> My son will soon be a teenager. He has little interest in watching TV. His default is to go to YouTube and check what's new.

Of course. I'm 30 and if it wasn't for live sport I'd never watch TV and even that is going away: Sky Germany lost the right to the british premier league and before that the spanish La Liga. Both, as well as the italian and french football leagues, are legally available at DAZN for 10 bucks a month. It's a great deal.

However besides sports the program just isn't there. It can't be since its priority is to find the lowest common denominator and please everyone. Which results in nobody getting what they actually want. YouTube doesn't have those limitations - you'll find in-depth content for any kind of niche interest and I welcome it.

I can only assume that traditional TV is even less interesting to today's teenagers than it is to me, someone who grew up with it.

> However besides sports the program just isn't there. It can't be since its priority is to find the lowest common denominator and please everyone. Which results in nobody getting what they actually want.

This isn't remotely true. I don't watch that much television but if you look at what TV critics are writing, there has never been a better time for scripted television ever. Now that networks like AMC, HBO, Netflix, Amazon, etc. can produce cost-effective original programming, it has allowed them to hit smaller audiences are still be profitable. That allows for far more creativity that the old network model where you had to appeal to such a mass audience.

I'm curious to what all this great YouTube content that keeps people entertained for hours on end is. I personally find some of the instruction content pretty incredible, as well as some of the music content, but I couldn't occupy that much time with it. Especially with instructional content, I need to actually apply what I was watching to what I'm trying to accomplish!

It seems like with music content, I'm constantly fighting off recommendations of low brow content.

Oh, absolutely - don't get me wrong. The quality of the content has never been higher (if we exclude The Wire and The Sopranos). It's the format that's the issue here - there's no way I'll sit in front of the TV at a specific, network-dictated time, so unless your content is available as stream (in non-US countries), I will find other ways to get it.

Concerning YouTube content: For me it's a lot of about in-depth reviews of niche products. In my free time I work in audio and music production and being able to see a compressor, synth or DAW techniques explained in a series of long, well produced videos is something that simply wasn't available some years ago.

I suspect a significant portion of viewers are using the internet to see the programming (via torrents or streaming otherwise), without having a subscription to any of these channels.

I just can't imagine anyone but professional critics to subscribe to all these channels.

most sitcoms on tv worth viewing have adult themes / content, not available to large networks.

I believe very very few of the shows the parent post is talking about are sitcoms.

I love that the internet has enabled this.

Watching TV in India, where I grew up, was an absolute, unmitigated motherfucking abomination that I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy. Bland, unidimensional characters whose only purpose was to act as a loudspeaker for what the scriptwriters wanted to convey. Idiotic moralising basically throughout (obedient daughter in law: Goooood, rebellious kid who wants to live life his own way: baaaaad). A story that you could predict from start to end after just Scene 1.

Fuck that. Out with the old, in with the new.

> TV executives don't seem to understand that.

Oh, they completely get that, but this generation of executives are ride-or-die into retirement. They don't care about the future of their companies.

They're going to pick the carcass as long as they can, parachute out with everything, and leave it just in time to go the way of Blockbuster.

I'm 25 and I never had TV when I moved out of my parents house. I mean, I obviously had "a" TV, but never used it to watch TV, cable - I basically use it as a display for my PS4 and to watch netflix, that's it. My ISP wanted to bundle a TV package with my broadband, but I just have absolutely no interest in watching it, it's a waste of time.

I'm in the same boat as you. I have a TV and the cheapest cable/internet option I could get for the speeds I want through comcast. I stream whatever I get through chromecast stick and if it isn't offered that way I don't care to watch it.

My service comes with a set top box of sorts to watch like 10 different basic channels. It still is sitting in the trunk of my car unopened. Probably broken now that it has gone through a few winters sitting in my car's trunk. When I told them I wouldn't hook it up and asked if I could just not have it they kept telling me if I return it or don't take it my service will be disconnected.

Oh, but they do understand that and that is why they also control the internet. Ok, just the tubes, but still. As more and more people start cutting cable tv, watch what your internet bill looks like. Up, up and way too much!

Exactly. It will end up just like landlines - no cheaper to cancel it.

Cost of internet+phone+TV = $150

Cost of internet+TV = $149

Actually in my experience:

Internet+phone+tv = $150

Internet+tv = $160

Internet = $165

We literally have tv and a phone line but neither of them hooked up because it's cheaper

As an additional data point it's the same here in Holland, or at least with my provider. I've never bothered to go for only internet, but I've also never used the phone or tv functionality that is available to me. It's just there.

A few weeks ago I got scared shitless because suddenly our landline phone went off, which it never does. The caller was apparently from 'Microsoft support' and out to help me fix the viruses on my windows computer, despite the fact that every single device on our network is Apple...

I have been trying to cancel my Comcast internet+cable connection to a pure internet one for 2 years. (I haven't even set up my set top box.) But every time I call them they give me a promotional deal which costs less than pure internet (@the same speed).

Yes, and I don't know in US but Cable TV started with a lot of channels without advertisements. Now, you are paying Cable TV and the channels are full of advertisements, so it is not clear why you are paying.

