers are a huge waste. I
You can also read a newspaper if you don't have internet, or your internet connection is slow, or down, or you can read it out on the porch or the boat where your wifi doesn't reach, you don't need an iPad to read it...
You also can't line the bottom of a birdcage, pack dishes, wash windows, or get a fire going with an online newspaper. You also can't cut an article out to save or pin up on the fridge.
Because the aggravation of obtaining, understanding, and maintaining a computer + internet connection is not worth the trouble.
I hear people claim that once everything's set up, it's easy. That's not my experience. Every time I go home I've got to deal with issues with my mom's computer and internet. They're never her fault, and sometimes they're difficult to solve, even for a tech person.
Watching video online is great when everything goes right. But it seems like a good portion of the country has fairly lousy internet, which makes videos sputter or stop. People who grew up with the ease and reliability of tv have a hard time stomaching these kinds of problems.
Also, when you get older, you don't necessarily want more choices. Your mind is tired and cluttered, you just want to relax in front of the tv and not have to sort through an infinite array of choices or deal with technical issues.
> I don't understand why older people hang on to less optimal way of doing things...
I'd imagine they simply don't understand how these things work. I don't think my parents have ever intentionally watched a YouTube video. I'm sure they've heard of Netflix, but I don't think they know how to setup it up... so they wont even consider the value proposition... even though their Blu-ray player has built-in Netflix support.
We've grown up with this technology so it's not a big deal to rip a DVD or download a torrent.
But if you're barely aware that these things even exist, it's difficult to actually learn how to use them... even if the procedure is ultimately trivial.
I think having a dedicated TV with cable is optimal:
1. Computers and Internet are for work (HN being an exception), TV is for
entertainment. It makes sense to keep things separate, even physically
separate.
2. If I watch TV, I do *not* want to be bothered about thinking what to watch.
I reserve these kinds of decisions for work or for things that actually
matter.
3. If another person makes the program for me, I'm likely to be exposed to
interesting things that I would not have picked by myself.
> It makes sense to keep things separate, even physically separate
Saying something doesn't make it true.
>2. If I watch TV, I do not want to be bothered about thinking what to watch. I reserve these kinds of decisions for work or for things that actually matter.
Fair point. It's the same reason I listen to pandora in that sometimes I'd rather not choose.
> 3. If another person makes the program for me, I'm likely to be exposed to interesting things that I would not have picked by myself.
Maybe but more often than not, this isn't true unless you find the massive amounts reality tv to be interesting.
But none of the reasons you describe make TV with cable optimal for anything except lying back and having random (not necessarily good or interesting) entertainment thrown at you and exposing yourself to hours of psychological marketing tricks.
There are a lot of different modes of entertainment. One that you describe is pretty rare - "Show me something I would like to see, I don't care what, maybe something new".
Obviously this is a useful mode to have. TV channels about wildlife and history are good examples - you can turn them on even for 10 minutes while you do some chores, for example. But for "stateful" content like sports or TV series this is suboptimal. And that's the bulk of entertainment.
>I don't understand why older people hang on to less optimal way of doing things?
Because they are used to it and it works for them, so they couldn't be bothered? It's not all about "optimization" of options and full utilization of potential features, sometimes personal convenience is more important.
>Same with newspapers. You can't share newspaper content easily. You can't click on a word and Google it or look up information about Ukraine's president while reading the news paper. Newspapers take up space in your house and unread newspapers are a huge waste. I get some people like distraction free reading, without a glaring bright screen so the case here isn't as clear cut as with a TV, but the point is valid.
Not being able to "click on a word and Google it" is exactly why some people prefer newspapers. And it's exactly why some people who read the news on the web actually read 1-2 articles, skim 90% of them, and end up with cat videos somewhere on the corners of YouTube.
Also some people don't like sharing content. Why would I want to share a news item? As if I'm the purveyor of news to my un-englightened friends? Finally, "newspapers taking space in a house" is a first world problem if there ever was one. Let's be honest: nobody really considered "newspapers taking place" a real problem...
