Netflix CEO Says Linear TV Will Be Dead in 5 To 10 Years (theverge.com) 201
An anonymous reader shares a report: Netflix wants linear TV to die. CEO Reed Hastings has been banging the TV murder drum for more than 8 years now, and in the investor call today, he reiterated his belief, confidently saying that Netflix was in a great place because linear TV would be dead in "5 to 10 years." Hastings is financially incentivized to say this. One of the biggest competitors for the largest streaming service on the planet is the set of totally free streaming channels that beam into any TV with an antenna, and their costlier friends on cable TV.
Also in the news (Score:5, Insightful)
Airline exec said trains are going the way of the dodo.
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Netflix will also have to contend with the fact that there are some programs that only really work in a linear fashion such as current national and local news.
I've often wondered though why you can't go back and re-watch the news for a specific day. I'm sure the politicians wouldn't like that as people could easily go back and see if their statements and predictions turned out to be true or not. But that right there is the reason why historical news should be available.
Re:Also in the news (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny that you mention that. German TV had a feature (in their high-brow, late night slot, where else) of the news from 30 years ago.
It's kinda ... interesting to see how certain things panned out...
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Local news is often archived and you can often stream older news broadcasts at least for a week beforehand. But stations do archive older broadcasts and have for years - they have replayed politici
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What an amazing coincidence, I've heard train execs say that airlines are a dinosaur industry.
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Airline exec said trains are going the way of the dodo.
And they weren't wrong. Look at train travel in the USA. Airline travel has all but replaced inter-city travel relegating the train travel to a practical joke.
Same in Europe. If you could get somewhere faster by plane you would. It was cheaper too.
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But the Dodo went to Cincinnati, so isn't that good that trains go there too?
Want 2D at least (Score:2)
I think we'd want 2 dimensions at least. A linear TV just doesn't sound very interesting.
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I would imagine that trains and broadcast TV are preferred by a similar subset of people.
Re:Also in the news (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't really say the same for Europe. Germany just introduced a 9 Euro ticket to get people away from using gas for their cars and the trains are crammed.
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Here in California (which could easily be a nation in its own right) our governor claimed he was going to give us free public transport for a while, along with gas relief for anyone who drove. That changed into no free public transport, and a check for anyone who filed taxes last year and made less than 500k, so the poorest people (like those on SSI) don't get it without going to additional effort that many of them won't or even can't put in, and people who don't need it get it anyway.
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You can. The German 9eur ticket has crashed trains full of local and IC commuters. The airline industry very much decimate train travel internationally.
And why wouldn't it. Overnight sleeper train AMS to VIE was about €180 last I looked. Transavia flight was €35 and gets you there in a fraction of the time.
The real reason trains have high international patronage right now is that air travel is currently an utter shitshow.
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Depends on use case. If I'm a tourist that overnight sleeper train from AMS to VIE looks awfully attractive at 180 euros compared to booking a flight and staying in a hotel somewhere for somewhat more money.
Re:Also in the news (Score:5, Interesting)
As a consultant, I can say that overnight sleepers do have a certain appeal. First, you save yourself a hotel room. If you go from one customer to the next, that's a considerable expense you already avoided that can offset that ticket price quite easily.
Then the difference in comfort. On one hand, you're wedged between other people and arrive at the desination in a shape that pretty much requires you to change clothes before even starting your work day. Meaning you have to fly early enough that you can get to a hotel, check in, change clothes and get to your client. Getting out of the sleeper train, you just came out of a fairly comfortable room, with the facilities to make yourself presentable, you put on a fresh suit and you're set for the day. Yes, you pull your trolley behind yourself as you arrive at your client, but so far nobody bothered to even talk about it.
Don't knock it 'til you tried it.
Re:Also in the news (Score:5, Insightful)
Europe/Area: 4.066 million mi
United States/Area 3.797 million mi
Trains were working here. Until all the car/gas/oil companies started buying them all up along with public transit and decided to let it rot to move more people to cars.
The US Gov insistence on subdivision being only for cars in the 50s and 60s didn't help.
