Let network programming die off.
The networks would never have developed great shows like "The Sopranos," "The Wire," "Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men."
This year I've visited numerous platforms to watch "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," "Carpool Karaoke," "Bojack Horsemen," "Killing Eve," "Fleabag," "Insecure," "Billions," "The Handmaid's Tale," "Ray Donovan," "The Americans," "Chernobyl" and the year's best show "Succession."
When the networks can match those shows maybe I'll go back. I'm betting that'll never happen. Networks must contend w/middlebrow sensibilities of a mass audience & commercial sponsors. Not to mention people want to schedule when & how to watch tv now.
When I was sick recently I binge watched 16 episodes of "The Kominsky Method," followed by more "Bojack Horseman." Binge watching shows is a gift. Nobody wants to watch tv on the schedule networks impose.
I watch news on MSNBC & CNN. I haven't watched network news in 15 years. I try to read 2 -3 newspapers a day so I know more than what's on cable news. I recently watched the ABC Evening News for a week while visiting my 90 yr old mother & was aghast at their coverage which focused obsessively on weather events, crime & "feel good" pablum. It wasn't as numbing as watching Fox News but it was bad. I remember when CBS news & Cronkite were gold. Those days are gone.
I still try to watch "60 Minutes" & SNL when someone good is hosting.
But for me, the networks are toast.
8
The problem is that there is too much programming. We need something like the TV Guide to sort through this deluge of shows. The internet is all over the place to find any meaningful list.
28
By the time I look at my options, watch a trailer or two, I have no tome left to watch.
5
My family doesn't watch TV anymore (and no streaming either). At some point in my life I got the feeling that I have already seen everything, multiple times. There is the rare exception of a great movie every couple years, but that's it for me. Sitting for hours in front of a flickering rectangle became a waste of precious time. The days are so short. I prefer to live and enjoy my own life, instead of watching other people living theirs.
39
That's the thing about technology: it's always vulnerable to newer, disruptive technology.
@Andre - I heartily agree. Haven't had TV for most of my adult life and the last shows I recall watching were Moonlighting and Thirtysomething. I'm still perplexed that newspapers write about television shows.
4
The problem for me with things like HBO or streaming services is the monthly subscription rates. I've subscribed to Netflix for a long time, but HBO would be another $20 CDN a month, and each of the streaming services other than Netflix would each increase my monthly bills if I subscribed to them. As a senior on a (low) fixed income, I just can't afford them all.
34
@Karla Decker
Thank you for this comment. The article treats all these new "services" as though they were free. They're not, of course. Suppose one service has one show that you like. Do you sign up for it, and ignore the rest of its junk? That's expensive. Suppose your show moves to a different service. You then have to switch services. Suppose you want to watch one show from each of two services. That's two to sign up for.
Consumers have been asking to pay for only the shows we want to watch for decades, and we never get it!
33
@akamai You can do this now, with pay per view services like iTunes. You pay a premium to just zap right to what you like and ignore the rest, but it might be more cost-effective for those with targetted tastes who don't watch a lot of stuff.
And there's always DVDs. I never gave up my Netflix DVD account. I don't need to subscribe to HBO to watch Chernobyl. Netflix just sent me the first DVD.
And don't forget public libraries. They have great DVD collections and also they're represented in streaming by Kanopy (good for classic and foreign movies, and documentaries) and Hoopla (good for British imports and sometimes gets surprisingly recent mainstream American shows).
21
@Karla Decker Churn around the services, subscribing and cancelling sequentially. I get Netflix and Amazon Prime now. Netflix is $9 at the cheapest rate and well I'd be getting Prime anyway for shipping.
I keep meaning to check out CBS All Access and soon I'll be meaning to check out Disney+ and Hulu and HBO Max and maybe Apple+ if they ever manage to make anything good. But Netflix and Prime keep me too busy. When that slacks off, I can cancel one and check out another.
8
You used the word "fragmented" only in passing, but I think that fragmentation of TV has a strong impact on the country. Back in the day, there were only four options in most places: NBC, CBS. ABC, and PBS. Everything over the air.
Today we have endless options: hundreds of cable or satellite channels, On Demand viewing of old programs using those services, and a growing number of streaming services. While "old" TV often brought the country together, today that effect is gone, buried in a flood of choices and commentary.
How many people do you think would watch JFK's funeral, the first moon landing, or the last episode of M*A*S*H today? My guess: far fewer than watched them at the time, even though the country's population is much greater.
