Tv, so last century



  • <rant> 

    I've found myself in the awkward position of living with my parents for a few weeks, in between the end of my lease and an overseas trip.  They have a really shitty internet connection so downloading stuff is out of the question so i've been forced to watch tv.  And wow what an absolute steaming pile of shit, it must be about two or three years since i've actaully watched something on tv and absolute crap that they wheel out and expect people to watch is just terrible. 

    Was tv always this bad or has this happened since i stopped watching it?  Completely inane reality tv sandwiched in between even more inane ads, it's like everything on tv is aimed at the absolute lowest common denominator and done as cheaply as possible, what gets me though is the amazing amount of cross promotion i see these days, like channel ten basically putting advertisements for their shows into news stories.  This is the state of tv in australia at the moment, is it like this everywhere?  It amazes me that with all the choice in media people have (bittorrent especially) that they are still content to sit there and be spoon fed the absolute crap that the tv company was able to buy for the cheapest price.

    The problem is people seem to be resistant to plugging their computers into their tv's, everyone has tv out on their pc's these days but i find it's only IT people who actually use it.  These days using your pc to watch shows is just as easy as setting up a DVD player(although i still meet people who can't even do that).  Do other readers have a similar experience?  I'm assuming most readers of this site would get the majority of your content off the net? 

    It may just be an australian thing, we only have 5 channels and only two of them might ever have something good on(rarely), pay tv is expensive and not much better.  Is this dumbing down and cheapening of tv the channels response to competition from other media sources?  Is this the same in most countries or unique to australia?

     Sorry for the rant but after a few years of not seeing tv i was genuinely shocked by what it has become.
     

    </rant> 



  • where is all this content that you are downloading coming from?



  • @tster said:

    where is all this content that you are downloading coming from?

     

    mostly the US and the UK, sorry i should have mentioned that here in australia we get shows a year or so late(if at all) so if i want to watch stuff i have to get it from sources other than tv.  Most of the stuff can be purchased on dvd even though it's not actually broadcast, but dvds are a pretty lame medium and expensive and again a lot later to come out than on the net.  Stations are required to broadcast a minimum amount of locally produced content but judging by the quality this is where they save money to spend on US produced crime dramas.

    for example HBO's Rome was cancelled here after two or three episodes(they put it in time prime on a brain dead commercial channel) and because the rights to the whole season were sold to the station that stopped airing it you can't see it here now.  This is just one exapmle but there are many.



  • @element[0] said:

    @tster said:

    where is all this content that you are downloading coming from?

     

    mostly the US and the UK, sorry i should have mentioned that here in australia we get shows a year or so late(if at all) so if i want to watch stuff i have to get it from sources other than tv.  Most of the stuff can be purchased on dvd even though it's not actually broadcast, but dvds are a pretty lame medium and expensive and again a lot later to come out than on the net.  Stations are required to broadcast a minimum amount of locally produced content but judging by the quality this is where they save money to spend on US produced crime dramas.

    for example HBO's Rome was cancelled here after two or three episodes(they put it in time prime on a brain dead commercial channel) and because the rights to the whole season were sold to the station that stopped airing it you can't see it here now.  This is just one exapmle but there are many.

    Yep, Australian TV definitely sucks balls. I guess because we are such a small market we can't support more than a few channels, so in trying to condense the myriad of stuff available from the rest of the world we invariably miss out on the good stuff as they cater to the lowest common denominator. Also I'm sure the producers charge an extortionate rate for shows too, which our small fry stations just can't afford.

    No doubt it is mostly crap on US TV too, but least the stream is a bit bigger to be able to pan for those few nuggets.

    So yes, I'd say it's just us. Play any other small countries with a comparable population and market size.



  • @element[0] said:

    @tster said:

    where is all this content that you are downloading coming from?