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True. However, trains in the US are not really organized around commuting, and not within the same city or to smaller locations. Mostly they're handy from getting from NYC to Washington DC, and things like that. Sometimes it's ok. like the train coming south into NYC, handy if you're in that area, but also it's bizarre that this train stops in Grand Central station, and then you have to take the subway and walk a few blocks to get to Penn Station so you can get to New Jersey. For a long time the auto cul
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To clarify: there are a few Amtrak trains that come into Grand Central, and those seem to come from upstate NY. I think that's what you're referring to. The main Amtrak line runs from Boston to Penn Station in NYC, and then south to DC.
Re:Also in the news (Score:5, Insightful)
Trains work in Europe because European countries discovered they were great for moving around troops, so they built lots of them, in a pretty good point to point pattern.
US states never really worried much about their neighbouring states invading so railways were built in a different pattern, better for moving freight to and from ports and kind of crap for people.
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Doesn't help that there are still "grassroots" organisations that promote "tracks to trails" and other such silliness. That's really promoting cars (how else are you going to get to those ex-track trails?)
It depends on the situation. In some areas, the law says that abandoned railroad rights-of-way eventually revert to the adjacent property owners if left unused. At least the bike trail keeps the rail corridor intact in case anyone ever finds justification for putting in a new railroad track.
Also, I've never heard of anybody proposing to actually shut down a rail service just so a bike trail could be installed. The trail thing happens only after the damage has already been done.
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The US Gov insistence on subdivision being only for cars in the 50s and 60s didn't help.
It's more than that. Corporations played a large part, too, by killing mom and pop bakeries and grocery stores. When there's no bakery and grocery store around the corner within walking distance, then you're forced to use your car and drive to a superstore that serves tens of thousands of people instead of a hundred or so people.
Re:Also in the news (Score:5, Informative)
Europe is more dense, ensuring higher ridership. It's got roughly twice the number of people per square kilometer as we do.
Re: Also in the news (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't Work (Score:3)
If population density were the driving factor you would have European-style train systems in the east and west and you'd fly to locations in the interior. Th
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The biggest difference for rail travel in the US and Europe is that in Europe there are rail lines dedicated to passenger trains. In the US all passenger trains travel at the mercy of the freight trains. Freight and passenger trains travel on the exact same set of rails (in most if not all cases) but the freight train has first priority. So, if a freight train needs to use a track that a passenger train is scheduled to use the passenger train has to pull over and wait for the freight train to pass.
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yeah, those flyover states are just as densely populated as western europe.
cities like kansas city, houston, phoenix etc are just as densely populated as berlin, right?
Re:Also in the news (Score:4)
Yes, but no. If that was a huge factor, Canada would have better trains than the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]
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For passenger travel, trains have pretty much disappeared.
Global reality says otherwise.
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China [qz.com]
Europe [wikipedia.org]
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> For passenger travel, trains have pretty much
> disappeared.
Only in the US. Try going to Japan or Germany or Singapore or Spain or Korea or France or Sweden or Taiwan or the UK or... well... you get the idea. We're so far behind the rest of the modern world with out pathetic rail network that it's almost comical.
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The internet is also heavily subsidized by the government
Whaaa?? In the U.S.? Do you have any citation for that?
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For passenger travel, trains have pretty much disappeared
They may have done that wherever you live but not for most of us outside the USA!
Germany, for example, is currently trialling a scheme where you can travel anywhere in the country for €9 for a month-long ticket. The trial seems to have worked and the debate now seems to work out a price for the future.
Basically, if people don't have decent trains in what is supposed to be a developed country they need to find out who is paying the bribes!
Re: Also in the news (Score:5, Informative)
There is an order of magnitude more government money going to US automotive roadways than into all US train systems.
Nope, not until (Score:2, Troll)
None of them are good, and all overpriced for what they offer.
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Sports is the last bastion of regular TV. There's just something about experiencing sports in real time, even if the perception of "shared experience" is tenuous at best. The other happy consumers of standard TV broadcasts are dying of old age.