For a long time, broadcast TV, for better or for worse, served a unifying role for the country in both good and bad ways. It perpetuated racism and second-class status for women, but also strengthened public opposition to the Vietnam War, and brought Sesame Street to the world. Top-rated shows drew huge percentages of the viewing public - Roots or The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show - and affected our national culture in ways that are inconceivable today.
Countries and cultures are perpetuated because their people share ideas and values, which are shaped in part by mass communications. It's not clear how the changes in TV watching habits may affect these key principles.
74
@Bluevoter
There's also the case that while broadcast tv showed JFK's funeral, the moon landing and MASH, all those things were decades ago and those choices were determined by behemoth broadcast networks that are much less civic-minded than they were decades ago. The news divisions and regular coverage are more determined by financial considerations than they were 30, 40 or 50 yrs ago.
6
Commercials are totally out of control. And I'm not even talking about those annoying ad's at the bottom of your screen. I'm old enough to remember when the charge for cable TV was justified by not having income from commercials. Look when we are now.
The frequency of the ad's, at this rate of expansion, will shortly end up with more screen time than the actual show people watch.
I will use whatever medium that allows me to silence these ad's, minimize their allowed time, or stop them completely.
97
@wfisher1 I'm 72 years old. Finally a "me to" moment I can identify with. As a life-long baseball fan (Red Sox), the nightmare of routine 4-hour World Series games with one hour of commercial breaks, plus pop-up ads during play, is easily cured. See ya, MLB (and I don't mean that literally).
8
@wfisher1 One more time for the people in the back.
As an entertainment consumer, ads during a show are a non-starter.
If I watch a hour of TV every night during the week, that equals roughly 23 hours. I can either pay Netflix $16 for those 23 hours, or I pay YoutubeTV $50 for those 17.25 hours. (15 minutes of commercials, 23 times).
Who is subsidizing who?
2
@wfisher1 I bailed on broadcast and cable years ago and ads were intolerable then. They must be beyond belief by now. As the audience continues to flee ads, they just shove more ads at whoever remains in a desperate attempt to make up the difference.
8
The enemy of what used to be called television which became cable and is now streaming is advertising. As a consumer, I will do and pay whatever is necessary not to see the mindless annoying repetitive drivel of commercials.
2
Live ratings are still ok for hit shows like Late Show with Colbert, Mom, Young Sheldon, 60 Minutes, The Voice, even The Walking Dead still gets some live viewers. I wouldn't gripe about the quality of shows like Superstore or The Good Place. Everybody knows Sunday night on HBO is still a big deal. As for commercials, again try watching The Late Show live you know with a channel changer (don't take "no flipping" so seriously).
Less is more.It's about quality over quantity. Choice is always good. To allow the viewer to watch what they what when they what is important.And not to be spoon fed what the networks want you to see. For me it's also about watching something commercial free. It's how the creators of movies,shows intended their ideas to be seen. I dropped my cable subscription years ago and have never been happier. My quality time is important. And, for me streaming is the answer.
1
Yes it's all structures of various conditionings, like school being pegged to the factory 9-5 workweek, & weekends to the religious Sabbath etc etc etc but now that we're freed of such structures there's the further overarching structural conditioning of I want what I want when I want it, as much as I want without limit, still in the "shop til you drop" consumerist worldview!
I remember when I was very young - 12ish - I would get so excited waiting for the new season. (This was the time of 4 channels, no cable, internet, etc. Yes, kids, there was such a time.)
I would eagerly await the issue of TV Guide that profiled the new shows. Ah, what a time!
On an unrelated note, a gripe I've had with the awards is that no show should get an award if it's not on basic cable. I mean sure, it's going to be on some cable channel, but no pay service. If there is a chance that some people won't get a chance to watch the nominated show without spending more money, then why nominate it? This will also force producers to work with more constraints that they wouldn't have on pay TV. Imagine, having to be more creative! That's a win-win in my TV Guide.
1
Maybe TV will disappear.
1
This is really a generational thing...why are the NCIS's and their ilk still so popular, because viewers 50+ all watch these shows and I don't expect that to change -- the last few years, there has been less investment in 'pilot' season and I expect that will continue, as it is hard to launch a new project on the networks, especially when celebs would rather be on HBO or Netflix (maybe now Apple).....come up with a novel idea, play it for 13 weeks and move on --
1
How ironic to read all the complaints regarding the incessant and interminable commercials on TV --
But there's one ad campaign which stands out above the rest --
It's for one of the (many) auto-insurance companies - and its ads run on just about every station --
The message of the ad - which is so appropos of this article is --
"Pay for only what you need" --
I don't see myself "needing" HBO or Disney Plus -- especially when I can watch reruns of "M*A*S*H" - "Have Gun, Will Travel" - and "The Flintstones" for free...
