TV’s Age of Anxiety

We live in anxious times, although it will take a thousand social scientists to explain why that’s the case at a time of relative peace, general prosperity, and mostly miraculous medical care.

You would think that the television, once derided as a national narcotic and a place where couch potatoes go to veg out, would provide an escape from anxiety, but it doesn’t.  And I’m not just talking about the content of television programming, which itself leans to the alarming.

No, what I find anxiety-inducing on TV is the 21^st Century phenomenon called “Fear Of Missing Out” or FOMO.  There’s just too much television to watch or even keep straight.  This leads to the sense that we’re missing out on interesting television content that other people are enjoying.  This feeling is only exacerbated by the many podcasts, blogs, websites and Twitter accounts dedicated to helping us navigate through the best of TV.  They’re always marveling at shows we’ve barely heard of.

It seems like a lifetime distant, but just ten years ago a reasonably alert person could keep a list of all the great TV shows to watch in his head. Not so today.  As TV content has expanded exponentially there are must-see TV shows hidden all over the TV spectrum, if I can only remember what they are or where thye’re located. Unless I literally write them down on a list I keep on my phone, I never think about them again – until the NEXT time someone mentions them.

In this regard, the streaming services are singularly unhelpful.  Netflix in particular does not believe in advertising its shows – indeed there are so many of them that it would be impractical.  (Although I did read in the Wall Street Journal that Netflix does post a lot of billboards in Los Angeles to mollify its stars.)

Instead of traditional advertising or marketing, Netflix makes you aware of new content by prominently placing on your welcoming screen the shows its algorithm thinks you want to see.

First of all, I don’t have that much faith in these “if you like this, you might like that” algorithms. They are nowhere near as sophisticated as they seem.  But more important, there’s such a gush of new content that you’re likely to miss a fantastic new series if you don’t log on for a couple of days and they’ve moved on to promoting something else.

Counterintuitively, our TV-related anxiety is rising even as it’s easier to watch TV any time, any place.  Given the rise of time-shifting and multiple video platforms, there’s no reason to ever miss a program.  In the pre-DVR age, if you skipped an episode of your favorite show, that was it – it disappeared into the broadcast ether and you’d never see it unless you were lucky enough to catch it on reruns or wait several years for syndication.

Yet the truth is, if you missed an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” or “All in the Family,” you didn’t really care that much.  All the episodes were more or less interchangeable.  Since there was no narrative arc over the series, you weren’t being deprived of important plot developments if you had better things to do Saturday night than to sit around watching TV.  In other words, because TV was just entertainment and not “art,” you didn’t need to sweat seeing every episode.

A related challenge for watching TV these days is too much choice.  People think they want a lot of options but they don’t really.  There’s nothing quite a paralyzing as going into an ice cream story with 60 flavors and trying to pick the one that will give you the richest, most sensational ice cream experience.  Same with TV.  When I look at all the shows on Netflix, they all seem pretty good but I worry that I’ll be wasting my precious TV-consuming time by not watching the very highest-quality show.    We’d be better off with fewer shows and more obviously terrific ones.

Needless to say, my complaint falls under the category of “first world problems.”  With all the despair in the world, am I really going to feel sorry for myself because I feel overwhelmed by the TV landscape?  Uh. Yeah.  Maybe it doesn’t rise to the level of justified anxiety, like fear of losing a job or getting a disease, but there’s no question that whenever my wife and I sit down to watch TV at night, I feel a sense of pressure to pick the “right” show for us to watch.  Life is too short to waste on “only OK” television.

What I really need is an app to help me find and remember content regardless of whether it’s broadcast, cable, or streaming.  Can someone invent that and give me some piece of mind?

Play Ball — It’s Over-The-Top Season

Last week was the beginning of the baseball season but in our house it’s really the beginning of Over The Top season.

Over The Top, as every MediaPost reader probably already knows, is television programming that does not arrive via antennae, cable or satellite.  It includes subscription-based services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, free and ad-supported services such as Crackle, and transactional services such as iTunes and Amazon Instant Video that allow users to pay for individual pieces of content.

