One thing I missed after canceling pay TV is the way I used to watch news. You just turn on the TV and there is news. So I created http://tiltview.com to gather current news and play it without having to do any work.
I'm the opposite, I loathe TV news. It is especially bad now during election season. Drivel, platitudes, sensationalized crap, and one feel-good story about the local kid who saved a puppy or whatever. I can do without.
Tv news might be terrible, but there is definitely something to be said for having a certain selection of stories pushed at you. If nothing else it gives you perspective and context knowing what news everybody else is paying attention to. I noticed a terrible confirmation bias seeping in to my news when I got all my news from Internet sources.
I think quite the opposite, it gives you the illusion of being informed when in reality you are just viewing a tiny slice of the world as through a soda straw.
If you really want to be informed it takes a hell of a lot more leg work.
I can't remember who said it, but a favourite saying of mine is "isn't funny how the world only creates just enough news to fill 30 minutes every day".
I record the 6pm news on Tivo every night. Sometimes I watch it, mostly I don't. If something big breaks, I can watch it on the news.
Generally being alert to blogs and twitter will let you find out all the necessary to follow stories.
People waste far too much of their lives absorbing non-essential news items. In retrospect, most of us would be flat out recalling 4 big news events from the prior year.
I'm not saying you should get your news from CNN. I'm saying that if you get your news all from the Internet, you should turn on CNN from time to time to see the stories the rest of the world is paying attention to.
Bias is also very strongly present in television news (even news other than blatant lies as found on certain networks)...it may get worse as the most educated viewers leave to the Internet, and accountability for accuracy goes down.
Yes, bias is very present in broadcast news, but it is somebofy elses bias, and it is usually stunningly obvious, which makes it largely less harmful. When you introduce your own bias in to the news you consume, it is easy to think that the whole world sees things the same way you do. No matter how shitty and biased tv news is, at least it is another perspective.
Some folks do choose their television news source based on their own biases. It may not match your biases, as an educated, Internet-savvy, viewer...but you're not the norm. So, I can see how watching the mainstream television news could be useful as a tool for remaining in touch with what the majority is hearing and believing. I've been overhearing the news lately, as I'm staying with my folks for a few weeks to help out while my dad's sick, and I'm definitely getting a view of the world I hadn't seen in a while. I don't know that it is elevating my mind or spirit in any way, however.
So there's no bias on the Internet? Come on, that's not even serious. Even on HN there is a groupthink. In fact, most of the major new sites are associated with having some supposed bias or another. Can you just go to straight AP reports, sure? Could you just watch C-SPAN yourself? Sure, why not?
But if you're the kind of person that thinks alien abductions are real, climate change is not, evolutionary theory is a fraud, government should stay out of our lives except for abortion, and so on then you will probably think NPR is a biased hedonistic den of sin.
Here's a serious and legitimate challenge, find me a concrete example of bias in any of NPRs news programs. (Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Top of the hour news updates).
The more editorial programs on public radio (This American Life, On The Media) are more opinionated, and the quality of local news is only as good as your public radio station, but NPR News is as clean as an organization as there has ever been.
A far better recommendation than NPR, which is also "ok" but far from unbiased. PBS's coverage is generally far more even handed, far more informative, and far more thoughtful.
Not so much watching the news but having some kind of ambient noise that may be informative. It's the same reason I have NPR on most of the time in the background.
News provides the gestalt for what's going to be rattling around in other peoples' heads. It also gives you material to work with for small talk.
If your work or day to day life doesn't involve interacting with people even a little bit the utility of this is somewhat limited. I doubt there is a very large number of people for whom that is true.
Wow, this is really cool. I actually prefer this to watching broadcast news. You get the same feeling, but the ability to skip stories I'm not interested in makes the whole process way smoother.
I find listening to the news on the radio to be much more enjoyable than watching the news on TV. Really great to listen to while cooking/cleaning/doing laundry, etc. Plus the programming on my public radio station is just so damn good.
I don't bother with TV news but I did have a positive reaction to your site. I like how there's no screwing around - straight away it's giving you something to watch and easy buttons to skip ahead if you're not interested. Would be great if there were quick options to thumbs up/down a video to get more or less of that type of news (politics vs world vs sport, etc) or ignore a particular provider that has long, boring brand intros.
I'm sure it'd also be trivial to introduce skippable ads that were tailored and of interest (in an ideal world...) to viewers.
It's the way companies are willing to jump through hoops for Apple that they'd never for anyone else (BBC iPlayer is a particularly disgraceful example) that's been an effective flash replacement.
All the news you need can be heard for free on the BBC world service. It has a refreshingly internationalist perspective which is interesting to compare and contrast with countrys' national news bulletins.
You're not counting satellite, which has been taking market share away from cable. As of 2011, 60.4% of households have cable, and 31.1% of households have "alternative distribution systems," almost all of which is satellite, like DirecTV and DISH. Safe to assume that very few households have both cable and satellite, so about 90% of households have pay TV.
According to the data in this article DirectTV and Dish Network both lost subscribers as well this quarter (52,000 and 10,000 respectively). While the losses historically were at the hands of the satellite operators, more recently it has been lost to the internet.
Nearly 2.65 million cable or satellite TV subscribers have canceled their service since 2008 to rely solely on Web-based services according to estimates from the Convergence Consulting Group. ... It is estimated that roughly 930,000 customers will cut the cord in 2012, for a total of 3.58 million subscribers since 2008. The group also estimates that traditional television providers will add 185,000 accounts this year, up from 112,000 in 2011.
2/3 of the way through 2012, and less than half of April's predicted 930,000 disconnections have occurred. Will more people disconnect during the fall and the holidays?
