Pretty sure everybody is talking about streaming, box sets, or piracy.

Does anybody actually watch broadcast or cable TV anymore? Like, the not on-demand ****? Ugh.

Pretty much sports only.

What Antony said. I watched Tottenham Hotspur (play absolutely rubbish and get jobbed :argh:) and then American Football all day. Afterwards, I switched back to PS4.

Reasons: What's on is usually crap. Also, I'm really over being bombarded with commercials (which is also having a say in shift of sporting choices). Isn't it like for every hour, 1/4 of said hour is devoted to advertisement?

Slightly more than a quarter. Shows in syndication are also often edited down to increase advertising time, usually editing down a long intro, but sometimes they cut content for time too.

TV stations, lol. burn 'em all.

It's been noticeable in the UK as the BBC has had to alter some of its more marketable programming for US syndication (part of the creep of privatisation of public services here). In particular the natural history unit's shows now have a "making of" featurette at the end designed to be dropped by the US channels to make way for the large amounts of advertising.

I.e. you get 40-something minutes of David Attenborough in your hour-long show of "Life Story" or "Planet Earth" and we get that plus some cameramen getting knocked over by antarctic gales and going slowly crazy while filming penguins in extreme isolation. The reduction in show length I feel has contributed to the decline in actual information in these documentaries even while the quality of the footage improves by leaps and bounds. It's all spectacle now and sometimes you'll even be shown an animal without being told what it is or where it is.

Barely. Literally the only real reason I have a cable TV subscription in my apartment is for when my parents decide the visit. If I could "turn on" cable TV for a brief moment and turn it off, I would do that instead of a monthly subscription. I try to justify it by using it as background noise when I do work, but then I found I work better with silence in the apartment oddly enough. I'll watch the new Venture Bros season on TV, that's about it.

I'm curious to see what % of avid cable TV users could be classified as baby boomers as well.

I'll watch football again if the players went back to playing the damn game every down. It seems like a bunch of talking and advertisements after every play, moreso than years before. Can't back that up though with a source, just seems like that (or maybe it has always been that way).

The American Way.

No I understand you on that. Like right now. Packers score a touchdown -> commercial -> kick off return -> commercial. Annoying *DVR pause*

Do they edit the games down, or do they actually play them that way? Because at least the people watching it on TV have something going on, imagine the folks who paid for a ticket.

I've said it before, but

The worst thing about living through terminal-stage capitalism is the ads. Or maybe it's the best thing, if you're an accelerationist. The superconcentration of capital has made a lot of really dumb, unprofitable, wasteful enterprises successful. Yesterday's maximizing shareholder value is today's ad-funded tech companies like Google and Twitter. The good news is that it can't keep going forever, but in the meantime it's really irritating.

I'm disappointed... I was hoping we were going to talk about all the new 4k tv's coming out. :saddowns:

Well, the thing about the NFL right now is that it's the playoffs. That changes everything in terms of advertising revenue. There are more ads, and now the games last like five goddamn hours because of it. I mean, jesus, this Green Bay game started at like 1pm. It's almost 3 and we're just hitting the third quarter. This game would normally be almost over at this point.

Jon`C, NFL games are shown live, so there isn't any editing of what happens on the field. And they don't run plays when the tv station goes to commercial. Typically they only run commercials if there's a timeout called by one of the teams or it's a change of possession. They never.... ever... even in the postseason, interrupt a possession to go to commercial. The competition committee would throw a holy **** fit over that because momentum and other sports platitudes.

The thing is that the NFL is one of the strongest brands on the planet, and advertising revenue helps pay all of the absurd salaries that are a direct result of the popularity that a successful NFL franchise has. If you're awesome, people watch, and people pay huge amounts to come see it in person, therefore you now make 15 million dollars per year. The more popular it is, the more stations charge for ad space. I'm pretty sure everyone knows how advertising works at this point, so I won't continue. The point is that the only thing in America that can even remotely challenge the NFL in terms of popularity is NASCAR, and it works the same way.

It's all about corporate sponsors and money, but that **** keeps the game I love played on Sunday, so I live with it.

Are you suggesting that the great number of jobs out there are beached whale puss and we as a country are afraid to acknowledge this? Nonono they are useful because those jobs pay.

Sign up for your free LinkedIn account today!

Pretty much.

It seems that most of us instinctively infer that this thread is about the shows we watch via streaming and I wonder how people are watching most shows. I have three Rokus, one Amazon Fire TV, and a tuner card in the PC which I can watch on the main TV via Windows Media Center on the Xbox 360 for the rare show that can't be found on Hulu (my wife likes to watch American Idol) or that should be watched live (Superbowl, Daytona 500, etc.). Pay TV (cable, satellite, etc.) is a thing of the past for us although there are several streaming services I subscribe to. Sling TV sounds interesting but at some point paying for too many services might end up defeating the purpose of cutting the cord all together.

edit - oops missed page 2, catching up now

My dad got one of those. It's nice.

