My fancy expensive name-brand digital TV takes a full minute to boot up from a cold start, longer than it took my tube based TV from the 1950s to warm up.
Once on, it takes almost a full second to change channels while it rebuffers the stream of the channel being changed to. This prevents quickly flipping through channels to see what is on.
As a result I just don't bother most of the time. Which is fine, I watch much less TV.
We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.
Here's a question for my fellow amateur economists: What happens to the quality of broadcast television when you increase the supply of broadcast channel-hours by a factor of 50 and you don't increase the supply of viewers at all?
I used to watch TV, like most people. Then, in the 1990's, the number of channels started increasing. More options, great. Twice as many channels did allow for more specialization, so maybe there were twice as many things I wanted to watch. When it reached four times as many channels, though, there were still only twice as many things I wanted to watch. Ten times as many channels, and now I wasn't sure if there were even twice as many as in the old days, because the budgets for the good shows were being spread among more shows to provide vehicles for more ads in all those new broadcast channel-hours.
Then, along came TiVo. Ah, TV was fun again. I could skim the cream. Couldn't imagine life without it. But as the years passed, the things I grabbed with TiVo were losing quality, too, seemingly bleeding budget to the shows "out there" that my TiVo and I ignored.
Then, my TV set broke. I assumed I'd have to get a new one quickly because, of course, everyone had to have a TV, right? I was sure I'd go crazy without it.
But I didn't. As time passed, I found I grew less motivated to get a new one, not more.
Well, after years of no TV, we finally got one a few weeks ago, so we wouldn't have to gather 'round the laptop for Netflix and slide shows of family vacations. The image is spectacular. But I can't believe what I'm so clearly seeing. They may call themselves The Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, History Channel, Food Network, Science Channel, or whatever, but they're all "Paid Programming", reality for rednecks, and pseudoscience for suckers, punctuated by screaming ads.
Even the islands of quality have clearly suffered extreme beach erosion.
But at least DVR technology has improved. Sorry, JUST KIDDING. You'd think that after years of Moore's Law, Comcast could make a cable box that didn't act as though I was waking it from a nap with each key press. You'd think that a product called an "HD DVR" would have an HD interface (wouldn't you?), instead of one with the display resolution of the lower half of a Nintendo DS. You'd think with so few needles hidden in the haystack of broadcasting, their interface would help you navigate the guide and find shows to watch, but apparently nobody at Comcast HQ has ever used Amazon to find a book.
Some validation: In the UK, the BBC has a pretty fixed budget, a pretty fixed (low) number of channels and a pretty fixed audience. They have continued to produce a high quality output of world-class educational and entertainment TV for a good chunk of the last century.
They also managed to build a free streaming service superior to Hulu, and a bunch of great websites.
It costs $230 per year ($19 per month). And there will never be any ads.
Actually the BBC had it's remit massively widened by the last government so that it had to fill sections of DAB, a large amount of Radio channels, Freeview, set up iPlayer and run a whole load of channels that aren't even targeted at the UK (such as BBC Persian), largely to meet the FCO's propaganda needs. Additionally, the dodgy dossier episode has emasculated and distorted large chunks of the BBC's programming leading to some completely bizarre side effects[1].
The BBC still does produce a large amount of quality progamming, but budgets and purposes have been affected. Top Gear for example used to be about cars but is now an entertainment show - a wildly successful entertainment show, but no longer something you'd seriously watch to get an idea of what cars to buy and what to avoid. The BBC is also responsible for the One Show, which one day will be recognised by the UN as a crime against humanity. There's also been considerable dumbing down of shows like the Apprentice and Dragon's Den over time, eschewing quality in favour of personalities and entertainment. The natural history unit still put out good documentaries, but even they're not entirely untarnished[2].
The quality of news has also suffered, particularly thanks to spin doctors in previous administrations, the simon gilligan dodgy dossier affair and other stresses on the BBC. When was the last time you saw a proper debate? The other week I saw Alastair Campbell jogging around forests, talking up the end of civilisation through alcoholic poisoning brought on by drinking at home, demanding minimum pricing as the only way out but completely ignoring the impact of the smoking ban as a factor in home drinking increases. It was a terrible attempt at a documentary and a case study in what's wrong with the BBC at the moment.
I do apologise for getting on my soap box about this, you didn't deserve it for pointing out the good stuff. Still, the BBC is not a perfect organisation and the amount of media it has to produce combined with political interference has meant that quality has dropped, perhaps not as much considering the volume of material it puts out, but it isn't immune.