Oh, streaming is changing more than just the culture of the medium. Like most of my friends, I'm freelance / self-employed (don't work Mon-Fri 9-5). And I use nothing but streaming services, no network or cable (so I needn't keep track of when "my show" is coming on). These combined have led me and most people I know to pretty much lose track of what day it is at any given time. (Today is Friday, right? I had to stop and think about it.) People used to have their lives and brains ruled by the clock, but not any longer. Call it the TiVolution of the species.
4
At the end of Just Call Saul they had credits for Mexican, French, Brazilian, British, German, Spain, Norway, and other language releases. That means that most American shows are now shown overseas for even more fees. Was a time when all US programming stayed here. Now it is global, yet how many British movies, TV shows and other countries do you see translated with subtitles here? Where is free enterprise in media broadcasting? NO COMPETITION. Yet let China, Viet Nam, or some poor third world country copy and sell their country's films here at flea markets and they call out the FEDS! I remember many being busted for contraband 8 tracks, CDs, and tee shirts with sports teams. It is illegal to make and sell copies of American releases but it should be an open market for subtitled foreign releases. We lack a lot of great foreign films and TV. Be fair and bring it on.
I have Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. More often than not, I am overwhelmed by all the choices and end up watching nothing.
11
The “Network” model (ABC, CBS, NBC, etc.) has been dead for a number years.
Nobody at the networks wanted to declare it to be dead but it’s death has been confirmed by the number of streaming competitors.
In addition the “Network’s” advertising model doesn’t work and is not sustainable.
Who watches the commercials?
Everyone records (or pauses the program) and fast forwards through the commercials.
Why are the advertisers still paying to place their commercials on the Networks archaic distribution model.
3
@Carl If you see one frame of something that interests you as you fast forward and go back to view that ad then it has served it's purpose.
Wow! So now we get to pay for subscriptions for a few shows on networks we would never have watched as well as reruns we use to see for free on cable all so we can view them when we want to. Pay to see Marvel and Star Wars stuff on Disney, Succession and movies on HBO, as well as Apple, Amazon, CBS, ABC, etc and on and on it goes. Everybody who's anybody wants mucho deniro for less original programming than what cable gave us when we only had black and white and three channels to choose from with clean humor and less gore. And if it doesn't suit you just throw your hands up in the air and tuck your card away. Save your ever decreasing devalued dollars for things that really matter like medical insurance and retirement and to heck with that new Iphone and costly gigabyte plans. Things never change. Someone laughs all the way to the bank, someone cries all the way to the poor house. PRIORITIES PEOPLE! Don't get caught up in the fantasy world that Big Media has created to separate you from your paycheck. Choose wisely.
3
To think that cable gives you any shows, even reruns, for free is the great fallacy exposed by today’s plethora of subscription content providers. The shows on cable networks have never been complimentary. They’ve just been like the BK Whopper Value Meal — a bundle of menu items for a single price. We’ve tended to think of cable as a mere delivery vehicle — akin to a utility like Duke or Vectren, because Comcast/Xfinity, Cox Communications, et. al., do not create their own content; they contract with both the major and minor networks (those we call “cable channels”) for the use of their programming.
Yet another example of a generational change that will give me pause to say, ”God, I'm old.”
Now we live in an age where HBO feels free to produce challenging shows like The Watchmen, and the right wing trolls can review bomb the show.
Progress?
1
No one seems to talk about how *not* user-friendly streaming is at this time for a huge population who watches a great deal of television: the elderly.
Streaming— even with a smart TV— requires way too much selection and button-pressing for a population used to turning the set on, flipping the channel and watching. I find that just trying to watch a football game is daunting with the half dozen subscriptions I need to juggle.
I hate the way enormous sections of the population get utterly ignored in the rush for the next best thing.
11
@Claudia U. Don't worry, traditional cable isn't going away anytime soon. The cable companies are happy to extort as much as possible out of the elderly because they know they won't try anything new. My parents still pay $285 a month for cable and internet because my mother refuses to try anything new.
The idea of a "Fall TV Season" is an oxymoron, just as the idea of "TV GUIDE" magazine. Has been for at least 5 years now.
No one watches shows as they air anymore.