This is where baseball comes in.  I live in a different DMA than my favorite team, so the only way to watch the games is to stream them over the Internet on MLB.TV. Since I’m already a heavy streamer of Netflix, HBO Go, and Amazon Prime, adding baseball games to my TV options crowds out most traditional television except for the prestige Emmy-bait shows like “The Americans” and “Better Call Saul” that return this month.

I’m not alone in going increasingly Over The Top.  Nielsen reports that two-thirds of homes now have Subscription On Demand devices and that among those households, ten percent of TV viewing is streaming.

The traditional networks are racing to catch up and nearly every one of them now offers an SVOD service.  This makes it theoretically possible to drop the cable bundle altogether and cobble together a personalized TV platform of favorite networks and SVOD services.  All this comes in the face of a steady increase in cord-cutting.  According to the Leichtman Research Group, only 79 percent of households paid for cable or satellite service last year, down from 88 percent in 2010.

But as appealing as a 100 percent Over The Top world sounds, there are still downsides.

The biggest problem with Over The Top is inconvenience.  There’s still nothing as simple as watching traditional TV: turn on the set; click around to find something you want to watch; watch.

Not so with Over The Top.  For starters there is no simple way to gain access to all the major SVOD services.  I have an Apple TV device and every time I want to watch something on Amazon Prime I have to hook my laptop to the TV via an HDMI cable.  This is like having one TV in the living room for NBC, CBS and Fox and another one for ABC and ESPN.

I’m also not crazy about the way streaming services handle ads.   Netflix and Amazon Prime are ad-free, but MLB.TV needs to fill the time between innings and for some reason – legal, I assume – it does not run the local ads associated with the local broadcasts.  Last year MLB filled the time with commercials that were not even as good as the one’s you’d see on your local origination channel.  Seemingly between every half-inning they we running ads for an umpire training camp.  I probably saw that commercial 250 times – 200 times more than any other single ad in 2017 – and still I declined the opportunity to become a major league umpire.

Still, cheesy ads aside, MLB.TV is a major success for the Over The Top principle.  Only Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have more subscribers.  Baseball doesn’t have the buzz of other sports like football and basketball, yet with 162 games a year and an ability to tap the deepest reservoirs of family nostalgia, it’s still a major source of summertime programming; it’s primary appeal is that it provides a vehicle for people who are away from what they consider their “real” home to remain connected to their younger selves.

This is a lesson that other Over The Top services can learn from.   Over The Top works best for subscribers who have similar general interests (local sports, entertainment, the arts) but different niche affinities (a specific team, a movie genre) that couldn’t be supported even on a cable network.   This is the formula that makes Netflix a powerhouse even though only a handful of its shows (“Stranger Things,” “The Crown,” etc.) are as well-watched as traditional network hits.

So play ball.  Technology has added a lot to the TV viewing experience in the last ten years but nothing quite measures up to the satisfaction of watching my favorite baseball team all summer.

Living in a Time-Shifted World

Does anybody really know what time it is?  Does anyone care?  I know I don’t.  I’m increasingly living in a time-shifted dimension disconnected from time and season.

I realized how disconnected I am from live television a few weeks ago, when I sat down to watch HBO’s autism benefit and had no clue how to watch HBO live, despite being a 20-year subscriber.  I consume a lot of HBO content but almost always on HBO Go.  So when I wanted to watch the benefit, I couldn’t remember what, you know, “channel” the network was on, and had to go through the laborious process of finding that information from my cable provider’s website.

And then it occurred to me:  Except for sports and news, it’s been a long time since I watched any television show live.  In fact, I know the exact date I did so: Sunday, March 7, 2016, the series finale of “Downton Abbey.”  I was only watching live because I’d been recapping the show for a couple of years.  Before that, the last time I watched a show live because I absolutely HAD to was the series finale of “Mad Men.”

For the record, I’m not a cord-cutter.  We pay a lot to watch a full range of broadcast, cable, premium, and streaming channels.   I just don’t watch live.

This means I’ve lost complete track of when my favorite TV shows air and even what network they are on.  I literally have no idea what day “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is on — never mind the time — and have to think hard to remember it’s on Fox.