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"Real time" is easily handled by the IP multicast tech that never seems to get anywhere. Broadcast TV is not the only way.
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Real time is easily handled by the modern network, but multicast isn't really in the cards.
In practice, multicast is a bust apart from tiny packets within a singular layer 2 domain to do things like IPv6 neighbor solicitation/router advertisements/dhcp/mdns/ssdp/etc.
An example of why it is so limited is because in *most* network segments, rather than a carefully curated set of destinations using MLD/IGMP snooping, they just flood the data. Making local area bulk multicast an exercise in terrible performance
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There's just something about experiencing sports in real time
Streaming doesn't prohibit real time viewing. My main sports interest is Formula 1, and I'm very happy with their streaming service even if I'm watching the race live. But it also offers additional advantages over, say, watching it on ESPN, such as still being able to watch from the beginning even if you're a couple minutes late, pausing to go to the bathroom or get a snack, not panicking because your family has planned something right when the race is taking place, and being able to watch several differe
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"The 4 major sports leagues have a good streaming service.
None of them are good"
So they're good, but they're not good? How's that again?
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You should start there.
That is why it is at the top.
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The 4 major sports leagues have a good streaming service. None of them are good, and all overpriced for what they offer.
I beg to differ with the "good" part. They have streaming services, the video quality is, I assume, pretty good. The price and feature set stink.
My experience is trying to watch my local hockey team's games (go Sharks!). I can buy a subscription with NHL.com but it's only the away games, not local ones. I can buy any of the network-DVR services (YouTubeTV, Fubo, Sling) for about $70/month. All of those have slightly hokey interfaces because they need to pretend to be a fancy DVR. Content is found by "channe
sports & news will still be live also the big (Score:2)
sports & news will still be live also the big drop of an full season at once is not good for long term subs.
live weather alerts? EAS? What is the plan for tha (Score:2)
live weather alerts? EAS? What is the plan for that?
Will nextflix be forced to have local systems that CAN force an EAS on top of your show (as an up side it's an good way to kill VPN usage on them)
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Will nextflix be forced to have local systems that CAN force an EAS on top of your show (as an up side it's an good way to kill VPN usage on them)
That would be one option. For most people, though, EAS messages are going to their mobile phones.
Comeback of the Antenna (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's not inflation. It's execs seeing that they are bleeding subscribers for years who realized they could keep the same revenue by just squeezing whoever is left. For a while, it worked - there were some people who were planning to never drop cable no matter the price increase. But it's not sustainable and never was.
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Plenty of old people that I know are going back to Antenna because inflation has made most cable networks unaffordable for fixed income.
The increase in price of cable television service is well above the rate of inflation.
Um.. OTA is still very much a thing (Score:3)
and when cable TV is your ISP the caps will go dow (Score:4, Insightful)
and when cable TV is your ISP the caps will go down to make up for the lost of cable tv income.
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Yes, I still watch local news OTA and the quality is just as good or maybe even better than anything on Netflix.
Bummer (Score:2)
Because a whole lot of TV stations just upgraded to ATSC and probably haven't completely recovered that capital investment yet.
OTOH if you're poor or old and don't want to pay $10/month or whatever Netflix is charging in 5 to 10 years, then old fashioned broadcast is going to at least get you the programming that is 40% ads that boomers and gen X crave.
Re:Bummer (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you for mentioning gen X. When referring to generations, most people talk about boomers and millenials and just skip right over us, totally forgetting (or not caring) that there is an entire generation between the two. No biggie, though. As the latchkey kids, we're used to being forgotten about. Hell, we used to look at pictures of dead kids on the back of the milk carton as we ate our breakfast cereal and then would go outside to play and not be back until dinner time.
On a note related to your comment, a few years ago one of the TV networks started showing cartoons on Saturday mornings again. When I was a kid, Saturday morning cartoons had ads for toys and sugary cereals. Now they have ads for things like life insurance, AARP, medical devices, etc. I figure there are no kids watching, just gen Xer's like me, so they certainly know their audience.