1
Great and poignant article. I'm 32 and grew up with TV as a cultural staple - Saturday morning cartoons, TGIF sitcoms, the golden era of Nickelodeon kids' TV, the rise and peak of the WB teen drama, NBC Thursdays, and of course the much-written-about Golden Age of prestige cable drama. The sense of cultural community was hard to beat.
Sad to think that it's all coming to a close with the end of the last watercooler show (Game of Thrones) and the rise of a la carte streaming apps. It's just not the same.
6
As a parent of an 18- and a 21-year-old, I think TV as we knew it is already almost over.
3
If there ever was "a whole culture" that cries out for changing, TV is it. Especially if that "culture" includes the violence, inanity and creative vacuum that largely represents it.
3
We have just about stopped watching TV - subscription rates for the streaming services are high, just one isn't enough, network programming is increasingly dull, and we have rediscovered books and hobbies as a substitute - sometimes even chatting with each other.
28
TV adds are losing a lot of people. Especially if you can record the program and watch at another time and fast forward through the endless ads.
When I was a kid, I could go to the movies see a double feature along with some short programs (three stooges) and all I had to suffer were a few coming attractions. Now it’s 20 minutes of commercials, endless coming attractions and only one movie! Not even a cartoon in between.
I stopped going to the movies a long time ago. The same is happening to interruption filled network TV.
14
Fragmenting the audience has been written about as a threat for years now for every medium and especially tv. At least the author states that “it could be last night” at any time so perhaps he is realizing it’s not as big a deal as it’s been made out to be. And more representative shows are a good thing.
Interesting how music and tv delivery have almost perfectly reversed. Today you get a stream of songs at any time but that may or may not include one you asked for excepting Spotify or a direct Google search. Which is kind of how tv channels would serve up nights of shows. And today streaming tv serves up your show immediately like you used to play music so as the author says making each individual Netflix different.
It also sounds like the author is trying to say streaming services with their vaults are becoming like the web’s long tail but doesn’t quite get there.
My long term concern is how the services are coalescing into a few but that sort of shakeout will continue to occur until we change our flavor of politically influential capitalism.
2
I fear that streaming will take the same path the networks did and become more exclusive as they promote only their own. Thus making it more expensive for those of us who chose to cut the cord (cable) some time ago due to the expense and lack of choices.
9
@Vicki My bet is, the bubble bursts and just four or so of these services survive to grow into global behemoths that gobble up anything good from the losers (Star Trek from CBS All Access for example - somebody's going to be making Star Treks indefinitely but it might be Amazon).
My winner's circle is Netflix and Amazon, since they were out first and are already global; and Disney+Hulu (as a single entity when Disney absorbs Hulu fully) and HBO Max, since they have the big brands as this article points out. And maybe Apple+ depending on how stubborn Tim Cook is about playing movie mogul but based on what I've seen from them so far, they have a lot to learn in this field.
All these services will show only their own stuff since the sources for licensable content will dry up. Anyone who survives in entertainment production will do so by having a successful global streaming service. Independent producers will have to do exclusive deals with one service to get access to the audience at all.
2
This is a bubble. It will burst. The major networks would be wise to create real content in the meanwhile, like they used to the old days, to compete until it does. There are tons of properties between the three really, that could be first run as as multi-night movie event miniseries, before immediately being sold for bingeing and second runs.
2
@Thomas Corbett Streaming is a bubble, it will burst and leave maybe four survivors, but broadcast is over for good. It will wither into just cheap garbage like reality TV. Too much of the young audience the advertisers want to reach have fled for streaming and social media. The economic logic of broadcast has been destroyed and won't be returning.
2
The Networks are over. I rarely watch them other than PBS. Streaming is the only way to watch TV, though Netflix is producing so many flops it is uncanny. If Netflix allowed us to pay for some extras like Amazon, perhaps it would do better; however, I am fed up tuning into a Netflix flic only to find it in another language. I immediately give it a thumbs down and stop watching. Netflix should tell us when we are going to watch a foreign film. Otherwise, streaming is a great alternative to the Networks which can't even bring good Evening News to us anymore.
4
@Philip W
I only watch Jeopardy, old M.A.S.H. episodes, and some PBS.
Reading is so much more interesting than "moving pictures" these days
3
I understand the unease, but ultimately... how is the new streaming era any different from a public library (that costs)? We all stop by and read something different. Nonetheless a community builds around that shared activity. Similarly, shows will continue to bring us together even as we enjoy them separately, at our own pace, in our way, in our own sweatpants and living-room miasma/gloom.