The way we watch TV in our house is, we look at the DVR recording guide to see what shows are in the queue (“Oh, ‘Modern Family’ was on last night!”).  If nothing urgent is there, then we move on to HBO and Netflix.  And if I have a spare half hour and want to watch a screen but there’s nothing I particularly need to see on Netflix, the last thing I’d do is channel-surf.  Much more likely is that I’ll click over to YouTube and watch some favorite music videos, film clips or TV scenes.

People time-shift for many reasons.  The original draw for VCRs was that they allowed you to fast-forward through commercials — and go out in the evening and catch your favorite show when you came home.  Still, the understanding was that using a video recorder would be the exception, not the rule.

Two trends have pushed me into a full-time time-shifter.   First, with all the high quality television available today, everything I watch is “Must-See TV.”  I would never just turn on the TV and watch whatever’s on.

Just as important, the fragmentation of TV, with the broadcast network monopoly smashed to pieces, means I no longer feel compelled to watch a show when it’s live so I can talk about it with friends or colleagues the next day.  No one’s watching what I’m watching, so there’s no water-cooler chatter about TV.

It’s funny how easily old habits die.  I can barely recall what it was like to watch the clock to make sure I didn’t miss a favorite show.  And yet back when I was younger and had a vastly more active social life outside the house, I somehow managed to consume even more television than I do now.

What I can’t wrap my head around is whether I am an outlier or a harbinger of future viewing habits.  Clearly a lot of people are still watching live TV.  Nielsen’s most recent Total Audience Report shows that the average person still watches nearly four hours of TV a day.  That’s only down by about 15 minutes compared to the same period two years ago.   (This would be a good time to remind everyone that only about half the homes in America even have DVRs, and fewer subscribe to premium cable channels).

But I don’t feel unique as a full-time timeshifter, certainly not with a 25-year-old in the family.  He’s lived in his own apartment for three years and would no more own a television than a Sony Walkman.

So maybe I’m slightly ahead of the curve.  A decade ago I pish-poshed futurists who said that live TV would eventually go away.  But now that it’s happened to me, I’m not so sure.

After all, if an old-timer like me can abandon live TV, anyone can.

Watching TV Is Too Hard

I recently received a message from Amazon urging me to watch its video programming, which is included in my Amazon Prime membership.  That certainly seemed like a good suggestion — until the time came when I actually wanted to watch something.

The video-viewing apparatus in my living room consists of a stack of machines and devices — but to my disappointment, none of them offer Amazon Prime, not even my much-hyped Apple TV.  Sure I could watch Prime on my laptop, and last year I did, in fact, watch Amazon’s “Catastrophe” that way, but the experience convinced me that watching “TV” on a laptop while seated bolt-upright in front of a desk is about as satisfying as eating dinner standing in front of the sink.  From a utilitarian perspective they both accomplish their main task, but the aesthetics leave something to be desired.

Preferring to watch video entertainment on my HDTV monitor, I decided to solve the Amazon Prime problem by ordering a six-foot HDMI cable, which I can hook up to my computer when I want to stream onto the TV.

But what a pain in the neck.  Already sitting on my viewing stand are five remotes that control: 1) the monitor; 2) the DVR; 3) the DVD player; 4) my Apple TV; and 5) a cable-splitter device to switch from cable to cable. Now I have a separate cable to connect my laptop.

And it’s not as if these other devices are that easy to master.  The navigation on the Apple TV is so sensitive that I’m constantly landing on the wrong icon or the wrong show.  Of course to get even this far I needed to go online many times to check Apple TV instructions, since there was no manual with the device itself.  And even now, after all these years, I don’t understand why the DVR will sudden stop recording shows on my watch list, or why I get reruns when I specifically set the directions to record first-time-only broadcasts.

Whenever I complain about the complexity of watching TV, I feel like the old coot yelling at the neighborhood ruffians to stop playing on his grass.  Why can’t I be more like my Millennial son, who watches TV while lying on his bed with his laptop propped on his stomach?  Get out of the way of progress ,you geezer!

Of course we have to be careful not to romanticize the past.  One of the earliest television clichés was the image of the 1950s dad on the roof trying to position the antenna just right, so TV was frequently a pain the neck even in the days of yore.  Cable solved the antenna problem but created its own challenges with the cable box, which required its own remote control.  And the VCR was so complicated that most people only used it to play videos, not to record anything.