I wouldn't say that any of us know how advertising "works", considering that the industry goes to great lengths to obfuscate whether or not it's effective (it isn't) and even the best players in the space are hemorrhaging impression value (because it never had any real value). Basically what I'm saying is enjoy it while it lasts.

is there 4k content yet, or is it one of those early adopter screw over things like how all of the first HDTVs were 720p and then when they finally started making content it was all 1080p?

I don't think there's any content in 4K quite yet, but it's allegedly coming this year.

I believe there are 4K digital downloads available, but there is no physical media. I don't know if anyone streams anything in 4K, but I imagine you'd need a giga connection to stream it anyway. Honestly, without a giga connection, I can't see viewing digital download as feasible either.

Apparently Netflix and Amazon. I remember thinking similar things about streaming in HD. I'm actually more doubtful that 4K will come to widespread physical media. Of course 4K, and beyond, will look fantastic. I just don't see any reason to rush into it. It's definitely not the bang for the buck that moving from VHS to optical or SD to HD was. Now, if you're going to talk about very large screen size, much past 60", then of course you'll see tremendous difference. When the time comes I will certainly investigate the options.

Is anyone here still, or ever, on the 3D bandwagon? I own maybe one Bluray 3D title and no hardware. It hasn't really been a concern of mine.

I think there is supposed to be some sort of 4k blu ray later this year, which is pretty much the only hope for physical media at this point, and even at that it's only delaying the inevitable death of it.

ahaha, yeah

There are two things the consumer electronics industry loves: breaking promises and making you throw your **** out every year.

There was 720p "content" when I bought my first HDTV. It was called D-VHS. The tape drives were two thousandu dairu. There were 91 movies and you could only buy them in the United States. Note that this was the only way to get pre-recorded HD content from 2002 until 2006 when the first HD disc players were released, almost 7 years after they were first promised "next year" at a CES.

The whole "1080p is true HD" thing didn't shake out until 2006 when the first players were released. And even if you had managed to wait this long, you were still more likely to choose the wrong device because initially HD-TV had better branding and more studios backing it. Blu-ray only took the market because Sony literally bribed its competition to stop making drives.

Devices and formats aside, it's not like you could just use your old TV with new devices or vice versa. Here's a quick look at how devices have handled video over the past 15 years:

- BNC + RG-59
- RCA coax
- S-video
- Component video
- VGA
- DVI
- DL-DVI
- HDMI
- DisplayPort

Note that this is worse than it looks, because there are extra restrictions sitting on top of them. For example, if your older TV has a DVI port, you can't just get an HDMI to DVI converter and expect it to work because your TV is missing the copy protection hardware. This **** is deliberate: even Macrovision was designed to block you out if you tried to use a VCR as an RF modulator to hook up DVD players to older TVs.

If someone thinks this isn't gonna happen with 4k too, they a damn fool, son. Even if I had infinity dollars just sittin around I wouldn't spend it on 4k, because money or not life is just too damn short to keep up on this stuff.

Actually, for a videographer, recording in 4K turns out excellent full HD video. There are 4k cameras out there that when downscaled to 1080p, the end result video is far superior to many other 1080p cameras at the same or greater prices. You don't actually need 4k to appreciate a notable quality difference when downscaled to full HD (i.e. FDR-AX100 and PXW-X70 (when the 4k firmware upgrade comes along)).

Here in Mexico, people mostly have their social events recorded in full HD, and delivered on DVD, Blu-ray has been available for some time, but people here are slow adopters. Since most of my competition just recently went to full HD, and just now the demand for Blu-ray has slowly started to grow, I am going to get ahead of them by buying the PXW-X70 in a couple of months, and downgrading 4k video. An associate of mine is also doing the same; we sometimes work together so we tend to try to have the same accessories and equipment for occasional substitutions.

3D is great!

For games!

I was a super early adopter of computer stereoscopy. I had one of those special GeForce DDR cards with the extra vram and shutter glasses, back in 1999. I also dollarsed into NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround in 2010. Unfortunately NVIDIA still hasn't released an SDK for stereoscopy, so games don't really work right if they have things like "shadows" or "skies" or "GUIs", but I guess it has only been sixteen ****ing years. (OR is going to obliterate them, only because unlike NVIDIA they actually have an SDK that actually makes it possible for developers to support the technology.)

The technology doesn't exist to do 3D movies right, especially not once you start talking about households where people want to sit at oblique angles and maybe don't want to wear glasses the whole time. That's not to say the movie theaters are doing it great, either, keep in mind. Autostereoscopy is the holy grail but you don't get good results until the horizontal resolution of the panel and the horizontal number of cameras both approach infinity. That's what's wrong with the 8K autostereoscopic TV you posted about, according to the description.