5
@Lex We can stream the public library anyway. Kanopy and Hoopla. I recommend both!
PayTV’ via cable—-we’re told that means great reception and if you’re paying to watch TV there’s won’t be commercials. Not true. Now we have 24-hr commercial stations and within any one-hour program perhaps 32 min of actual event time.
Pay Radio—-means great reception and complete control of your listening pleasure. Even the holdouts are considering switching because previously cystal clear FM reception has been mysteriously and progressively deteriorating.
1
I love streaming TV for many reasons, one of the strongest being the lack of commercial interruptions. You can binge 3, 5, or a whole season of a streaming series without commercials. This was the first thing that hooked me on Netflix. Obviously pay networks such as HBO , SHOWTIME, STARZ, etc are also doing this, in the weekly episode model, but the invention that made network TV at all palatable, was the DVR. I could watch great shows like The Americans over the network because it was on the DVR and the commercials were quickly bypassed.
Now it has happened that some streaming services like CBS all Access, stream their shows with commercials and can’t be recorded on the DVR, some services like Hulu, have a more expensive price for “commercial free” streaming. Will a device that can record streaming shows be in the future, or already exist? Are cable providers working on something this to make up the loss of money when their DVR customers leave? Just wondering.
2
This all seems like ancient history to me. I bailed on cable years ago and broadcast went with it, mainly due to lack of interest, and each year broadcast gets worse and worse.
I don't much worry about stuff I can't find on Netflix or Amazon. Maybe I'll check out Disney+ or HBO Max sometime, but I'm perfectly happy for cable and broadcast to go bye bye.
If any of the streamers who take over from broadcast and cable want to generate more water cooler discussion, they could easily and cheaply create chat forums for shows within their own apps. Then fans of say Bojack Horseman can happily chatter with other fans, from all over the world. Might require some help from Google translate, but that can't be hard. Imagine how much fun it would be. Why don't Netflix and Amazon do that now?
2
It seems the author is more decrying the loss of in-person interaction in favor of the rise of electronic (social media) interaction. In the days of the “must see TV” event, we did talk about that around the water cooler on Monday. Today however, that water cooler is likely collecting dust as the workplace hotel desk has replaced the cubicle which replaced the office long ago. Human interactions and shared experiences in the real world are rapidly disappearing in the traditional sense.
In many ways, the bingable TV space could be seen as more a reaction to the social media world as opposed to leading it. If one figures that across the entire country, there will always be some community of people that binged a given show last weekend, social media lets them connect. In todays world, social media connections with zero distance cost are becoming more the norm. With a larger pool (the world) of people joining together with their social interests, this shift may not be surprising.
Decades ago, we mourned the loss of prominence in the written word. People cared less about this, perhaps because reaching out via long distance at five cents a minute (or free) made letters an anachronism. Now we are facing (no pun intended), the loss of much of in person interaction, along with the nuance of facial expression, tone and pace of dialog. This new world has great potential for widespread community, but will perhaps change our idea of what community is.
2
@Peter Smode I've substituted water cooler chatting with visits to sites like darkhorizons that have a lively and fun audience and a nice interface (been driven away from some sites due to mere changes of the interface that make discussions too annoying to follow). I just make sure I've seen the whole current season before joining the chats.
I'm a fan (and big consumer) of streaming TV, and would never want to revert to "the old days" in which I grew up. I can't abide commercials, and I like starting to watch a show at 9:17 if that's when the mood strikes. But I think our current model of TV viewing -- in which even friends who watch the same shows may view them over such different time-frames that they never actually converse about them -- is contributing in to the further fragmentation of our culture.
I was a young teenager during the Watergate era. The love/hate divide for Nixon resembled today's love/hate for Trump -- everyone is firmly on one side or the other, and just about nobody is apathetic or in the middle. But somehow, people got along better back then.
And as trite or improbable as it may sound, I think it's because despite divided politics, certain elements of our culture resonated with ALL of us. Even if the live-broadcast hearings that monopolized the political conversation had us at odds with our neighbors, we still all agreed that Saturday's episode of The Mary Tyler Moore show was remarkable. TV provided a medicinal common ground.
Mr. Poniewozik is correct that TV is "the nervous system through which our culture sends signals to itself" -- and right now, the country is not sharing a single nervous system.
37
We are seeing an increasingly fragmented society. It is possible to live within a very small world now - avoiding exposure to anything out of the bubble you have created.