You definitely make some fair points. The BBC is definitely not a perfect organisation, although most of its value comes from the fact that it is intended to strive to be one.
I'd certainly take commentary from the commercial UK press with a pinch of salt, though. They have a tremendous amount to gain from the BBC's demise.
But I don't think your second reference is really a fair criticism, and I think this was blown completely out of proportion in the UK. I certainly didn't feel that the series was "tarnished". After all, getting a camera inside an actual polar bear den in the arctic? I think that'd be somewhat invasive. Still a beautifully shot, enjoyable and educational series.
The BBC has also been responsible for all of Adam Curtis's documentaries, which are often excellent, and still get made (although the most recent one was perhaps not so good, but I digress).
Proper debate occasionally happens on Newsnight, although I think Jeremy Paxman's role has developed into some sort of entertainer of late.
They did spend a lot of time paying vast amounts to... Jonathan Ross.
About Adam Curtis: Watching, say, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" was fun. But I don't see any reason to believe that his other documentaries about subjects I know less about are any more trustworthy than that piece on computers.
I'm British, but I live in California, and I'm eagerly awaiting the day that I can pay monthly for BBC iPlayer (their streaming service). There are sketchy proxy services available, but it feels terrible to be paying a third party and effectively stealing the content.
On the other hand, they could easily provide paid service internationally but choose not to.
It's disingenuous enough when the word 'stealing' is re-purposed in discussions about copyright infringement, since it is very doubtful that every copy of a shared file resulted in an actual loss.
In this case, though, it seems easy enough to establish that the BBC has provided no way to compensate them for viewing their content from the United States. You might be "stealing" bandwidth in some sense, but I don't think it's fair to characterize the content as stolen in this case. The third party (VPN/proxy provider) is paid for network access just like you pay an ISP, not for the content itself.
"On the other hand, they could easily provide paid service internationally but choose not to."
I doubt it's easy, but they've been working on it for a while now and it should be available fairly soon.
I agree that it may not be fair to characterise the content as 'stolen'; I chose to use that term out of laziness. However, it's definitely not fair to consume the content without paying, either. It increases the financial burden on the UK license payer. Many of the BBC's shows are available to a US audience - you just have to buy them on Amazon, or stream them on Netflix.
This highlights some oddities of the UK TV licensing system. I can listen to BBC radio all day every day; I can use the BBC websites all day every day; I can watch BBC TV programmes on their iPlayer service (so long as the programmes are "catch-up" and not streamed live) and I do not need a licence.
I only need a licence if I watch tv broadcast live. Everything is defined in law; the devices used to receive (which include smart phones and computers) and the signals (which weirdly include for example French telly received via satellite). A person could hate the BBC and all its output and never watch it but still need to pay the licence fee.
Personally, I welcome the BBC but the enforcement of the licence has been sub-optimal in the past.
According to most people who follow TV closely, it's lead to a TV renaissance. Most people agree that, post-Sopranos, we've been living in a golden age of television with shows like The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, Community & Louie all being an order of magnitude better than what's gone before it. We're currently suffering from a glut of amazing television and if you haven't been paying attention, that's your fault, not TVs.
The tv shows are great, but the networks and broadcast model are broken. The whole argument about content is missing the point of the original article, which uses a clever slightly askew title to draw in readers.
I have a TV but I am not using it to watch cable broadcast. I have cable but just because it came in a stupid bundle with the internet. So the TV is there but it is used to watch Netflix, Youtube, Amazon and Hulu videos. It is used for games, skype (there is a camera attached to it), also used to browse pictures (since it has a better resolution and color profile than my laptop).
And I have noticed the same effect in respect to commercials. I cannot stand watching them and refuse to watch anything that suddenly interrupts and starts showing commercials (so I stopped using Hulu eventually as well because of it). Extended family members think I am crazy for being so "fussy" and I think they are crazy for putting up with annoying commercials.
Well in terms of economics what you're talking about is more specialization and niche audiences being served. HBO made itself into the network to watch smart television during the last decade. Right now that's less true as other networks figured out that people like smart things.
I'd say if you were not watching "The Wire" or "Six Feet Under" that you're missing out on something rather interesting. "The Wire" was unique partially because it was like a very long, very good movie in terms of quality and respect for the audience.
There's so much good television now that I don't have patience for the argument that TV is worthless. I don't turn on the television except to watch something specific but when I do I find the quality seems to get better year after year even with my favorite shows ending. More shows are willing to experiment and try to reach new audiences.