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Hey if it's any consolation most people call children on the street millennials rather than the married with kids, jobs and mortgages that most of them now are.
You can't really trust anything anyone says when it comes to generations. It's mostly a clueless testament to ignorance of other people.
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At the rate Netflix is raising its prices, it will probably cost $29.99 a month for the 4K/4 screen package 5 years from now.
They'll probably have an ad-supported plan that offers just 2 screens for $14.95 by then, but nobody is going to really want that. It's more of a "here ya go, stop whining about the price increases" option.
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And with those price increases they still won't make any money because they'll throw it at their internal studios to make series that nobody really cares to see.
It's an emergency service (Score:4, Insightful)
I never, ever want to consume broadcast media for entertainment. It's just too annoying. Even if I'm going to be in a hotel I can bring a streaming device with me. mp3s in the car, etc etc. But I still have devices which can receive a broadcast, and they would be useful in an emergency if the internet connection is down. It doesn't make sense to me not to have any broadcast media.
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Everyone should own an emergency radio (likely one with a hand crank).
My pair of boofwengs are supposed to appear imminently, I got the tripower model with the big battery. they are capable of doing frs, gmrs, and also all the local emergency radio services (which haven't gone digital here yet) and also can receive FM radio. I have a bag with 10W flex panel to charge with on the go, and also a 5W hard panel that's small enough to fit inside of it. I need to find a nice little lithium to keep in the bag, besides my lifepo4 jump start box. (That works though.) With my IMAX B6
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What?
Netflix CEO Says Linear TV Will Be Dead ,,, (Score:2)
Netflix CEO Says Linear TV Will Be Dead in 5 To 10 Years
According to recent news, so will Netflix! Not a smart thing for the CEO to say, he should be taking care of his own business instead.
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And what are you doing Netflix..? (Score:2)
Not the entire reason, but a large part of the point of "linear TV" is to create events with predictable audience sizes at predictable times so they can maximize ad revenue against a show's production costs.
I don't know if Netflix plans to keep racking up debt to produce shows, but considering they decided not to release one of their more expensive shows all at once (Stranger Things) and are investigating adding advertising to their streams, it really looks like they're moving towards more linear TV. Surely
Re:And what are you doing Netflix..? (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting watching the dynamic change.
South Park addressed this in the Streaming Wars specials they made - in their own style of course.
If they start advertising in stream people will flee elsewhere. I personally canceled my free Hulu trial years ago back before they had an ad-free version (and they wouldn't let you play back certain shows on certain devices) because of crap like that. I have Hulu now, but they lost me for a good long time over the presentation of their service. Presentation matters and people are fed up with advertising.
I think what's going to happen in time is there's going to be less Netflix style pay for custom content and a return to syndicated content. It would be worth making a good show at a studio level then auctioning the exclusive rights off between services. Have a good show but the service you sold it to doesn't want to keep running with it? Add a clause to the contract that if you drop the show exclusive rights immediately end and you can then auction it off to a different service.
Disney of course could easily continue to do what they're doing because they're friggin Disney.
Predictable viewers (Score:2)
Thing is, with a service like Netflix, you combine the show and other information relatively easily collected about the viewer(s) based on other shows they watch, you can build a BETTER profile of the viewer than what traditional broadcast TV was capable of building, do personalized ads, etc... And it doesn't require the collation that earlier shows had to have.
Netflix is losing subscribers, I think, because of the fragmentation of streaming services. Netflix doesn't have the show base to keep viewers up
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The full show wasn't ready by the initial announced release date. They were still adding VFX to episode 9 a day before it finally dropped, and supposedly early watchers saw some bits before the final effects were added.
As someone who works in radio... (Score:2)
This kind of sentiment is useless and stupid. The ad dollars coming in for 'linear TV' -- honestly never heard this term before - are still sky high. It's much more likely that Netflix dies in 5-10 years than 'linear tv'.
