Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixedbit | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if any attempt at reinventing TV will achieve a mainstream success (I mean a legacy TV scale success). Up until today all such attempts attracted a relatively small group of customers and a popular opinion is that TV is bound to die.

View on HN

"TV is bound to die"

Quite impossible. TV is the large entertainment display in your living room. That won't die. Whatever currently runs that display might die, but it will be replaced with something better.

I want Spotify for my TV. Let me choose shows to watch, when I want them, streamed from my fiber internet connection, on-demand, right after they come out, and I will pay a premium.

Netflix is so close to this. They need a few more agreements and a better interface designed for TV and designed for an entertainment system. Frankly I'm a bit surprised they're not there yet; it leaves the space open for someone else to fill with a better living-room UI.

Big opportunity here folks, if you can deal with licensing & legal. Someone else do it, I don't have the time.

I've always been of the opinion that a TV is just a display. A computer/the web/netflix just gives you access to more content for that display; it's still a TV. Analog broadcast channels, digital cable w/ box and guide features, the full web and netflix, what's the real difference here other than quantity of content? We'll still be watching shows and movies on large format displays for the foreseeable future.

tl,dr: A TV is just a display, we're not going to stop watching content, why say TV is bound to die?

You are right, TV viewed as just a display is IMO not bound to die. But TV as a platform for delivering content very likely is (and this is large part of the business). Companies creating smart TVs are definitely not agreeing that TV should be just a display, because then what would be a point of putting a feature rich OS there?

A lot of people use `TV' to refer to both the thing on the wall, and the industry that produces things to show on the thing on the wall. I think that's the case here.

Assuming I've read the OP right, I don't agree with the assessment that the TV industry ``is bound to die''. The demand for high-quality, well-made programming remains relatively stable (maybe increases gradually over time), and even with the best will in the world, amateur producers can't produce anything to match something like Game of Thrones. So there will probably always be something akin to the TV industry producing that sort of programming.

What probably will change is the means of distribution -- it'll be over the internet instead of over the air -- but I don't think there will be a radical shift in the style of broadcast for a long time. People are happier paying $XX for a cable/satellite package and getting an Eat-As-Much-As-You-Like experience instead of buying each course separately. If this wasn't the case, we'd already have seen a massive uptick in people cancelling their TV service and just buying $PROGRAMME season-by-season on iTunes. As far as I've seen and read, that just isn't the case.

The more availability of internet-based programming, the more people will use it. The more people use it, the more strain is put on bandwidth, which in many areas is already strained. I think we're in for a rude awakening here; the TV industry is warming up to internet distribution faster than the broadband industry is advancing its tech. People run back to cable when Netflix buffers every 5 minutes.

I agree completely, but broadcasting their programming via the internet isn't a paradigm shift for anything except set viewing schedules. Whether I'm watching The Walking Dead over the air at a set time, or watching it over the internet whenever I feel like it, I'm still watching it, and the TV industry as we know it still needs to exist in a relatively similar form to produce it. The only real change is that they broadcast from a server instead of via a transmitter, and they can't guarantee to advertisers that I'll be sitting down at a certain hour to watch it, which may dilute their advert's effectiveness somewhat.

Maybe because early adopters don't care for TVs. I'd be willing to bet most folks here in HN don't really watch TV for instance, other than for the occasional news, and for something to eventually catch on and become mainstream having a base of early adopters helps. Perhaps I'm just assuming things, but I feel like this will be a major block on the road to everyone building "smart" TVs.

I think group watching will remain popular, especially among kids, and for that you need a large display. Maybe the trend will be towards screen sharing, where you'd use a tablet or phone to select programming, then switch it to the screen. Maybe 'screen control' would be a more apt name, since I wouldn't want to depend on the tablet/phone for data & rendering. I'm not convinced that enormous standalone tablets are sufficient, because I have to believe that fingerprint smudges on a TV would be seriously distracting.

Yes, people for sure will still want to watch stuff on good quality displays. But I think dump TVs: large displays that you can easily connect to a standard computer or a mobile device and stream content to are much more compelling than 'smart' platforms.

You can plug computers into the HDMI port of any new TV already, right? Whats the difference between a TV and a large display, for the purposes of the average consumer?

None whatsoever. I know lots of non-technical people who do exactly that, without having the faintest idea of how their laptop magically outputs stuff to their TV. To them, in that use case, it becomes much the same as the DVD player or video recorder they're used to; it just so happens that it also does more than either of those two things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com