I won't speak to the shows on Discovery or whatever since they sound dumb to me but the shows with actual plot and characters are better than ever.
Going from 3 to 300 channels did not help. What really cut into their budget was a steady drop in viewership over time as new toys simply become more compelling than TV. Reality TV is simply what happened when keep cutting the budget.
PS: Seinfeld reportedly turned down a $5 million per-episode offer to continue the show for a 10th year. You can put on a full season of a reality TV show for that.
> Ten times as many channels, and now I wasn't sure if there were even twice as many as in the old days.
I dislike the fact that they make such a big deal about the number of channels available. DirectTV, for example, offers between 140 and 285 channels! Who would want to flip through that many channels?!
My dad has DirectTV. Sure, it has loads of channels. But once you subtract out all the PPV channels, the really narrow special interest channels (the marlin fishing channel) and the holy rollers there's only twenty or so you'd want to watch, depending on your interests.
You know TiVos are still around, right? I'm pretty happy with my Series 3 (lifetime subscription.) Just cloned and upgraded the hard drive in it so it should last many more years to come. Works fine with Comcast or any other cable provider--you just have to pay for them to provision cable cards. As a bonus, it also works fine with an antenna.
And this is why I groan when Samsung easily dismisses rumors that Apple is about to enter the TV space.
The UX around TVs is horrific right now, and people put up with it because that's how it is. There's enormous room for a dramatic UX improvement and it doesn't seem like the incumbents realize this.
IMO there is a strong correlation between the mobile phone landscape circa 2007 iPhone release and the television landscape today. Pretty much the same players, mostly vying for market share based on kitsch features... No true innovation.
Without having read the article I'm guessing Apple will introduce something along the lines of 'Siri TV' dispensing with the remote control as they did with the stylus but instead of substituting it with fingers we'll use another built in human control device that you don't have to lug around or keep track of, your voice. It gets around the issue of needing a keyboard where a TV is web-enabled in so far as you can easily search YouTube or Google for content by voice and it solves the dilemma of the lost or sitting on the other side of the room remote.
Siri is a game changer, but Apple's current implementation on the 4S isn't adequate. Whether it's bandwidth problems (due to bad coverage) or misunderstood commands due to noise, my experience with Siri has been mixed - it's a tough problem, but the results aren't there yet, at least for basics such as "(find|what is the|call) number of $mycityname water department". Strangely, the "speak text" feature seems to work pretty well almost anywhere... I have no problems editing contacts in the car.
I know what you are referring to, but I would say no. Not like that at all.
The ideal climate control interface should never even have to be looked at. It should just know what to do with your heating/cooling equipment to make your house comfortable.
A ideal TV interface should help you do a lot of things, and ideally be fast in the process.
(The article was down while I was writing this comment, but cable equipment and TVs drive me nuts.)
>A ideal TV interface should help you do a lot of things,
That's kind of a judgement call - there's nothing wrong with a minimal interface that does what you want it to and nothing more.
Kind of like Chrome as a browser - Google's big thing with its design was minimal and out of your way, so you can focus on the web page (the reason you're running the browser in the first place).
It's not just the UX that's broken for TVs, it's the pricing as well. Apple has strong success stories in pricing as well as UX - witness the original iPhone data plan ($20/mo for unlimited data + 200 texts from one of the top-4 providers? very good) or the iPad (both the device and initial data plan).
This is generally not an issue with your TV (unless you using an internal OTA HD tuner) but rather a poorly made cable box. Generally the cable box is responsible for channel changing, buffering for decode and other things. The stream is sent, uncompressed, to the TV over HDMI. Now your TV may be trying to do some processing on the HDMI signal but that should not effect channel changing at all as the TV isn't changing channels, its just processing a stream. If the cable box borks the stream in the process of changing channels, that is the cable box's fault.
This really stems from relative non-existent competition in the cable box industry. The consumer doesn't usually get to choose, its just whoever got the deal with Comcast or whoever.
The solution to this, which has been and will continue to be fought adamantly by cable providers, is allowing CableCARD/M-CARD support. It lets you plug in a little card that will allow any device to decode the cable stream.
Its not a full solution though, most people just don't care and the cablebox is usually 'free', why pay for something better?