Growing up in the 50's and 60's everyone watched the same limited number of television channels. You could choose from a limited number of news shows but they all covered the news far better than what we have now. Your whole family watched entertainment shows - together in one room. You watched the movies and cartoons your parents saw before there was television. Old content once seen in theaters was replayed on television. There were underlying currents to many of these shows. Westerns usually had a 'good vs. bad theme with most people working hard to simply get by. 'War' movies were propaganda when made - and still were years later. Television helped provide 'cultural commonality' - a shared point of view.
It now does the opposite.
Today it seems that most viewing is individual. While there are televisions is everyone's bedroom, most viewing seems to be online. People are attracted to specific content - and can live without ever seeing anything outside their bubble of interest.
Instead of expanding one's horizons, exposing you to things you might never have been aware of 'television' is evolving to a medium which allows people to withdraw from a larger world and stay safely surrounded by the familiar.
28
@cynicalskeptic
Growing up I watched a lot of shows I would never watch today.
There are now so many choices it gets overwhelming.
4
Remember that we are talking about broadcast TV, which is not disappearing anytime soon, and in the age of cord-cutting is enjoying something of a rediscovery, since it is free to watch. The fall TV season is an ingrained part of the broadcast television business cycle, and truthfully has not had much of a reason to exist for about twenty years (if it ever did). If it hasn't gone away yet, it probably won't anytime soon.
That said, a big threat is the increasing amount of commercials. An "hour" TV episode is only 41-42 minutes, and a half hour sitcom is now only 19 minutes of actual show. Most of us will find a way to eliminate the fat and just get the meat. The ability to watch TV without commercials (or at least buzz through them) has been with us since the VCR was invented. Streaming is a more recent addition, but it only offers more options - if there is a show people want to watch, they will watch it.
What may disappear (and we are already seeing a trend toward this) are full 22 or 24 episode seasons. Most new shows start with only a 10 to 13 show buy, and it's only if the show has any potential following that they get a full season pickup. Additionally, we are seeing more and more series starting end ending in the summer months - what in years past was a wasteland of reruns or worse yet, failed pilots.
5
@IMP Even so called "news" shows, like Lester Hunt on NBC. The show is 30 minutes, but I would guess it's really close to only 15 minutes because of the endless commercials. I always watch TV with my laptop on my lap. Every time they go to commercial, I read another article on the computer. I can just stop reading anywhere, and go back to the news when the commercial is over.
5
@IMP Broadcast has lost too much of the young audience advertisers want, for it to survive in the same form. It'll devolve into cheap formats like reality TV. The likes of Disney and AT&T will focus on quality productions for streaming.
@IMP mute button - great invention.
This is what I want to know. We know Netflix is debt financing, as are the rest but Amazon is cash rich. If they're all using Wall Street verticals as their model, and if Wall Street has demonstrated some hyper wrong doing that underscores a lot of wrong with now, how likely is it for investigative features that expose Wall Street's titanic wrongdoing? There's only so much Robert Redford high ground while the Sundance Film Festival supposedly celebrates independence while dancing to the tune of Chase. Yea, but as long as we have Trump to be horrified by, why bother asking the question, right?
1
Excellent piece. Many insights. Deep thinking with crisp writing — pleasure to read.
11
By not including YouTube in this article, you are completely missing where TV is going in the future. Today's kids watch YouTube constantly and even value that over traditionally produced TV shows. My 7 year old son has no concept of live TV and prefers YouTube over most traditional TV shows (except for a couple shows on Netflix.) Much TV watching is also a personal experience for this generation, being watched on tablets and intertwined with playing video games. Ask any parent of an elementary aged child and you will hear much the same thing.
14
@Amy And the social interaction with YouTube is sharing funny videos. Plus there are comments sections on YouTube. Often idiotic and obscene, but they exist.
So why don't Netflix and Amazon (and Apple and Disney) take advantage of social interaction with their own sharing/chatting features for subscribers? They could implement some controls to keep the nonsense to a minimum. Seems like a huge lost opportunity. Nobody chats around a watercooler but everyone is glued to their phones. That's the watercooler.
Same kind of thing happened with newspapers a while ago. First the print news went to color, then you had USA Today's TV-shaped newspaper racks, which got some criticism but showed that at least an unconscious level they had an inkling of what was coming.
The internet offers us screens with endless entertainment and news any time, but it also flattens it and makes it much harder to determine what's actually important. And as much as it invades privacy, it also makes it possible for us to focus narrowly only on what we want to see (or in the case of targeted marketing, what an algorithm thinks we want to see).
