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.

Either that or they never watch TV.

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.

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.

[1] - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/08/today-pr...

[2] - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8950070/Fr...

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.

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.

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.

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.

The licence fee made perfect sense when it was created, it arguably has been unfair to consumers since VHS became popular.

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.

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.

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?!

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.

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.

First off, iTV or whatever it's going to be called, doesn't need Siri yet - see this: http://entertainment.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2671593...

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.

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.)

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).

In any case, modern TVs suck at doing either of these things. I wouldn't mind which way they go as long as they do one of them.

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 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?

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.

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...

This is a feature not a bug. Most people don't understand aspect ration and in fact will get upset if a standard def video doesn't fill the HD screen.

Actually, it is probably just laziness on the manufacturers part but it works out well for most consumers.

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!"

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.

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.

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.

Since there's nowhere near 720 pixels x 60 frames/sec worth of information being sent to your TV, who cares?

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.

Also, depending on the video source, there might very well be a 720p x 60Hz signal being sent to the TV.

Let's do the arithmetic:

720p is 1280x720 pixels

RGB = 24 bits/pixel

60 frames/sec

1280x720x24x60 = 1.3 Gbps

For comparison: Full broadcast HD is around 15 Mbps

Why people think they can see full 720p worth of information is beyond me.

EDIT: Pay attention to the last sentence and the posts above. Of course I don't think people can see 1.3G worth of info.

Again: Why people think they can see full 720p worth (=1.3G) of information is beyond me.

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.