It seems like every time we master one form of technology, the device industrial complex invents another must-have machine. We now live in a world when no one can go into another person’s home and confidently change the TV channel without screwing up the system.  That’s a lesson I’ve learned over too many Christmas visits to my parents’ house.

Figuring out how to work the devices is bad enough — but finding something to watch is even worse.  I know there’s a ton of content to watch, but where to find it?  I’d really like to watch “Orphan Black,” but have no idea how to do that.  I see from a Google search that it’s on BBC America.  Is that part of my cable package?  I guess I could look, assuming I can find my channel guide?  Or maybe it’s on Netflix, but the search function is really hard on Netflix.

I’m glad there are so many great shows to watch and so many ways to watch them, but it seems like “television” is about to collapse on itself from the weight of its own complexity.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll just stick to Colbert.  He’s on every night and is waiting for me on the DVR whenever I get home.  Sometimes the path of least resistance is the best option.

Is Television Too Expensive?

Every time my wife and I discuss household spending, her first idea is to cancel HBO.  This has been her opening gambit so many times it’s almost become a tic.

I don’t want to imply that the $200 we spend annually on HBO is chicken feed, but if we really wanted to save $200, I’m sure we could do better than that by comparison shopping our many insurance policies (health, homeowners and auto), better insulating the house, or switching away from all that organic produce.

It’s not as if we never watch HBO.  We’ve devoured “True Detective,” laughed at “Veep” and made generous use of our HBO-GO account.  I don’t think my wife has any particular animus against HBO; it’s just that the size of that cable bill really sticks in her craw.

She’s not alone.  Last year’s American Consumer Index Survey revealed that Americans hate cable companies and Internet service providers more than any industries.  That’s a lot of hate for a sector that doesn’t pollute the environment, manufacture weapons of mass destruction or foreclose on our houses.

Those of us who remember free TV resent paying for cable at all.  But in fairness, no one’s putting a gun to our heads. Cable television is a discretionary expenditure.  There are about 10 million homes that watch TV the old-fashioned way: over the air.  I actually know a family like this. Of course they watch “Mad Men” when it comes out on Netflix and skip cable sports altogether.  And because they don’t have a DVR, they miss their favorite shows if they’re not home.  I know, it’s like they’re the Cleavers — or the Flintstones.  But they survive.

If they so desired, cable companies could make the same argument that Whole Foods does: Sure, the sticker price is higher, but the quality is so good that it’s actually a better “value.”  With cable you can get that DVR and a huge assortment of networks and programming.

There is some truth to this argument. When TV was “free,” it wasn’t nearly as good or convenient, and people didn’t watch as much of it as they do today.

But while TV is worth paying for, I’m reminded of that chart in classical economics where the demand line intersects with the supply line, and the intersection point is supposed to determine the price. For many millions, the price of television is no longer at that intersection point.  The unending increases in the cable bill threaten to undermine the entire business model of the business, which is getting people to watch the ads on ad-supported programs or to subscribe to premium channels.

The problem is that once the cable bill passes a couple of hundred dollars a month, consumers get desperate to cut costs and start looking for ways out.  It’s kind of like the cost of gasoline: Once the price gets above their comfort zone, people will spend tens of thousands of dollars to buy a car with better gas mileage just to save a thousand dollars a year on gasoline.  It’s not logic, it’s emotion.

Television is suffering from another principle of classical economics: the tragedy of the commons, in which people act rationally according to their own self-interest even though it ruins a common interest and undermines the interest of the whole — in this case, the good will of the cable consumer.  TV networks must know that exorbitant cable bills are bad for the industry, but each wants to squeeze every last dime out of the cable viewer.   Why should one network show restraint during retransmission negotiations when it knows a rival network will demand the most it can get?

Will cable go the way of the telephone company?  More than half of households no longer have or use their landline phones, the result of decades of increasing prices and indifferent service.  Maybe, but what cable has going for it is inertia and (relative) simplicity.