     

    mostly the US and the UK, sorry i should have mentioned that here in australia we get shows a year or so late(if at all) so if i want to watch stuff i have to get it from sources other than tv.  Most of the stuff can be purchased on dvd even though it's not actually broadcast, but dvds are a pretty lame medium and expensive and again a lot later to come out than on the net.  Stations are required to broadcast a minimum amount of locally produced content but judging by the quality this is where they save money to spend on US produced crime dramas.

    for example HBO's Rome was cancelled here after two or three episodes(they put it in time prime on a brain dead commercial channel) and because the rights to the whole season were sold to the station that stopped airing it you can't see it here now.  This is just one exapmle but there are many.

    I was trying to point out that you are bashing television shows as all shitty and worthless when all the stuff that you are download on the internet are actually TV shows. 



  • You could do what several people here do (ender, Lingerance, Random822) and watch anime. Tons of variety there, and places like Netflix have a good selection. If you want to view current shows you'll have to use torrents or steaming video sites like stage6.com, which probably isn't feasible with a shitty internet connection. You're not missing out on much though, since IMO the only good shows this season are Clannad and Higurashi Kai.



  • @tster said:

    @element[0] said:

    @tster said:

    where is all this content that you are downloading coming from?

     

    mostly the US and the UK, sorry i should have mentioned that here in australia we get shows a year or so late(if at all) so if i want to watch stuff i have to get it from sources other than tv.  Most of the stuff can be purchased on dvd even though it's not actually broadcast, but dvds are a pretty lame medium and expensive and again a lot later to come out than on the net.  Stations are required to broadcast a minimum amount of locally produced content but judging by the quality this is where they save money to spend on US produced crime dramas.

    for example HBO's Rome was cancelled here after two or three episodes(they put it in time prime on a brain dead commercial channel) and because the rights to the whole season were sold to the station that stopped airing it you can't see it here now.  This is just one exapmle but there are many.

    I was trying to point out that you are bashing television shows as all shitty and worthless when all the stuff that you are download on the internet are actually TV shows. 

    Obviously i wasn't saying that because what would i download?

    Not all shows are shitty but i'd have to say about 99% of them are pretty shitty, it's probably more an australian thing, even that 1% of good content (from the us or uk) doesn't make it here in preference to cheap, mindless drivel.  Whether this is because the owners of the content are charging too much or the stations don't try any harder because they know that most people are too lazy to make a choice.  It's more that people would spend(at a guess) maybe two hours a day watching tv when they get home but rather than watching stuff they want to watch they just watch "whatever is on" regardless of whether they actually like it, when they could easily watch whatever they want.  There are a lot of good tv shows it's just here most of them aren't actually on tv or if they are they are quite often in a completely innappropriate timeslot.  ie. eleven in the morning for stuff like spaced, scrubs or family guy(not the best shows in the world i'll admit but certainly better thatn most of the shite on here)

     

    The latest abomination i saw that passes for "local content" just takes the most popular clips off youtube for the week and has a couple of minor big brother celbrities introduce them, i mean bravo

     



  • My sister has moved from UK to Oz and misses the TV - however we do have the enforced license fee.

     

    Must say though here in the UK, TV is on a downwards slop with the introduction of nationwide digital only broardcasting - increase in  the household TV bandwidth.

     

     



  • @MrMan said:

    You could do what several people here do (ender, Lingerance, Random822) and watch anime. Tons of variety there, and places like Netflix have a good selection. If you want to view current shows you'll have to use torrents or steaming video sites like stage6.com, which probably isn't feasible with a shitty internet connection. You're not missing out on much though, since IMO the only good shows this season are Clannad and Higurashi Kai.
    Anime suffers from the same golden rule from which American TV suffers: 99% of everything is crap. I'm following only three American TV shows right now (Heroes, House and Stargate Atlantis) and one anime (Higurashi Kai). Compare this against the total amount of television produced in both the US and Japan right now.

    When I took my job here and moved, I decided not to get cable or satellite television at my new place. I use the Internet and DVDs (legality of downloading television aside, I buy the seasons I download once they're released) to filter out the 99% of crap I don't want to see. I hope to never go back to cable. The only thing I'm really missing as a result is local news (but I can get that through gossip which exists in spades around here)...



