The Glade 4.0

coming to the end and wanting more. You get used to not having to wait on cliffhangers or even a week for the next episode then, quite suddenly: BAM! you're all caught up.

Over the last couple of months. I've blasted through Dr. Who and Warehouse 13, both of which apparently have seasons in progress on Amazon VOD, while I do have a some amazon credit courtesy Grouse, 15-20 bucks a pop does seem a little steep. I'll probably break on Dr. Who and just hope that Netflix picks up the next season of warehouse 13 sooner rather than later.

Yes I'm aware I could probably find anything I wanted with a little torrent-fu, but I'd rather contribute something even if its just my monthly Netflix.

It's also feels sad and clunky to realize that you've watched 3 seasons of a television show in the time its taken Grimm to get off its Holiday Hiatus. Especially when I ran into a familiar face at the end of WH13

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I had this issue with The Walking Dead. Saw Season 1 on Netflix, then gorged on Season 2. Then started watching Season 3 on AMC, and have been going through the withdrawal of the mid-season break. Kinda harsh.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

I couldn't agree more. It is such a catch 22. If you don't watch it live (or DVR it) then the ratings slide and the show gets cancelled but then you have to deal with annoying breaks in the show and crappy pacing.

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Honestly, these are all reasons that the broadcast format is dying, and we should all do everything we can to speed it up.

Hiatus? Commercials? Sooooo 1990's.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

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I concur.. this format, or whatever you call it, cannot die in a blazing fire soon enough...

I completely despise it to the point that I don't even bother watching serial television series any more until the season has ended and I can back-to-back all of it (as time allows).

You two know that if you don't watch it on TV the ratings drop and the advertising money dries up and then the series gets cancelled right?

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Most of what's out there is total **** regardless of what format you watch. Even series that start out good like BSG turn to **** when the authors start running out of ideas.

(10,000 posts!)

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

This is exactly why the system is broken and needs to be changed (including how 'ratings' are measured, and what criteria is used to determine if a show could be cancelled)...

Broken how? If people watch a show it makes money and gets continued. If people don't watch a show it loses money and is dropped mid-season.

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Its broken because watching tv when it is aired is increasingly not happening.

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Holy shitsnacks!

The entertainment industry needs to adapt to how consumers want to watch their product.. not the other way around.

Otherwise, people will find alternatives...

For free, with no ads or product placement, and on their own schedule?

If someone could crack that nut and make enough money to fund the program, that person would be very successful.

Unfortunately, consumers don't want to make any concessions at all to the fact that shows cost money to produce.

I'm not suggesting they give it away. Someone just needs to come up with a different model than the current one.

Product placement is one way for advertisers to get paid. It has limited applications and benefits, but it's a start.

I suppose some form of crowd sourcing might work for some applications...

Beyond that, I've got no clue how to make it work..

Advertisers are getting zero benefit from my viewership with the current system (I just can't make myself watch most of the crap that's on TV anyway).

Live sports is the one exception. Time shifting a football or baseball game is just not the same as watching it live.

It's fairly well documented that more and more people are 'cutting the cord' (I hate that term) and losing subscription cable/satellite TV in favor of streaming services, and other forms of digital media services.

One this is for sure. I'm not going to sit in front of my TV at inconvenient times to watch crappy advertisement addled television just to make myself feel better about the fact that someone spent time and money making it.

I'm in favor of some kind of top to bottom (first run movies to syndicated television) content distribution revolution. Amazon VOD is probably closest, though it'd prefer to get some kind of bulk rate rather than paying per series.

I don't mind advertisements, especially in the Hulu vein where they seem to be a bit more targeted and where the viewer has options (two minute commercial then your show is ad free is pretty good imo). Product placement is fine too as long as it doesn't seem forced. The kind of stuff Chuck did for Subway after they saved the series is pretty fine and they definitely earned it.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

If you are not part of the Nielsen family, what you watch on TV doesn't matter. Do cable companies have the ability to know what you are watching on TV? I am sure they do but those numbers do not count. All that matters is the Nielsen ratings. Those **** people have a strangle hold on the system.

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Raell Kromwell

9900 too many!

(I kid ;-p fo reals ;-p)

Im not sure that's true.
I watch a lot of content on Netflix, iTunes & ordered blu ray - because I want to watch it when I want to watch it. I try and avoid watching streaming/bit torrent. I lapsed on two shows when I really wanted the next season (Mad Men & BSG), but then bought the blu rays when released to 'make up for it'.

My friends who are more willing to Warez than me seem to use paid usenet feeds & run pretty complex home media / storage / disk array / broadband solutions.

All of this suggests people are willing to invest time and money to get content the 'right' way - it's just that media companies are too locked into selling it in the way that their infrastructure (people, kit & processes) are set up to deal with, rather than the way people want to consume it - high quality, instantly globally available, whole storylines at a time.

I'd love to have the iTunes TV show rental concept that was tried in the US - 59p per HD episode for single view. Dip your toes in for cheap and see if you like the show.

Basically, more flexible, available, simultaneous, high quality, on demand paid delivery, with variable pricing for keep/hire, SD/HD, season or per bite, etc, with great indexing and discoverability (no, NOT one **** site per network, requiring a cable sub, with completely different ui semantics, and Ads embedded half the time, you **** UX imbeciles) would cause me to spend more money on media, not less. And I already spend a lot.

*shrug*

I probably spend more in Comixology than for video entertainment - and its because those guys have understood how to make their content conveniently consumable.

For reference, I also have a Humax PVR satellite feed thingy - i.e. broadcast - it's *TERRIBLE*. I never ever use it more than three times a year, always for 'must watch live feeds' (queens speech, sporting events, etc).

While this is true, the reason the Nielsons have a stranglehold on TV ratings is because they're the ones collecting information useful to advertisers. Advertisers don't just want to know how many people watch a show; they want to know demographics, buying habits, etc. And that's what Nielson attaches to the viewership numbers.

If it were just about viewership, cable/satellite companies could provide on-demand numbers, Netflix and Hulu could provide stuff like that, etc.

If Nielson is going to be replaced with non-broadcast-TV-centric alternatives, it's going to require Google-like anonymous browsing/click-through tracking.

And I suspect most folks wouldn't be thrilled at that, either.

Either that, or consumers have to take a shot of reality and realize just how much money advertisers consider their eyes on their ads worth (and thus how much they're dumping into the system per viewer)...

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

You know... I wish channels like HBO had direct or online subscription models. Where i could pay for a membership to their programming without needing a full TV provider

Sent from my SpringBoard using Tapatalk 2

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

I thought HBO was working on one at one time

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Indeed, it isn't about getting things "free." It's about the need to overhaul a system that is 40+ years old.

Honestly, to me, the answer is non-skippable "this program brought to you by X" twice per show, which would enable longer commercials that cannot be skipped.

This went out of practice decades ago due to the rising cost of shows and thus the inability of a company to afford to sponsor the whole thing; however, with modern technology, you can actually have more than one sponsor and cater which sponsor appears to the audience based on demographics.

Boom.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I also would like to see the broadcast model taken over by the streaming media model. It makes sense for advertisers they can target demographics on a micro-level (micro-marketing?) and I'm even willing to pay to subsidize the content I consume. I think most consumers are.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

This is part one of a brilliant presentation to the Australian TV industry about how the industry needs to change to capitalize on the new way people watch television. The entire presentation is on youtube in multiple parts. It's very long, but very interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxCoCTc3T5Q

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Not to go off topic...

Is there a schedule out there some where saying when Netflix will have show/movie X?

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Raell Kromwell