What’s Left Of Cable TV Is Slowly Going To Hell

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 145 points – What’s Left Of Cable TV Is Slowly Going To Hell
techdirt.com

What’s Left Of Cable TV Is Slowly Going To Hell::We just got done noting how 2023 was finally the year that streaming fully surpassed traditional TV in terms of overall paying subscribers. A very obvious "cord cutting" trend that executives spent years claiming was fake or a fad is now the majority norm. But what's left of traditional cable TV isn't doing so well.  Broadcast…

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At the heart of the problem sits Wall Street’s myopic thirst for improved quarterly returns at any cost. It’s simply not good enough to provide people with a quality product everybody likes; the need for improved quarterly returns inevitably results in a quest for scale and growth that always cut corners and sacrifices product quality [...]

The eternal race to the bin, ladies and gentlemen. And it just gets faster and faster.

This is literally the description of capitalism. To think that it is isolated to the cable market is a display of the myopia that the author of this article describes themselves. 

(Sarcasm warning)
It's almost as if capitalism gives us the least of everything at the greatest cost, rather than the opposite!

Nawh, people keep saying it's the best system so it must be.

That said, many of the executives who ran cable TV into the ground have jumped ship to streaming, and are repeating many of the same mistakes without having learned much of anything from history or experience.

Why would anyone hire these people?

Because short term profits are the goal. Squeeze the company dry, leave with your golden parachute, and the problems you created are the next guys issue.

Anyone willing to cut costs and piss away the reputation of a company can do that.

This is always the same pattern. The new thing is taken over by the same old players and it becomes shitty like the same old thing.

If they put cable tv shows on YouTube, maybe someone would watch them

I gave up on cable years ago, a streaming service that lets me curate my own favorites list and ignore the rest of the crap out there is really all I need or want.

Can't say I've even THOUGHT about broadcast TV.

We should all consider broadcast tv … at least if we occasionally like live video, like sports. I’m not subscribing to an expensive new service for the handful of nfl games I watch in a year, for example

Actually, I do kind of wonder whether sports moving to exclusive streaming channels has affected sports bars. I’ve never gone to such a place intentionally to watch a specific sport, but I’m tempted to, over subscribing to a new expensive streaming service

Before streaming, my TiVo was able to mitigate excessive advertising (and let me watch shows in a fraction of the time), I should look for something like that