  • I stopped watching TV years ago and haven't missed it at all.  I get loads of crap from my friends however, because I own one TV (and I only own that because of my husbands ridiculous desire to watch it) but own six computers.  So when they come into my office and begin to go on and on about how this or that happened on some reality TV show and I don't give them some delightful response of understanding I am suddenly met with a quizzical look and then a sigh. "Oh yeah, you don't watch TV, you live on your computer.  What a waste of time."  They spend hours mindlessly staring at a TV and I am the one wasting my time.  Hmmm, I think they have been brainwashed by the little men in the TV.



  • @Nakushita said:

    "Oh yeah, you don't watch TV, you live on your computer.  What a waste of time."  They spend hours mindlessly staring at a TV and I am the one wasting my time.  Hmmm, I think they have been brainwashed by the little men in the TV.

    I hate that, I get flack from my parents even about my computer habits (even though they paid for my network security course and are both ex military radar technicians). But as MrMan has mentioned anime is where it's at. As for most of it being crap, I haven't been exposed to allot of animes I didn't like. I avoid the dubs for the most part, especially ones that get licensed for Saturday morning cartoons and most Hentai dubs tend to suck too.



  • @Lingerance said:

    But as MrMan has mentioned anime is where it's at. As for most of it being crap, I haven't been exposed to allot of animes I didn't like. I avoid the dubs for the most part, especially ones that get licensed for Saturday morning cartoons and most Hentai dubs tend to suck too.
    The way I see it, if you like all anime then you either have incredibly varied tastes (anime is not a genre but a medium encompassing nearly every possible genre), or you just like the novelty of anime itself. It's just television, except with a few benefits like the impossibility of "reality" shows or gameshows (which I suppose is a godsend, really).



  • lol, i saw another one last night, it was "Top 20 songs that get stuck in your head" hosted by Bert Newton, apparently they do one every week with a different top twenty.  This one consisted of playing a minute or so of the film clip and then interviewing some minor(and i mean really minor) celebrites about what they thought of the song. 

    The sad thing was that all the people they were interviewing were clearly(for the most part) sitting at their desks, so they'd obviously just got a camera crew and walked round the channel nine offices and just asked people who happened to have been on tv before and were sitting at their desks. 

    It's almost like they've completely stopped trying, the sad thing is when i asked my sister why she was watching it she said she new it was crap but there was "nothing else on" so she'll just watch it anyway.  I guess that's why they can get away with it, as long as none of the stations try then there is no incentive to do anything good.



  • @Welbog said:

    @Lingerance said:
    But as MrMan has mentioned anime is where it's at. As for most of it being crap, I haven't been exposed to allot of animes I didn't like. I avoid the dubs for the most part, especially ones that get licensed for Saturday morning cartoons and most Hentai dubs tend to suck too.
    The way I see it, if you like all anime then you either have incredibly varied tastes (anime is not a genre but a medium encompassing nearly every possible genre), or you just like the novelty of anime itself. It's just television, except with a few benefits like the impossibility of "reality" shows or gameshows (which I suppose is a godsend, really).


    Although calling it reality would be stretching it quite a bit, there are many slice of life anime's that aren't about anything in perticular except the main cast.
    And i also wouldn't be surprised if there's a gameshow anime series somewhere, gantz would actually sort of fit the bill, although the gameshow element of it is only very small. (and its more of a game then a show really)




  • @stratos said:

    Although calling it reality would be stretching it quite a bit, there are many slice of life anime's that aren't about anything in perticular except the main cast.
    And i also wouldn't be surprised if there's a gameshow anime series somewhere, gantz would actually sort of fit the bill, although the gameshow element of it is only very small. (and its more of a game then a show really)
    The difference between anime's "slice of life" genre and the western "drama" and "comedy" genres is slight. A lot of anime is called slice of life as a main genre, but that's not really specific. A lot of them are hilarious (like Azumanga Daioh), some of them are more like romantic dramas (Honey & Clover), and most of them are just boring crap, like most of everything. Reality is a completely different set of genres. I don't know where I'm going with this... </ramble>



  • @element[0] said:

    <rant> 

    I've found myself in the awkward position of living with my parents for a few weeks, in between the end of my lease and an overseas trip.  They have a really shitty internet connection so downloading stuff is out of the question so i've been forced to watch tv.  And wow what an absolute steaming pile of shit, it must be about two or three years since i've actaully watched something on tv and absolute crap that they wheel out and expect people to watch is just terrible. 