The New York Times’ Emily Steel recently published a helpful guide on the numerous streaming services you could use if you did cut the cord. The piece makes clear that if you’re an average TV consumer watching 17 different channels a month, it might be a little cheaper — but certainly not easier — to duplicate your viewing experience on an a la carte basis. You could probably cobble together most of the broadcast networks and many of the key cable networks through a combination of Sony’s PlayStation Vue ($50/month), Dish’s Sling TV ($20/month) and Apple TV ($20-$40/month).  You might save some money, but what a pain in the neck to juggle all these services on different devices, especially on those nights when the Internet connection is balky.

But as my wife’s preoccupation with HBO shows, purchasing decisions are not rational.  I honestly don’t know where the pain point is for us to cut the cord, but it does exist, even if it’s more aggravation for not much savings.  All I can say is, I hope we never reach it, because I enjoy sitting back and watching TV with as few devices as possible.  Please take pity on us, oh Lords of Television!

Ten Modest Proposals to Improve TV

It’s hard to overestimate the role that TV plays in contemporary American life.  Its effects are so pervasive and fundamental that we no longer even notice them.  Like any essential institution, though, television can be exasperating, overwhelming, or unsatisfying.  So, as we slip deeper into the summer doldrums, this might be a good time to fantasize about ways to improve the television experience.  Here are 10 suggestions:

1.     A pan-platform TV Guide.  With the increased availability of video streaming, it’s possible to download and watch your favorite TV shows well after they’ve run.  Great! But how do you find these shows?  Are they on a network’s website? On Hulu? On Amazon Prime? On Netflix?  Do you need a special app? You can’t just Google the show’s name and find out. Instead, you have to hunt down and search each potential website.  How much better it would be if there were one master website that could direct you to the correct portal.

2.     The Obituary Channel.  This is a concept borrowed from my former colleague Frank Palumbo. There used to be a TV channel just for trials (Court TV); why isn’t there one for the recently departed?   The channel could include breaking news coverage related to the deaths of famous personages, as well as biopics and documentaries. And don’t forget the live coverage of the funerals of the top A-Listers.

3.     Better coverage of TV ratings.  This is one of my pet peeves, articulated in greater detail previously, but every year, as more and more people timeshift their TV watching, the media’s fixation on overnight ratings for the 18-49 demographic becomes more and more ridiculous.  Except for sports and the news, the overnight ratings are essentially meaningless because more viewers will frequently watch a show via a DVR than see it live.  Consequently, it would be better to wait until the DVR ratings are in before reporting viewing in the media.  And can we skip the 18-49 call-outs while we’re at it? People 50+ watch TV too, and sometimes even buy the things that are advertised.

4.     More reality on reality shows.  I’m not sure who coined the phrase “reality television,” but there’s very little reality in that genre.  The producers clearly drive the plots, conflicts and even some of the dialogue to the point where there’s little difference between a show like “Duck Dynasty” and a traditional scripted sitcom.  To that end, I’d like to see a rating system on each show that signals how much is “real” and how much is producer-directed.  A “1” would indicate minimal involvement, while a “5” would reflect heavy coaching and wacky suggested hijinks from the producers.

5.     Commercial choice.  The bane of the TV viewer’s existence is commercials, with entire technologies built around commercial avoidance.  That’s not because people hate commercials – they just hate a lot of the commercials they are forced to watch repeatedly.  But what if people could choose their own commercials?  This is kind of a reverse targeting, where the consumer chooses the commercial instead of the other way around.  This would pressure advertisers to make ads more engaging and interesting.

6.     Universal Remote.  This is hardly a new idea. Viewers have been complaining about multiple remotes since the introduction of the first VCR, but it’s 35 years later and we are no closer to the dream of a single remote that operates the sound and channel selection for the TV, DVR, cable box, Apple TV, Chromecast, and DVD player.  I have five remotes now and, what’s worse, have no idea what two-thirds of the buttons do.  If we can put a man of the moon…

7.     A reality show about nude dating: Oh, wait, we already have that.

8.     A mega-device box: This is the pipe dream of all pipe dreams.  Instead of separate boxes for cable, DVD, Apple TV, game console, etc., why can’t they all be incorporated into one mega-device?  And instead of getting a whole new cable box every time we move, why can’t we just take the box with us? In other words, instead of the cable companies buying the boxes from the manufacturers and renting them to us, why can’t we buy directly from the manufacturer and own our boxes? That’s what happened with landline telephones — which, believe it or not, kiddies, we used to rent from Ma Bell.