2/3 of the way through 2012, and less than half of April's predicted 930,000 disconnections have occurred. Will more people disconnect during the fall and the holidays?
I got the impression from the article that these are numbers through Q2, so only half the year. If so, the pace would be about right.
I mentioned on a previous thread that satellite/cable TV companies need to be adding 1.1% to their subscriber numbers ever year just to keep pace with the growth of the number of households in the US[1]. If you looked at the percentage of households that subscribe rather than raw subscriber numbers, we'd see an even steeper decline over the past 10 years or so.
Some people will disconnect when their contract is up. I signed a 2 year contract but it expires in January. My biggest apprehension is having to turn my 2 HD DVRs back in. Then realizing a few months later that I want 'real' service again. This would mean that I would to pay another upfront cost to rent the DVRs again.
I recently quit cable. I mainly watch sports, and I discovered that various web feeds along with espn3 gives me enough coverage that I don't really need cable (I'd say it's about 70% of what I want to watch). I do miss some soccer/tennis, but overall it's worth it - coverage through official web feeds is still good, and full digital cable is really expensive.
The big disappointment has been the olympics. But as a tennis fan, I'm not at all surprised that NBC has been a disappointment. I was really delighted when the finally lost their rights to wimbledon, because finally things were aired live and were accessible on line.
NBC has pretty much limited live web streaming to people who are paying for expensive cable packages. Essentially, they'll let you watch on the web as long as you aren't using the web to avoid paying for cable.
ESPN is still be a little crappy about this - you do have to get your web through a particular provider (though if you have a military or university account, you'll also get through). But nowhere near as bad as NBC, and no surprise there.
I don't know about boxing but to watch the NBA (I know that's not going to cover college sports), you can get NBA League Pass for around $100. It's not necessarily cheap but it's cheaper than paying the $64 a month I used to with DirecTV (the cheapest option in my area).
Edit: Just wanted to point out that it's $100 for a whole season and not per month of course.
The online version of NBA league pass is basically useless.
1) All nationally televised games are blacked out (anything on ABC, TNT, ESPN, etc.)
2) Locally televised games are blacked out on a by region basis. So if you want to watch the Heat play, but they're broadcasting the game on Fox Sports East or whatever and you live in Florida, you can't watch it.
3) The video quality is incredibly low. It's an SD stream at less than 1 mbps. Godawful. To be fair though, the Cable version of League Pass also sports some awful video quality (super compressed HD when that's even available, and it frequently isn't).
I'm not sure where you're getting your info (perhaps you saw the price for the remainder of this season) but it used to be $100-$120 depending on which
Even you bought. It went up slightly this year, though I'm not sue how much since they let returning subscribers keep the old rate.
I don't follow baseball so please correct me if this information is for something less than it seems to me. A quick google search brought up two services (MLB.tv and MLB Extra Innings). The former seems to cost about $40-$50 while the latter is in the $200 range for the season. Also, Extra Innings looks like an add on package to an existing cable/satellite subscription while MLB.tv is a standalone service.
I posted a reply above, but I also wanted to point out that MLB is similarly blacked out on a regional basis. You could use a VPN to get around that, but that's an annoyance that most people will not (or can not) go through to avoid paying for cable.
Cable/Sat is great if you love sports. If you don't watch sports, it really sucks that this is where most of your subscription fees are going, plus you have to buy ever larger packages just to get a few more geeky channels.
Better just to buy from Amazon what you can't get on Netflix. Cheaper in the long run.
Too bad the cable/sat operators refuse to regroup their packages, lest they anger the sporting gods. Well, good riddance, jerks.
I don't have pay TV and use netflix/amazon/iTunes streaming a lot. I sometimes have multiple kids watching distinct video streams on different devices at the same time.
I haven't hit the bandwidth cap with my comcast internet-only service yet. I can imagine you need to get seriously into torrenting HD movies to go over the edge.
I think that the parent post was suggesting that the ISPs might increase overage charges, and reduce the bandwidth caps (as in smaller amount before overage charges) as a way of offsetting customers dropping their cable tv subscription (i.e. lost revenue) and streaming more video over their internet connection (i.e. more strain on the ISP's network + maintenance costs).
Will companies like HBO make the necessary changes to their business to survive the end of pay TV, or will they go down with the ship, stubbornly clinging to their high margins and tightly controlled distribution channel? Of course, cable companies have, in collusion with telcos, locked down the Internet last mile in most markets by putting independent ISPs out of business...so they may not suffer much in the next few years, unless and until Google fiber comes along and makes them utterly irrelevant.
I moved house recently and decided to no longer pay for a TV subscription (which as I'm in the UK would be Sky). I don't watch much in the way of TV, my girlfriend watches a bit more so it was a tricky choice.
We've ended up with NetFlix through an Apple TV as our primary source of content, it's not perfect but there's enough stuff on their that we have an interest in to keep us entertained.
I'd be interested in seeing the stats for how many in the UK are going down this route, we've got slightly less services available, and as far as I can tell we have much less choice than over the pond.
This number would be a lot larger, were it not for Comcast (and probably others) bundling Cable TV service in with their Internet packages, for considerably less money than you can get Internet alone. I don't know if they're inflating their numbers to show their investors or what, but I can't wait for Google fiber. Even though I don't really trust Google anymore, they're the lesser evil here.
As wave pointed out a lot of news videos are available on the internet. We at Metadata Labs have a web services which finds and plays internet videos on a variety of subjects including News. Take a look at http://debsnews.com
Sounds impressive until you realize that just Comcast and TWC alone have about 35 million subscribers. I couldn't find a total number for all pay TV subscribers but I would guess it's above 100 million.
