CNN.com - Politics

Monday, September 10, 2007

Fuck T.V.

Television bugs me. The quality of the programs are usually substandard, shallow, and often idiotic. There is very little I can tolerate on television in terms of shows, and very few news programs have my respect. CNN, for example, with their new "Most Stories Per Hour" slogan. I like MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olberman, but off the top of my head, that's really the only exception to the rule. All other news programs are mostly background noise while I read the news online.

But recently television has been bugging me more and more. Is it that the programming is getting worse? Maybe. Is it the lack of interactivity that I can find online? Possibly. What the hell is so different about how I perceive the boob tube nowadays? Is cable television dead to me? Or is it a dying breed?

The answer hit me this morning: television is nothing like "teh internets". It isn't very interactive, and even where it is, it's very shallow and limited: American Idol, for example. It isn't easily navigable: search functions are primitive and weak; channel surfing usually involves hitting channel up numerous times, navigating a "guide", or scrolling through your favorites listings. Online, I can just bookmark my favorite sites, open up the bookmarks folder, click a link, and BAM, I'm there. With cable, the closest I can come to that with my favorite shows is navigating the guide to find the channel, navigating the time slots to find the show, and then setting it to record on DVR.

That's another thing: DVR is really the only saving grace for cable or satellite television these days. Websites are there any time you want to access them; television shows are not. You have to hit the day and time of the broadcast, and if you miss that, chances are you're S.O.L. unless they rebroadcast it (whenever they feel like it), you DVR it (what if you forget?), or someone bootlegs it and puts in on BitTorrent (illegal). Television has arguably become the least user friendly of our daily-use technologies.

But it gets worse. The average television show is low quality entertainment to begin with: whether it be an idiotic concept, low production values, or shallow source material. But advertising makes it worse. Unlike online, you are forced to watch ads in several minute blocs before your program returns. And then, like on the internets, you get ads slipped into the actual content, whether it be the little bug in the corner of your screen, or characters drinking Coke, wearing Nike shoes, and the Geico billboard in the background. It's a double whammy of advertising, just to put a show on television on a national network to reach a small portion of the national audience.

What then, is the alternative? Once again, the internets come into play. Online broadcast of shows is already becoming a reality. We can also sometimes access clips or even live streams from networks, although internet radio does this more effectively. The internets also offers a cheaper distribution model than cable or satellite television does: it is a global series of networks with a global audience. An investment smaller than that made to air a program on television could reach a larger portion of the global audience, and advertisements would have a greater reach on a lesser budget. An expensive website with massive broadband bills wouldn't even be necessary: the foundations are already laid in the form of P2P networks such as BitTorrent. There are people out there willing to share the bandwidth costs to help distribute your material.

Who wins in direct broadcast online? Viewers, producers, and advertisers. Who loses? The middlemen: the networks. The networks, in their inflexibility, may well lose not only their audience, but their producers and advertisers should legal P2P distribution of shows ever become a reality. Imagine an internet where one could legally watch Heroes episodes by downloading them on BitTorrent, and all one would have to suffer for it is a sponsorship message, a small advertising bug, and some ingrained ads. Where shows don't get canceled because they can't attract a large enough portion of the national audience to justify their continued production: direct broadcast will always reach your target audience if your promotions work, made cheaper by word of mouth and ease of access on P2P networks, is effective.


So what holds us back? A laundry list of problems: cable companies favoring the television format, telecoms drive to kill network neutrality, the drive by the MPAA and RIAA to kill P2P technologies, slow broadband speeds in the United States, inflexibility of the current broadcast system, and sheer force of consumer habit. Some of these issues can be struck down with two simple measures: getting the FCC to restore open access and network neutrality would promote growth of broadband networks in the United States, for example. Some problems are harder to tackle: television, as much as I and many others hate it, has consumers locked into habit, despite how unfriendly it can be to the user. P2P technology is suffering at the hands of a witch hunt due to its association with piracy. And yet, piracy would become less of an issue if television (and music) weren't so god damned restrictive. People bristle at being made to pay $70 a month for the good cable, just to watch a small handful of shows in a small handful of time slots.

The tyranny and the bullshit can only go on so long, though. Television's days are numbered in the information age. Just look at my generation and the next: television digestion is down, internet use is up. The internets are this generation's television, and television is just a distraction from this new reality. It will fade from prominence, and the internets will absorb all of its functions, and it will perform them better than television ever could.

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