The US cable TV industry is the last frontier for good interface design and generally acting cool. It’s laughably bad. And for an industry in as much peril as it clearly is, it doesn’t do much to help itself.
(But enough of me. Here is a far more entertaining and incisive dissection of the industry from that bastion of forward business thinking website WhatWouldTylerDurdenDo dot com)
Nielsen Realizes That People Are Telling TV To Go Fuck Itself
By Jack
The good news is that people are still pretty much fat and lazy visual-intake vegetables. The bad news for cable and network TV execs is that everyone is getting their fix on Hulu, Netflix, downloaded torrents, and their parent’s HBOgo account. The Associated Press is reporting on a study by fossilized TV measurement service Nielsen about “Zero TV”. Nielsen is scrambling to figure out how to minutely record people’s watching habits in order for companies to better sell us their Fruity Pebbles. This trend has been coming for years and the television industry has kinda sorta not really done jack shit about it, short of getting Louie Anderson to swan dive off a 3-meter board. A lot of broadcast and cable networks content can still only be seen with expensive monthly cable and satellite plans. So, the execs are trying to appeal to the consumer demand for on-demand viewing by allowing them to watch on their own schedule, provided they still pay a boatload each month to their service provider. Solid plan. Goodbye TV.
ESCAPOLOGY (the escape pod's blog) 