The potential for fragmentation, isolation and polarization is abundant and often realized. Just the opposite of what the creators in the Internet originally envisioned.
20
@John
The creators of the internet lacked foresight
This article is missing the central reason why the shift is on to streaming: programmatic advertising. No more "spray and pray" marketing dollars wasted when, as the writer accurately describes, there are bespoke viewing experiences and advertisers can now reach all those individual demos, at scale. It's a complete sea change.
5
"...unless a given show has no deal with a streaming service, in which case it might as well never have existed..."
Please somebody: offer thirtysomething
4
@leilah
Also Homicide Life on the Streets and bring back Crossing Jordan.
1
@leilah
You can watch some episodes for free on YouTube.
Does this also mean the end of the Upfronts, the May network presentations in New York to advertisers and the media?
1
It’s not just politics that is disuniting us today. Once upon a time, millions of Americans all sat down at the same time and day in the evening to watch the very same tv program...this brought us together! Now no more, except for the Superbowl.
13
And yet the stories it told were, for the most part, limited to the lives of white people.
1
Where will all the "quality' content come from?
7
@kjd There are abundant programs on Netflix (Unbelievable), Amazon Prime (Mrs. Maisel), Hulu (The Handmaid's Tale) to simply name three, that are of so much higher quality than pretty much anything produced by the big networks for many years.
13
@kjd : Specialized streaming services, such as Acorn and BritBox or MHz Choice and the Criterion Channel, even Amazon Prime, are bringing us some of the finest movies and TV from around the world.
I don't have time to watch all the intelligent choices that are available today.
4
@Pdxtran
Shudder and Gaia are two others that come to mind.
"The industry's so new, they haven't shaken off all the idiots yet".
That's a friend of mine said about the burgeoning PC industry in 1989.
Yet, his adage applies to all sorts of domains whenever there is a cultural sea change due to technological changes... There is always a plethora of new and/or local upstarts with new ideas and, eventually, the market either kills them off or they get bought by the bigger fish and, Borg-like, assimilated into their nation- or world-straddling portfolios.
Think of the automobile industry, the movie industry, the telephone and cell phone industries, the broadcast industries, the
Dot Coms... All began wild west fashion only to leave with a few remaining gunslingers.
Regarding the changes in television, we are in that same early wild west state. History will eventually repeat itself and we will have a few major players. The current reality of literally a dozen or more different streaming subscriptions to get everything you want is untenable. The "cord cutters" would be spending more than when still hooked-up to the cord.
That said, something different may occur within 20-30 years. It may be that Congress intervenes and forces deverticalization with content providers prohibited from being broadcasters and vice versa. It is reminiscent of what happened in early aviation when Boeing made planes, engines (now UTC P&W), and had its own airline (now United).
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Hope that someone from Netflix is reading these. They need to gain an understanding of the concept of too much choice equals no choice. I find myself turning to Netflix and increasingly turning away. Too much stuff, in too many categories and when you try to control and keep track of what you’re watching with My List and Continue Watching categories there seems to be no way to edit and manage those lists. Absolute worst and the thing that most drives me away is when any program I’m thinking of watching starts playing on it’s own before I can make my own decision. Absolutely turns me off and makes me think of canceling. I hope it’s not a preview of the brave new world of television.
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@Christopher Just wanted to let you know that you can edit both of those lists. Just Google it and you will find instructions. That's how I figured it out because like you it was driving me crazy to have my "Continue Watching" queue muddled up with stuff I didn't want to watch.
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Good news: You can control “My List” on Netflix. It’s really a godsend! You need a PC or Mac for this. Go to your Netflix Account settings. Go to Order in My List. Make sure it’s marked Manual Ordering. Now go to Netflix.com. Click My List (it’s toward the top of the screen). It shows your whole list in a list format. You can manually change the order.
In general I keep lists on my phone of ongoing shows to stay organized. I don’t even think of going into the Netflix app until I have already decided what to watch. Their site is simply too overwhelming and distracting.
Hope that helps!
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@Christopher
Once upon a time Neflix on demand was an interesting place with a thoughtful UI that really catered to people interested in watching movies.
Over time it has all changed, the UI has been dumbed down to the most idiotic level. Movies make up an ever shrinking portion of available viewing items. If their movie suggestion algorithm actually worked, I would have about twenty items from which to choose instead of scrolling through endless icons of drek.