> Older people, by virtue of having been around longer should be more capable of recognizing the pattern of new innovation
Not necessarily. The current generations of "old people" have always had TV; they have always had books, newspapers and magazines; they have always had cassettes for music (vinyl was the reserve of a rich minority and CDs weren't mainstream until the '90s). They have always had cars, trains, electricity, airplanes. They were already 30+ by the time videogames and PCs came about, which is why they left them to their kids. In fact, they saw the digital revolution happening in the workplace and were taken aback, to the point where, 30 years later, they are still not particularly comfortable with it.
The generations that saw real technological revolutions, innovations changing their way of life in radical ways, were the ones that fought the first and second World War. A lot of them didn't have home telephones or electricity while growing up, often even running water was missing; they didn't have cars, trains were expensive, and the thought of flying was just ludicrous. They bought the first radios and TVs and marveled at silent movies. Those generations could recognise change; the current oldies mostly saw marginal improvements, all considered. They spent most of their time actually dealing with social changes, rather than technological; which is why they are responding to the current wave of changes with a barrage of social prescriptions (i.e. silly new laws) -- they can see the social change happening, although they don't really understand the technological underpinnings of it.
My kids spend all their time on YouTube. They would rather watch video on their phone than sit down in front of a TV. This has big implications for all media, not just broadcast TV.
I don't have kids, but I noticed my cousins would all watch TV up until age 12/13 when they were allowed to get phones. As soon as they got phones, they abandoned the TV. Snapchat, instagram, netflix, games, and even hulu are now the only media they consume! I'm honestly excited to see what the TV landscape looks like in 10 years when these kids are 22-25.
Is this simply because regular TV has advertising and advertisers want to target the people with the most money?
There is a huge gap in wealth between generations thanks to debt via housing and education. Are advertisers putting pressure on program makers to make shows that appeal to old people? I'd guess they've done a lot of thinking on this.
"There is a huge gap in wealth between generations thanks to debt via housing and education"
You sound like there's a ton of incentive to make TV channels for teenagers, promote mortgage and colleges on it.
Capture all the unserved audience, make $$$s.
If that's where all money go in this generation.
There's some mixing in this thread of "watching via cable programming" and "watching TV/movie content on a TV versus a computer or mobile device."
For the former, even among people not paying at all, or not paying for it through the traditional cable company means, big-studio TV content seems more popular than ever (unsurprising since it's higher quality than ever, with still-increasing amounts of money pouring into it). This shift ultimately seems like one that will only hurt the traditional broadcast networks, as well as the cable networks that fill themselves with "passive watching" content versus the stuff that (currently, at least) plays much better in the newer distribution channels. Or maybe stuff like reality will just move online later when that demographic moves online if cable starts to fail. That's probably an area where the "it just works, and it's on, set it and forget" aspect of cable is actually a very large advantage, though. Otherwise, about the only non-large-content-library advantage of cable is that fast forward/rewind on my DVR work way better than on online streaming.
Extreme space and budget restrictions seem to be the only reason to give up the latter. The couch or recliner + TV viewing experience is hard to do without (I did it for a couple of years after moving and being short on space, and then couldn't believe I'd done it for so long after getting a TV again).
Curiously, you can also argue that the mean is a useless statistic, since it tells you very little about the bulk of a distribution with asymmetric outliers (i.e. age, wealth)
Knowing that the youngest person in the oldest half of the TV population is getting older does tell you something interesting, and slightly more specific than what the mean gives you, although I suspect mean and median are fairly close in this case.
Of course it would be nice to have mean, standard deviation, median, and maybe a few other percentiles. Better, a full histogram. But median is hardly useless.
You could also say that TV is increasingly for the young. Vice, House of Cards, etc. are great but they're targeting the 20+ crowd. There's an explosion of new shows and programs for kids on cable. Some of them, like Adventure Time, are so well done that I enjoy watching them. In fact, you could call this a bit of a "golden age" for this sort of thing.
Watching shows on the internet is great. The acting talent and quality there has really improved. But, I see this less as taking away from cable, and more as taking away from the box office. Kevin Spacey was doing great movies 10+ years ago, and now he's headlining Netflix's service. Honestly, I think these long running tv shows are a better format for a lot of actors. Breaking Bad just can not be done in a 2-3 hour movie, or in a syndicated format where each episode needs to be treated more or less independently (e.g. Law and Order). However, Netflix didn't really start that trend, cable did.