Gotta wait for the old people to die. (Score:2)
I have been off of linear TV for well over a decade (mostly because I quit watching TV all together for a while - before streaming really hit)
I explained to people years ago that if you got Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime all together it was STILL cheaper than cable TV and you got to watch what you wanted, when you wanted. I got +5 here on Slashdot for saying that years ago and it's even more true now. I now subscribe to a boat-load of streaming services (except Netflix) to keep the family happy, but I li
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Remember DVR's?
It sounds almost as old-fashioned as VCR now.
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Yes, back in the mid 2000's I was a huge MythTV fan
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Yeah, first one I ever physically laid hands on was my own MythTV. The demise of NTSC was what really killed the normal DVR.
If I hadn't built my DVR at the time I wouldn't have been able to watch Farscape and Stargate. The power wasn't reliable enough to trust a VCR.
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AFAIK you can't stream local OTA news without a cable subscription. Every service that has come along to try to re-broadcast OTA signals has been sued out of existence.
I finally settled on a Sling subscription for cable channels minus the OTA channels, this greatly reduces the cost of the cable subscription. I then just use a roof-mounted antenna to get an additional 70 channels (of which I watch 1 or 2 for local news)
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I don't know about the quality of the site I just found, but I'm in Houston so I selected that market. It broke down by network and service what would allow me to stream what.
https://thestreamable.com/mark... [thestreamable.com]
I don't want any of these types of services personally. The site itself I'm unsure of, but most of the services listed are known and reputable.
Actually... (Score:4)
Netflix used to release new content in batches - a full season would drop on the same day and we'd binge watch for a weekend.
They've now realized that releasing content 1x week is more conducive to customer retention - and that's a page right out of linear TV.
Advertising based business models paid for most over the air programming - and now Netflix and others are exploring an ad based experience - which will most likely be the norm once the industry consolidates and we get back to an oligopoly.
Netflix benefitted from leveraging technology in an industry that failed to adapt, but the future is starting to look at lot more like the past.
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1x a week is fine by me if I can still wait and watch it all at once. Some services won't accommodate that either and remove the earlier part of the season before the end of the season becomes available. Anymore, I really only watch through 1-2 shows at a time from start to finish. I won't watch a show at all if it can't all be available at the same time eventually.
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Netflix still release some things in batch. It largely depends on production schedules and marketing.
Quite possibly, yes. (Score:2)
But will netflix still be a thing by then as well, given all "line television channels" are also moving into their business model?
Linear TV won't die ... but paid linear will... (Score:4, Insightful)
The business model of paying for cable or satellite TV channels is quickly becoming obsolete. It only hangs on because of the older generation who is comfortable doing things the way they've always done them, and is content to have the types of paid content they prefer passively fed to them.
Broadcast television will continue to serve a purpose, IMO, just as terrestrial radio does.
There's still content like the nightly news and sporting events that are best enjoyed live, as they're being broadcast. And the other scheduled shows provide a stream of content that's all many places want -- such as bars or restaurants who just want something on the TVs and would prefer not to spend more money to have it there.
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Even the news is better gotten as youtube posts. Much less advertising and you can choose which segment to watch, and pause it without spending money on yet another device.
re: news via YouTube (Score:3)
Really? I didn't find that to be the case.
I tried it for a while when we "cut the cord" at my old house and didn't have a TV antenna put up yet. (We lived far enough outside the city so the small indoor antennas didn't work well.)
Without paying YouTube for a paid subscription, their advertising before and between segments of video has gotten really annoying. Didn't find it any better than having the 30 second commercials in a block during a live TV broadcast, really. (The live TV ads may go on longer, but
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Yes, in news, it's pretty rarified air for content that *actually* demands the low latency of live watching. If it can wait for the 'nightly' time slot, then it's automatically not live level of time sensitive. When they interrupt to provide coverage of a lot of events, the coverage spends a lot of time just waiting for more information to roll out while they repeat what little they know over and over again.
A few weeks back there were tornados in the area. Ok, *perfect* alignment with linear TV. We open
Good riddance (Score:3)
I never liked linear TV anyway. Exponential TV is much better.