    Was tv always this bad or has this happened since i stopped watching it?  Completely inane reality tv sandwiched in between even more inane ads, it's like everything on tv is aimed at the absolute lowest common denominator and done as cheaply as possible, what gets me though is the amazing amount of cross promotion i see these days, like channel ten basically putting advertisements for their shows into news stories.  This is the state of tv in australia at the moment, is it like this everywhere?  It amazes me that with all the choice in media people have (bittorrent especially) that they are still content to sit there and be spoon fed the absolute crap that the tv company was able to buy for the cheapest price.

    The problem is people seem to be resistant to plugging their computers into their tv's, everyone has tv out on their pc's these days but i find it's only IT people who actually use it.  These days using your pc to watch shows is just as easy as setting up a DVD player(although i still meet people who can't even do that).  Do other readers have a similar experience?  I'm assuming most readers of this site would get the majority of your content off the net? 

    It may just be an australian thing, we only have 5 channels and only two of them might ever have something good on(rarely), pay tv is expensive and not much better.  Is this dumbing down and cheapening of tv the channels response to competition from other media sources?  Is this the same in most countries or unique to australia?

     Sorry for the rant but after a few years of not seeing tv i was genuinely shocked by what it has become.
     

    </rant> 

    Yeah, TV here sucks. I can't say anything about other countries because I have never been outside Australia.

    I haven't watched TV for ages... I just occasionally watch the news and a few other things, but not that much. I sometimes watch cartoons, but even then, there's not really any good cartoons on any more either...



  • @Daniel15 said:

    Yeah, TV here sucks. I can't say anything about other countries because I have never been outside Australia.

    I haven't watched TV for ages... I just occasionally watch the news and a few other things, but not that much. I sometimes watch cartoons, but even then, there's not really any good cartoons on any more either...

     

    There is no reason to go outside Australia Daniel15, it's full of foreigners. Other places have more TV channels though (except for New Zealand and Nauru), but more TV just increases the amount of crap. A slight ray of sunshine is the fact that it is possible to travel to all countries and never miss an episode of Idol or Big Brother.



  • Yap, same shit here.

    In Argentina there are 5 free channels. 2 populist channels, 1 fascist channel, 1 socialist-nationalist channel, and the lowest of all, a tv channel with less than 2 dollars dedicated to shows about the other 4 channels.

     

    It's been a few years since i don't watch TV. I only follow one series, and it's House. Buyed the DVDs, but download the current season as soon as i can get the last episode.

    The only thing i could eventually watch is some soccer game with my friends, but not here at home as i don't actually have a TV.

     
    Most anime is nothing but more pathetic crap, exactly like the oh-so-artistic european movies... even when i love french chicks.
     



  • I just measured the length of a, supposedly, one hour show.

    It was 34 minutes long, the rest was advertising....
     



  • @Rasit said:

    I just measured the length of a, supposedly, one hour show.

    It was 34 minutes long, the rest was advertising....
     


    It can be as bad as 22 minutes actually.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Lingerance said:

    @Rasit said:

    I just measured the length of a, supposedly, one hour show.

    It was 34 minutes long, the rest was advertising....
     


    It can be as bad as 22 minutes actually.

     Erm do you have a different cite? From your link:

    [...] the "22 Minutes" refers to the fact that a nominally half-hour television program is actually 22 minutes long to make room for commercials.



  • @PJH said:

    @Lingerance said:
    @Rasit said:

    I just measured the length of a, supposedly, one hour show.

    It was 34 minutes long, the rest was advertising....
     


    It can be as bad as 22 minutes actually.

     Erm do you have a different cite? From your link:

    [...] the "22 Minutes" refers to the fact that a nominally half-hour television program is actually 22 minutes long to make room for commercials.


    I haven't watched it in a while, and I thought it was usually an hour long.


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