Also, cable/tv "owns" the coax cable running through the house: the fastest and most reliable way of moving information around the average US home. There's new technologies like Moca that are going to make a lot of things possible that currently are very flakey with current wireless/alt-ethernet solutions.
TV has always been (mostly) about mindless entertainment. I think the shows that are successful outside of a traditional cable package succeed because they were probably inappropriate for the cable programming format anyways. Services like Netflix are filling a new niche, but I don't think they can significantly take away the core value of cable for most people.
And the DVD box, the predecessor to whole series binges on Netflix. The 2005 revival of Dr Who was, IIRC, funded at least partially based on selling lots of boxes of it later.
56 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadSarcasm aside, the relative popularities of Fox News on TV and Vice on the Internet are pretty good examples of what this article is talking about.
There's still plenty of people watching content in the TV format, they just are not doing it from exactly 8pm to 11pm in the way that they used to.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/news/press_releases/2014/telev...
I shudder to think what the average age is of broadsheet newspaper readers is...
I suspect that it helps in Oxbridge and Ivy Entrance interviews as well
> “We suspect they will trade up,” Skipper said.
The implication here seems to be that cable is the premium/preferred product, and people will switch to it once they can afford a cable subscription. That does not at all strike me as being the case in this day and age.
The internet, and piracy, created an even more extreme shift in how you can consume video than it did for music. At least when you shelled out a ton of money for a CD, you still had the same experience when listening to the music. When you pay for cable or watch broadcast TV, you then not only have to wait for the scheduled viewing time, but you spend half as much time watching commercials as you do watching the actual program (10 minutes out of a 30 minute block).
Then on top of that you have to deal with the famously awful cable companies?
I think piracy + netflix have probably irreversibly changed people's willingness to sit through commercials, wait for the scheduled time slot, and put up with the other inconveniences associated with the whole process.
I understand some of this has gone away through video on demand and DVRs, but I still have to think that Netflix is superior when it has something and Popcorn Time when it doesn't.
It's not even the cost issue either. The cost issue is what got me started downloading music and video when I was a teenager, but nowadays (even though I'd be willing to pay a couple hundred bucks/pounds a month in theory) I've just had too much frustration and annoyance every time I've used a set top box (mostly in hotel rooms these days) to even have it on my radar as something that has the potential to make my life better.
Which means the flaw in their theory (for me) is the level of income I must attain is unrealistic.
Hulu+
I've had it for quite a while, beats having to be at home on a certain time to watch a show and also cuts the commercials way down.
Television shows and movies don't have nearly the timeliness factor sports broadcasting has. If I see guardians of the galaxy a week after it comes out it doesn't really matter, but there's very little point in watching 'the game' even a day after the fact (unless there's some exceptional reason to).
So in some regards, they do have kind of a stranglehold and are holding out hope that they can capitalize on that. It's funny talking to cable subscribers < 40, because (obviously anecdotal) the majority of the reasons given are 'how else am I going to watch sports?'
The whole LA Dodgers fiasco may be a leading edge indicator of a breakdown between franchises and cable operators. There have to be some conversations within sports teams wondering if they would make more money going direct to fans. On the other hand, it might make both sides more resolved to cooperate for a bit longer in negotiations.
I think you can even switch between different commentators as well as a few other options.
As for myself, I'm sure plenty of money from my local taxes, once I move back to the US, will go to subsidizing pro sports teams. I don't particularly feel like doing so with a cable subscription as well.
That doesn't really change your point though. I typically start watching after about an hour -- I'm highly unlikely to watch the game if I've already seen the score in the newspaper.
Paying >$100 a month to watch a couple of games a month sure is expensive, though. It'd be cheaper to watch them live, if watching them live wouldn't require plane tickets most of the time...
I don't watch anything else.
For the HN crowd, I thought ripping would be a no-brainer.
iTunes downloads aren't DRM-riddled (which is why my entire iTunes library is now part of my Google Play Music library.)
> For the HN crowd, I thought ripping would be a no-brainer.
Buy individual tracks and archiving them to your own media is a no-brainer, but ripping CDs isn't necessary to that when the major music download services all are (or allow you to export) portable, DRM-free copies.