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Modern life has shortened my attention span so much, I watch Dirichlet Function TV.
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I moved to Dirac delta TV, or at least as close an approximation as possible. I turned it on, turned it back off as fast as I could and left it that way.
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The future (Score:3)
The future is one of the hardest things to predict. That's why it's much safer to stick to predictions about the past.
Netflix dead (Score:2)
NF is recreating everything bad about TV anyway (Score:2)
With the rise of series released once a week and the new consideration of inserting advertising, Netflix is re-creating all that was wrong with old broadcast TV. WITHOUT being free (even for ad version)
Little fuzzy on what "linear TV" is. (Score:2)
I had two issues with TFA.
One is the idea of "you just put up an antenna and boom, you've got TV." My understanding is less than 10% of US households use honest-to-God over-the-air radio waves. By far the vast majority of homes use cable or satellite (or now, wired internet). It's so overwhelming, I'm surprised local stations still bother to broadcast. They ought to sell their spectrum rights to 5G operators or something, that's a much better use for them.
I'm also a little fuzzy on what exactly we mean by "
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I've never really understood people who just turn their TV on for background noise. I don't know anybody under 40 who does that in their house. I wonder if it's something people just like when they get older, or if the younger generation will never pick it up having been raised on more intentional steaming.
He's right, but will Netflix survive? (Score:2)
Broadcast TV has been a wasteland for a years, and you can see its budgets drying up. Cable has been overpriced and full of too many choices nobody wants for decades.
Netflix was the first big streamer and the first to reach the market saturation plateau. All the other studio-owned services will get there in 2-3 years. Wall Street is shitting itself over Netflix's subscriber losses because they reveal what the markets never want to hear: infinite, everlasting growth never lasts.
Now that all the other stud
He's fucked in the head (Score:2)
Many in the world get their media fulfilled with OTA waves from local stations because you can pretty much find a TV for close to nothing and all that'll cost you is the electricity to run it, not a recurring monthly fee. Even more people in the world get their media from satellites (free or subscription) because they're either too far from their local TV station or the choices the satellites offer are much better. Then you have countries like Iran whose quality of TV programming and internet access/censo
And Netflix will follow suite, (Score:2)
"Linear"? (Score:2)
Is it "linear" in the sense of "direct to consumer" (DTC), as in direct from the TV station transmitter to the consumer's TV antenna and receiver, which to me is over-the-air (OTA), or something else?
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It's an industry (not electronics) term that's a few years old, and for some reason it means "on a fixed schedule". It includes cable, satellite services like DirectTV, and OTA. Incidentally, the quoted article's use of "totally free streaming channels that beam into any TV with an antenna" is wrong; that's not streaming.
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It means you pick a channel and you get whatever is broadcast on that channel... You can't skip around and pick whatever show you want on that channel, you're getting a stream and you can only see what is being broadcasted at that time.
In contrast, when you pick app like Netflix, Hulu, etc. you can pick anything on their catalog and watch it whenever you want.
Maybe "linear" isn't the best term for it. My household hasn't used "linear" TV service for years.
Of course Netflix's CEO would say that... (Score:2)
...he's got shareholders to satisfy.
Happy talk about predicted new Netflix subscribers due to OTA programming dying off is just what shareholders and Wall Street analysts crave.
linear = scheduled or OTA? (Score:2)
They noted that younger generations are using OTA for the simple reason of
If he is talking about scheduled TV, well if OTA is going up, then at least that type of scheduling is sticking around, but as for other things that can be streamed on demand, he's probably right.
What is "linear" TV? (Score:2)
"Linear" TV sounds like TV shows that you have to watch in a particular order due to plot (e.g. Better Call Saul) as opposed to shows like Hogan's Heroes or Star Trek, which you can watch in any order. But I know that's not what he's talking about.
All I can figure out, is that what Netflix does is considered not "linear." But what is? And what is the word intended to evoke or imply about it?
And I want square circles everywhere (Score:2)
But because I said this does not mean square circles will be everywhere.
There will always be "linear TV" in one form or another. If nothing else, live news media.