My square eyes are now widescreen

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1656749]

A quick definition for the non-technology-minded:
If you're watching it on iPlayer or via any website, or via Video On Demand, then you're streaming. If you download a file to your computer to watch whenever you feel like it then you're downloading.
Oh, and VHS tapes, for the purposes of this poll, count as shiny disks. You are also banished back to the Second Millenium.

Comments

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I can't help but feel that people don't always like having all the choice. Personally I can have a lot of trouble deciding what to watch when there's only 20 channels to choose from. Should I ask "what's on tv?" and someone replies "everything", I can imagine I would become somewhat frozen by the magnitude of the task of merely choosing what I would like to see.

Though allowing us to watch everything all the time would not be constricted enough to make people do things like buy the media we could perma-stream. So I imagine that you'll never be able to watch "anything". I guess you might end up having channels which are "what's on" in the same way as we have now, but with no denotion of when it's on. Although with new media, when it's on becomes "when it's released", as I can still see a lot of people wanting to gather around the box (which becomes increasingly misnomered given my current screen has a width to depth ratio of 40:1 and that will get even more ridiculous with OLED and, eventually, QLED) to watch the latest new thing as soon as it comes out.

[andrewducker]

Oh, absolutely. You'll always have event TV, and people will flock to that as it appears. It would make sense to use broadcast-ish standards to get stuff like that out to a large chunk of the audience cheaply.

But, even with "everything" to watch, people are self-limiting. Me and Julie are 1/3 of the way through season three of Chuck, and in the middle of season four of How I Met Your Mother, and we're happily following those. Once we've finished them we'll find something else to watch instead.

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

True, you will always have tv guides to guide you or friends or online reviews or tivo telling you what you like, so there'll be enough out there on the fringe of your perception that you'll have a limited pool out of which to make a decision.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

"I can't help but feel that people don't always like having all the choice."

True - this is a well-known thing - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less . I like it myself - it gives me more opportunity *not* to do things.

I'll explain. When I moved to Manchester to go to university, from a very small town, suddenly there were a lot more opportunities to *do* things. If someone who did one single I'd quite liked once had ever played the town where I grew up, I'd have been excited about it for weeks beforehand, but now I could go out pretty much every night and see someone whose music I'd bought. So I only went to those gigs I *really* wanted to go to. The same with music. As a teenager, growing up with scarce music, I would buy *every* record I might conceivably ever want to listen to, because I wouldn't know if I'd ever see it again and I couldn't pick and choose anyway - hence I have dozens of charity-shop Johnny Cash albums and so on.

Whereas now, I know that should I ever want to listen to Johnny Cash singing Christmas songs, I can hear it with two clicks, so I save my money and time for the things I actually care about, or the few things that are still scarce (things that are too unpopular to torrent, generally).

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I think it's awesome to be able to get at exactly what you want, when you want it, with very little hassle. Once you're there then there's normally links to other things that other people have thought are similarly great and you can click on forever. I guess I was thinking too much in the sense of unlimited options and no filtering, which would never be the case.

[andrewducker]

Also, according to the poll you never watch things on shiny disks! Why, then, am I buying you some for Christmas?

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

I didn't note those were multi-clicky rather than mono-clicky, so I clicked on the one I do most at the moment.

Also: I need coasters.