I was telling my 7yo about this yesterday. How in the old days, you couldn't just watch videos on YouTube or download whole seasons of Pokemon. No, there were only three channels, and things were shown at one time, and you had to be watching then or you'd miss it, and you couldn't watch it again. And it was horrible!
(Called my dad today, he was most amused too.)
This was provoked by having to explain to her that we couldn't just get all of Season 17 X and Y, because it hasn't all been broadcast yet, that there's just a new one every week. And of course it's unavailable in the UK ... except on the net.
She watches lots of CBeebies/CBBC. So I pay for a TV licence even though we don't have a TV. Because the BBC is worth it.
Same with newspapers. You can't share newspaper content easily. You can't click on a word and Google it or look up information about Ukraine's president while reading the news paper. Newspapers take up space in your house and unread newspapers are a huge waste. I get some people like distraction free reading, without a glaring bright screen so the case here isn't as clear cut as with a TV, but the point is valid.
Older people, by virtue of having been around longer should be more capable of recognizing the pattern of new innovation leading to improvements, and not get stuck. I just don't get it, and I hope this doesn't happen to me, I'm already nearly in my 40's so we'll see.
A. You are picking and choosing your content.
B. You aren't exposed to advertisers (unless you are using hulu but even then you are picking what show you want to watch)
C. You aren't paying a massive monthly subscription.
D. It works using the internet, not cable.
The article isn't so much about using a TV (the actual device that displays the picture) or a computer monitor as it was about watching "traditional" tv (the content, shown in a scheduled manner)
They have less to do, and probably don't care as much about maximizing every minute of their day. They probably also like a routine. Dinner at 5:00p, Matlock at 6:00p...
>> Newspapers take up space in your house and unread newspapers are a huge waste. I
You can also read a newspaper if you don't have internet, or your internet connection is slow, or down, or you can read it out on the porch or the boat where your wifi doesn't reach, you don't need an iPad to read it...
You also can't line the bottom of a birdcage, pack dishes, wash windows, or get a fire going with an online newspaper. You also can't cut an article out to save or pin up on the fridge.
I hear people claim that once everything's set up, it's easy. That's not my experience. Every time I go home I've got to deal with issues with my mom's computer and internet. They're never her fault, and sometimes they're difficult to solve, even for a tech person.
Watching video online is great when everything goes right. But it seems like a good portion of the country has fairly lousy internet, which makes videos sputter or stop. People who grew up with the ease and reliability of tv have a hard time stomaching these kinds of problems.
Also, when you get older, you don't necessarily want more choices. Your mind is tired and cluttered, you just want to relax in front of the tv and not have to sort through an infinite array of choices or deal with technical issues.
I'd imagine they simply don't understand how these things work. I don't think my parents have ever intentionally watched a YouTube video. I'm sure they've heard of Netflix, but I don't think they know how to setup it up... so they wont even consider the value proposition... even though their Blu-ray player has built-in Netflix support.
We've grown up with this technology so it's not a big deal to rip a DVD or download a torrent.
But if you're barely aware that these things even exist, it's difficult to actually learn how to use them... even if the procedure is ultimately trivial.
Saying something doesn't make it true.
>2. If I watch TV, I do not want to be bothered about thinking what to watch. I reserve these kinds of decisions for work or for things that actually matter.
Fair point. It's the same reason I listen to pandora in that sometimes I'd rather not choose.
> 3. If another person makes the program for me, I'm likely to be exposed to interesting things that I would not have picked by myself.
Maybe but more often than not, this isn't true unless you find the massive amounts reality tv to be interesting.
But none of the reasons you describe make TV with cable optimal for anything except lying back and having random (not necessarily good or interesting) entertainment thrown at you and exposing yourself to hours of psychological marketing tricks.
Obviously this is a useful mode to have. TV channels about wildlife and history are good examples - you can turn them on even for 10 minutes while you do some chores, for example. But for "stateful" content like sports or TV series this is suboptimal. And that's the bulk of entertainment.
Because they are used to it and it works for them, so they couldn't be bothered? It's not all about "optimization" of options and full utilization of potential features, sometimes personal convenience is more important.
>Same with newspapers. You can't share newspaper content easily. You can't click on a word and Google it or look up information about Ukraine's president while reading the news paper. Newspapers take up space in your house and unread newspapers are a huge waste. I get some people like distraction free reading, without a glaring bright screen so the case here isn't as clear cut as with a TV, but the point is valid.
