An Experiment In Cord Cutting by Hill Holiday
We asked five families to spend a week without their cable TV and instead use one of the new “connected TV” devices - Roku, Boxee Box, Google TV, Apple TV, Xbox360.
I found this video fascinating. In its first five minutes the subjects of the experiment complain about the poor choice of shows on their new boxes and their bad user interfaces. No arguments from me there. Typing on a virtual keyboard with a clicky remote is irritating in the extreme, and the copyright holders’ ridiculous unwillingness to allow me to purchase their content is the single reason that I haven’t been championing the Apple TV to all and sundry for the few years I’ve owned one. If its catalogue were even half as large as LoveFilm’s it’d be a no-brainer purchase, in my opinion1.
However, in the final minute the subjects all bemoan the loss of their ability to just turn on the TV and watch whatever’s on. They hate having to decide what to watch.
In the past couple of years I’ve been trying to cut down on my vegetative TV viewing, and instead spend the time (and money) watching films and box sets of TV shows that I actively like. (Or even doing something less boring instead.) To my chagrin, I do still sometimes spend time idly flicking through channels, and occasionally even watch something I find there, but the number of times I’m still happy the following day about what I watched is so low I suspect it might be zero.
It’s jarring to be reminded that some people, perhaps even the majority, don’t see this as a waste of their time.
There’s more info on the experiment on the Hill Holiday blog.
(via John Siracusa)
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The catalogue is already slim, but worse than that, films which I’ve previously placed in my wish-list regularly pop up when I come back to them as “no longer available”. There is no technical reason for this. It can only be described as wilful stupidity on the part of the film industry, or something similar but involving swearwords. ↩