I'm guessing that most of the lag is in decrypting the broadcast stream on the fly from nagra 3 or whatever the current version is. For sure in Ireland there was a big business in selling 'dodgy' boxes which could decrypt all channels when you had paid for only a basic subscription to cable. The encryption upgrade a few years ago killed all of them but made the cable boxes run as slowly as treacle when it came to epg or channel switching
Well, encryption is certainly part of the story. DVB encryption uses messages called ECMs to distribute the key that is used from the receipt of the ECM through to the receipt of the next ECM. The time between two ECMs is called the crypto period and is generally in the order of a few seconds. The average wait time to get an ECM on changing channels is of course half a crypto period.
The other major source of delay is video compression, as defined by MPEG. MPEG uses bi-directional compression in the time domain, which means that frames are sent out of order, which in turn means that they have to be buffered. Furthermore, a complete frame, known as an I frame, is only sent every 10 or so frames (it depends on the profile of the transmission channel - is it lossy or not for example). As the P and B frames are basically diffs from the base I frame, you can't decode an image until you have received an I frame. This too introduces a delay of typically 0.25 seconds, and is the reason why even unencrypted digital is slower for changing channels than analog.
>We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.
This drives me crazy. I have a computer hooked up to my TV (for the same reason as the OP, we basically watch just streaming or my digitized DVD collection) and every time I upgrade the display drivers, and sometimes just randomly, the display goes wonky and I have to fix it by hand. I don't have to do that with my computer monitor...
I think you're right, and it makes me sad. Who would prefer a distorted image over a non-distorted one, black bars or not?
The only explanation I have for this is sense of entitlement: "I paid dearly for each of these pixels so you better use all of them, no matter how bad the picture looks like!"
For the latter issue (and possibly slightly helping the first issue as well), switch your TV to 'game' mode. This is a low-latency mode that eliminates certain image processing in order to reduce the lag between signal and display. That should allow you to change channels faster.
No, it won't. Game mode reduces latency on the order of 2-3 frames, so a 0.1sec or less. The issue is that the tuner has to consume a complete data frame before it can start displaying, since it needs to get a keyframe for the codec to start working.
Hmm, I think I may have noticed that issue switching between HD channels at times, but SD channels maybe don't have the same issue?
I guess the time before a key frame appears can vary from up to a second to as low as 0, depending on when you happen to switch. It could be that a few frames, or 0.1 seconds becomes significant at that point, though you're right that it's likely to make little difference. I was not aware of the key frame issue until now, though; thanks for enlightening.
Basically the way modern video codecs work is that they only fully encode every Nth frame, where N is some smallish integer - 15 or 30 is common. From one keyframe to the next, they essentially encode a diff from the prior frame. The idea is that most of the regions of the frame have very little change over short timescales.
It's a tradeoff. More keyframes means faster seeking (when you seek in a video, it has to start from a keyframe too, for the same reasons), but larger data rates for the same image quality.
>have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.
For HDMI connections, this isn't the TV's fault (actually I think my TV doesn't even let you change the aspect ratio for HDMI inputs.) For SD component/composite, there is no aspect ratio information in the signal so the TV cannot determine it correctly and generally defaults to assuming 16:9 because most people stupidly prefer 4:3 content to be stretched to 16:9.
I'm not really sure what your trying to say but the stream is decompressed at the cable box or at the the over the air HD receiver.
HDMI 1.3 and 1.4 support up to 10.2Gb/sec bandwidth. The video is not compressed, the audio may or may not be. So why would you think that there isn't 720p x 60fps being sent to the tv?
The max video you can get through HDMI is 4096×2160p24 @ 24bit color completely uncompressed which is several times the bandwidth needed for 1280x720p60 @ 24bit color.
So your argument is that compression doesn't exist? Do you also listen to 128kb WAV files and argue that they are equivalent to 128kb MP3s?
> Why people think they can see full 720p worth of information is beyond me.
From a distance of about 8 feet on a TV about 50 inches in size, the difference between 720p and 1080p is visible to a person with 20/20 vision. The eye cannot perceive 720p worth of pixels at once, but in the small spot the center of a person's vision is on, pixel density matters a lot.
My fancy expensive name-brand digital TV takes a full minute to boot up from a cold start, longer than it took my tube based TV from the 1950s to warm up.
Once on, it takes almost a full second to change channels while it rebuffers the stream of the channel being changed to. This prevents quickly flipping through channels to see what is on.
As a result I just don't bother most of the time. Which is fine, I watch much less TV.
We won't even get into how 720 screens don't really have 720 display pixels so even perfect size matches are resampled and interpolated, or how often I find I have to manually change the aspect ratio because it wasn't able to figure it out on its own.