9.     Make network executives and media kingpins watch TV with their families:  If the people who greenlight and oversee the junk that’s on TV had to watch these shows with their kids, parents and grandkids, I am 100% certain we’d have better TV.  After all, who wants to have his 10-year-old granddaughter turn to him and ask, “Dodo – why are that man and woman walking around without any clothes on?”

10.  A “favorites” list.  I literally have no idea how many channels are on my TV, and no matter how much “Man Men” and “Justified” I watch, I cannot remember the AMC and FX channel numbers.  Let’s have an easy menu that lets you click on your favorite channels.

The chances for any of these ideas being adopted?  Probably zero, given the inertia and special interests that afflict the TV business. But it’s summer and we can dream, can’t we?

Don’t Leave Me To My Own Devices

We are not a family of early adopters, but we’re definitely a family of adopters.  Someone’s always telling us about a new device or streaming service — and the next thing you know, it’s under the Christmas tree or in a pile of birthday presents.

You’d think that the more ways there are to watch TV the happier you’d be, but you’d be wrong.  If anything, more choice creates more stress because it’s frustrating to know you’re not getting as much out of your devices as you should be.

When people talk about cord-cutting, I wonder if they’ve really thought through what it would be like to go cold turkey using the current generation of electronic gadgets. For me, the only way I could manage it would be to consign myself to a life of fiddling, rejiggering and silent cursing.

To start with, I can’t think of anything more misnamed than “cord-cutting,” because now we have more cords than ever before.  We have connecting cords for our cable box, DVR, DVD player, Apple TV, Chromecast and laptop.  The problem is that there are only two HDMI ports at the back of the TV monitor, so every time we want to watch a different device we have to pull back the TV table, lean over and fumble with the cords and the ports. We’ve also got a plethora of power cords, since each of these devices (except for the Apple TV) needs electricity.  I’ve been told there’s yet another box we can use to consolidate all our cords, but I can’t bear the idea of introducing one more piece of electronics and the attendant remote (we already have four of them) into our living room.

In addition to collecting devices, we subscribe to a myriad of paid streaming services: Netflix, HBO-Go, Amazon Prime, and MLB for starters.  Unfortunately, there’s a certain amount of interoperability between the devices and the services.  The Chromecast should be the answer to my dreams since I should theoretically be able to just sit on my couch and stream shows from my iPod.  Alas, Amazon Prime, which is turning out to be a go-to source for shows I’ve forgotten to record, is unavailable on Chromecast. So to watch unrecorded shows, I need to haul out my laptop and connect it to my TV (along with the aforementioned fiddling with cords and ports).

Then there’s the problem with finding the shows you want to watch in the first place.  After all the positive end-of-season press for “Broad City,” I wanted to watch some episodes to see whether I liked it.  Well, you can’t just Google “‘Broad City’ Streaming” and expect to be directed someplace where you can watch full episodes.  You’ll get linked to YouTube clips and weird unknown sites that appear to function primarily as cookie-planting services.  What about the Comedy Central site?  Nope, just clips.  How about Hulu?  Once again, just clips.  What about Amazon Prime?  Yes, full episodes of “Broad City” are available there for $1.99 each or $6 for the whole season.

So after spending $99 on Prime, $30 for a Chromecast and God-knows-what for the iPad, it appears that the only way to watch “Broad City” now is to spend even more money, download it to the laptop, and hook it up to the TV.

Maybe I’m just being an old crank.  After all, the primary way my 22-year-old son watches video is sitting with a MacPro in his lap, which to my aching bones seems uncomfortable and bad for his posture.

To me, it’s plain that before these devices can become a major source of TV viewing, they’ve got to get a lot easier to use.  To watch a TV show I don’t want to spend 15 minutes Googling it, then paying extra for it, then rearranging the wires in back of my set. This is not a lean-back experience – and don’t we mostly watch TV as an escape from this kind of aggravation in the first place?

In the end, after buying all the devices and paying for all the services, the way my wife and I usually watch video is the old fashioned way: via the DVR.  Thank goodness for early 21^st century technology.