It's like in Germany where each household/flat has to pay an amount of money per month (~18€) for stuff like public television, radio and some internet presences of the state. The TV+Radio portion of this money-grabbing monstrosity is called "Öffentlich-rechtlicher Rundfunk" (roughly "Public broadcasting") which still is plastered with ads all over. Also you get into this system when you move in to a apartement/flat/house because the institution that collects this fee somehow has the right to collect such information but is conveniently not a government body and not "rechtsfähig" (meaning they can't be sued). Also really convenient is the fact that courts in Germany have time and time again approved this institution's operations... Well, the rest of an overview is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF_u...

Well lots of countries do have public broadcasting. There is an extensive list compiled here. [1]

It even does have its uses, if it were not for the abomination it is in Germany. If it were not for the fact, that the public broadcasters are controlled by political parties and clearly are everything but unbalanced (ok, compared to the US they are, but non the less).

I would gladly pay the money for them, if it were not for the fact, that most of this goes into financing soccer rights and formula 1 rights. And some "Volksmusik" shit and such.

I have to pay (being a German citizen with our own household).

I could clearly see a real usecase for public broadcasting, not tied to advertising revenue, doing real investigative journalism and doing great documentations. But I am being naive here. And a dreamer.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting

My blood also gets easily to the boiling point if I see the public broadcasters complaining about not having enough money while simultaneously opening a new radio station only for "Schlager"-music (old-fashioned music listened to primarily by old people reminiscing about the "good old times") and paying the higher-ups of the TV broadcasters obscene amounts of money...

I am with you on that track. Funny also to see how much money non the less ist generated (and used/needed) via advertising. It is the larges part of the monetary cake by far that is coming fromEZ Gebühren" (what I have to pay as a citizen) is somewhat around 1/7th of the overall budget (as far as I remember).

> not a government body and not "rechtsfähig" (meaning they can't be sued)

This meme has to die as quick as possible. The public broadcasters themselves are "rechtsfähig" and can be sued. Every letter you get clearly says which public broadcaster is responsible for it and that name is written in large font in its header.

They make use of a central office (the Beitragsservice) to collect the fees for effiency reasons so that they don't need to have employees for that in every of the nine local broadcasters. Everything they do is done in the name of one public broadcaster. They just happen to use a common brand name for that work.

Google found me this example letter: http://www.nickles.de/user/images/14/fa13e73ef7b155fc4455777... Note how it says "Bayerischer Rundfunk" all over and tells you how to file a lawsuit – just as every official letter of a public institution does.

This can be seen all over public administration. Your local tax office is also not "rechtsfähig" and you can't sue it (but you can sue the state in which name it operates). You still wouldn't come to the conclusion that you shouldn't pay

The broadcasters are a public body (and not a private firm) but not part of the government. This is similar to the position of the pension insurers, health funds, most Sparkasse banks, the IHK and many more institutions.

The advertisements are subsidizing a portion of the bill. What portion, I'm not exactly sure. Even if it was a patently false statement and cable companies started showing TV with no commercials (or maybe 10 minutes per hour at the worst), $60 is too steep of a price. There is too much shovelware (or whatever the TV term is) for that price.

I understand that live TV has blocked times for simplicity. That's fine. There is going to be filler to stretch the episode. However, don't stretch the show out for 25 episodes! If you cut the filler, you can have 13 episodes of quality with more shows per year.

> If you cut the filler, you can have 13 episodes of quality with more shows per year.

The BBC model

Yes. Youth of today will will sit in a room that has a TV and watch shows on their phone. TV is like Facebook for them, an artifact left by a previous generation.

> there are limits

My U-verse TV was at least $120 a month considering I had two boxes and HD (why is HD a fee in this day and age?) I dropped it for two FireTV's with Playstation Vue and Netflix and because I have Amazon prime I get all the Prime TV and Movies. We pay $50 a month now for TV and get an unbelievable selection of TV's, movies, and Netflix/Prime originals.

I think the only reason we had ESPN was because it had to be bundled with the package with Bravo and E! my wife wanted. How many people are paying for ESPN when they don't need it? The bundling is completely out of control with cable TV as well as the box rental fees. How can Amazon sell me a wonderful box that has a great interface and has native apps for Netflix and other services for a one-time cost $99, but U-verse and Comcast want me to pay $20+ a month for their shitty boxes. Over a few years I've paid for those boxes several times over! Consumers aren't stupid. They've been ripped off for decades but its only recently we can get a cable-like experience with cable-cutting.

Sadly, the margins on these services are very high so neither AT&T or Comcast wants to do price cuts. AT&T is instead launching its Vue competitor instead of making its cable problem more competitive. I think these companies want to continue to milk non-cablecutters for as long as possible and try to bring back cablecutters with these services, which ultimately reward the bad practices of the cable industry. So its almost like the worst of both worlds.

Even my mom is done with cable and she is far from a techie. It's getting easier for the masses to not have cable.

At least in the US, there's a strong investor preference for growth stocks. This often drives companies to keep trying to increase revenue from saturated markets rather than stepping back reinvestment and paying a dividend.

most cable tv bills come bundled with internet which is half or more of the cost. the best internet provider where i live just so happens to be the cable tv company, so there's not much choice.

I've had cable internet for nearly 20 years without cable TV. I suspect that bundling effect won't be enough to slow down the hemorrhaging.