Btw, if you really want to watch quality movies, try Kanopy. Between my wife's account and my own, we can reliably watch 10 movies worth investing our time.
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I miss the days when we had must-watch TV and you couldn’t wait until summer was over to watch the new fall episodes. But that was long ago and binge watching is the new norm that I just cannot get used to. Plus, the quality of some of these shows is dismal. Although I did like Stranger Things.
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It was interesting to see how few new shows aired on the networks and the rating were terrible. I actually watched more network shows since Netflix has been off its game the last few months. I think the biggest problem is for advertisers since they are marginalized by all the add free content.
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I can't help thinking about the elderly in nursing homes, low-income rural, and everyone else who can't afford or doesn't have access to streaming or OTA with antenna due to location.
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@Anne Hajduk Have we really reached a point in our culture where we fear that this is such a horrible deprivation?
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@Anne Hajduk
I can't get OTA with antenna due to location. I cut the cord more than ten years ago and quit cable. Now I feel like cutting the cord on Netflix. I don't watch that much tv. Maybe two or three hours a week.
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As a child of the 70s who grew up with TV as my one true friend, the one thing i could always count on to entertain me, my one true love. TV has changed over the years., there is more of it, but of a lesser quality. The first big change was when the networks totally gave up on Saturdays. Saturdays, the night when i use to watch Archie Bunker and Mary Richards, that night slowly over the years dissolved into nothingness, but there was a good lesson to learn from it. The lesson was: I could get along fine without TV, especially now in this new brave age of Youtube, and the internet. In many ways the Televison networks proved how unnecessary they are when there are a million paths to entertainment and a whole entertainment system lies in the smartphone in the palm of your hand. Disney can create its own channel, Apple too, who cares, in the end the truth is, the TV networks need us a whole lot more than we need them. And if all these people think we are going to spend a whole paycheck to see a thousand different channels, they have big surprise coming.
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@Lonnie
500 channels...no, 5000 channels, no, five million...
And yet: nothing on.
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@Lonnie
What will it cost to subscribe to all the streaming services? How will I access the internet? Through a cable provider? How will a digitally illiterate old goat like me figure it all out? I don't even use Facebook.
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A few years ago I bought a simple over-the-air HD antenna just to see how it would work. I was amazed at the picture quality, it enabled me to watch all my local channels and a bunch of other channels I may, or may not, ever watch. But that opened the door to cut the cable and go with streaming services plus the free over-the-air network TV and I'm glad I did. Streaming services are cheap, you can cancel anytime, watch what you want when you want, and all you need is internet service. My cable setup was costing me over $200/mo, although new customers get great deals, the longer you stay with them, the more they charge.I know many people are doing the same thing, you wonder how long cable/dish services will be profitable as more people make the transition away from them. Yes, there are some shows and sports that I miss watching on cable but I can live without them.
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Interesting piece, but it's sort of 2003, isn't it? We've been talking about time-shifting, the end of appointment TV, and the demise of shared media experiences since DVRs became popular—and the return of the AOL-style walled garden throughout the Age of Netflix. It's been great for television creativity, not so great for society. And at the moment, it's starting to present a problem for consumer pocketbooks. One small example: I was shocked last week to hear a TV writer, a friend of mine, say he was still on Season 1 of the Good Place and had somehow managed to avoid hearing about the big twist in the final episode. This guy works in TV for a living! If that's not media fragmentation, I don't know what is. (And no, I didn't spoil it for him.)
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This will mean the end of Oatmeal television, where conservative Christians tell us what we can’t watch or hear. I look forward to seeing more and positive transgender, gay, bisexual and lesbian characters of a variety of cultures and races. The writers should feel free to include people with physical and mental challenges, and a wide variety of appearances.
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I pretty much quit watching network TV 4 years ago. I've been streaming everything and 99% of what I watch are kdramas with English subtitles. It started when I enjoyed watching Netflix shows because I could watch as many episodes as I wanted in a single sitting.
Thanks to a Netflix recommendation, I watched a 24 episode mini-series that Netflix called The Great Doctor. It's a time-travel fantasy with both history and romance. Both captured me, so I started by researching the history, the drama, and the actors, and ended by discovering that all of the evening dramas on Korean television are mini-series like the one I had watched. Their variety shows go on and on for years, but their dramas all have a beginning a middle and and end, and that there were hundreds upon hundreds of them available for streaming -- some on Netflix and Hulu, but lots more if one went to a service that specialized in Korean dramas with English subtitles.
I've never looked back.
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