Not being able to "click on a word and Google it" is exactly why some people prefer newspapers. And it's exactly why some people who read the news on the web actually read 1-2 articles, skim 90% of them, and end up with cat videos somewhere on the corners of YouTube.
Also some people don't like sharing content. Why would I want to share a news item? As if I'm the purveyor of news to my un-englightened friends? Finally, "newspapers taking space in a house" is a first world problem if there ever was one. Let's be honest: nobody really considered "newspapers taking place" a real problem...
Not necessarily. The current generations of "old people" have always had TV; they have always had books, newspapers and magazines; they have always had cassettes for music (vinyl was the reserve of a rich minority and CDs weren't mainstream until the '90s). They have always had cars, trains, electricity, airplanes. They were already 30+ by the time videogames and PCs came about, which is why they left them to their kids. In fact, they saw the digital revolution happening in the workplace and were taken aback, to the point where, 30 years later, they are still not particularly comfortable with it.
The generations that saw real technological revolutions, innovations changing their way of life in radical ways, were the ones that fought the first and second World War. A lot of them didn't have home telephones or electricity while growing up, often even running water was missing; they didn't have cars, trains were expensive, and the thought of flying was just ludicrous. They bought the first radios and TVs and marveled at silent movies. Those generations could recognise change; the current oldies mostly saw marginal improvements, all considered. They spent most of their time actually dealing with social changes, rather than technological; which is why they are responding to the current wave of changes with a barrage of social prescriptions (i.e. silly new laws) -- they can see the social change happening, although they don't really understand the technological underpinnings of it.
There is a huge gap in wealth between generations thanks to debt via housing and education. Are advertisers putting pressure on program makers to make shows that appeal to old people? I'd guess they've done a lot of thinking on this.
You sound like there's a ton of incentive to make TV channels for teenagers, promote mortgage and colleges on it. Capture all the unserved audience, make $$$s. If that's where all money go in this generation.
For the former, even among people not paying at all, or not paying for it through the traditional cable company means, big-studio TV content seems more popular than ever (unsurprising since it's higher quality than ever, with still-increasing amounts of money pouring into it). This shift ultimately seems like one that will only hurt the traditional broadcast networks, as well as the cable networks that fill themselves with "passive watching" content versus the stuff that (currently, at least) plays much better in the newer distribution channels. Or maybe stuff like reality will just move online later when that demographic moves online if cable starts to fail. That's probably an area where the "it just works, and it's on, set it and forget" aspect of cable is actually a very large advantage, though. Otherwise, about the only non-large-content-library advantage of cable is that fast forward/rewind on my DVR work way better than on online streaming.
Extreme space and budget restrictions seem to be the only reason to give up the latter. The couch or recliner + TV viewing experience is hard to do without (I did it for a couple of years after moving and being short on space, and then couldn't believe I'd done it for so long after getting a TV again).
Knowing that the youngest person in the oldest half of the TV population is getting older does tell you something interesting, and slightly more specific than what the mean gives you, although I suspect mean and median are fairly close in this case.
Of course it would be nice to have mean, standard deviation, median, and maybe a few other percentiles. Better, a full histogram. But median is hardly useless.
Watching shows on the internet is great. The acting talent and quality there has really improved. But, I see this less as taking away from cable, and more as taking away from the box office. Kevin Spacey was doing great movies 10+ years ago, and now he's headlining Netflix's service. Honestly, I think these long running tv shows are a better format for a lot of actors. Breaking Bad just can not be done in a 2-3 hour movie, or in a syndicated format where each episode needs to be treated more or less independently (e.g. Law and Order). However, Netflix didn't really start that trend, cable did.
Also, cable/tv "owns" the coax cable running through the house: the fastest and most reliable way of moving information around the average US home. There's new technologies like Moca that are going to make a lot of things possible that currently are very flakey with current wireless/alt-ethernet solutions.
TV has always been (mostly) about mindless entertainment. I think the shows that are successful outside of a traditional cable package succeed because they were probably inappropriate for the cable programming format anyways. Services like Netflix are filling a new niche, but I don't think they can significantly take away the core value of cable for most people.