But then, 3D TVs don't really exist to be used for 3D. The companies started making 3D TVs because was a gimmie. You get it for free just by using a low-persistence LCD panel, which they were already using in every TV and monitor. They added the soap opera chip for the same reason. If they can add some dumb shiny thing without adding to their marginal costs they're going to do it every damn time, because there's always some sucker out there who'll throw away their old TV to buy the same TV with a different firmware.

4K seems pointless for TV unless you have a projector, or projector sized TV. I predict that 4k content will be available around the same time affordable 4k projectors come out anyway. The streaming stuff doesn't count, because it's all going to be so low bit rate that it will be DVD quality or worse unless nothing on the screen moves for five minutes.

4K monitors on the other hand... yes please.

agreed with the usual caveat: as long as we also get PC operating systems that can do hidpi right, because currently they are all garbage.

I can see an amazing difference on my FULL HD tv between 1080p content and 4K downsized to 1080p, so I wouldn't regard it as pointless. Hell, even on my 720p laptop I can pick up on a difference between the two.

What downsampling algorithm?

Basically SF_GoldG_01 I'm going to save you a lot of money.

The reason downsampled 4K looks better to you is because you're using bicubic interpolation. A side effect of bicubic downsampling is unsharp mask (click here to see why). You can get the same effect by taking regular 1080p video and applying a slight unsharp mask to it.

Note that this effect is psychovisual, meaning it doesn't actually improve picture quality. Bicubic downsampling and unsharp masking are highly visible to people with a trained eye and therefore undesirable in most professional video work.

Lanzcos3 I believe. What I have done is gone out and look at video from the AX100 recorded in 4k, and downscaled to 1080p, and compared it with camcorders at the same or greater price range that shoot 1080p only. I have found that even a consumer camera such as the ax100(I consider it consumer since it only shoots 4k at 4:2:0 8bit 60mbps) produces sharper, more detailed 1080p video (from a 4k source) than any 1080p only video camcorders beneath and at its price range, and a good deal of camcorders above it.



I'd really like to see someone prove that, taking 1080p video and making it as detailed as 4k downgraded to 1080p, I have yet to see this. Furthermore, another advantage of working with 4k, if you're using a professional grade codec 4:2:2 10bit, you can retain alot finer detail in edges for greenscreen work, which is something I'm very interested in moving into this year.

lanczos filters have the same artifact.



You'd really like to see someone prove the mathematical properties of the filters you're using?

Was the wikipedia article insufficient somehow?

I would love to enjoy a 3-D experience but motion sickness comes quickly to me. The last 3-D I went to was.......Alice in Wonderland and several times I was nauseous (not from the plot).

Edit: Re: Advertising
Advertising takes as long as the regulation game time itself. Meanwhile, 11 minutes of actual playing is occurring.

What I'm saying is that you'll be very hardpressed to find a 1080p camera that shoots video that is as detailed and in the same price range, with or without incamera or post sharpening, as the 4k downgraded to 1080p video from this 4k consumer camera (and its on youtube, which has terrible compression artifacts):

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEYhkvZEVN4

You're not taking into account that you'll end up with entirely differrent results when parting from different sources. There is 4 times as much information in 4k footage, data that is not present in 1080p video, and I find it really hard to believe that 1080p video can be sharpened to ahcieve the same amount of detail as 4k downgraded to 1080p, unless we're talking about a highbitrate 4:2:2 10bit codec.

What information is present in 4k downsampled that isn't present in a 1080p source?

Other than moire and overshoot artifacts, I mean.

If you set the camera to record the infrared spectrum, as mandated by the 4K committee for cameras such as those, you can get even more information and details.

Your end product will be of a higher 1080p bitrate. While bitrate is no guarantee of quality, and depending on the codec, you can store far more finer detail with a higher bitrate. Most 1080p cameras around the price range of the ax100 have a 20-30mbps and some are even 60p (avg .5mbps per frame). 1080p30 at 60mbps can be obtained from 4k 30p at 60mbps, and can easily be far more detailed than a 1080p30 30mbps, fewer compression artifacts and more finer detail.

iow a poor man's clean HDMI

That's one way to put it I guess. Also working with external recorders is burdensome, adds another failure point to your equiment and drives costs up (in case you were thinking of the BMPCC, while the 1k body sounds really inviting, the investment in lenses, power, external recorders, or large and fast sdxc cards will launch it out of the price range).

It always amuses me when a new high-end consumer camcorder is released and everyone thinks it's a $2000 Red One.

It's going to look nice, for sure, but it's not going to magically make everything you shoot look like a Michael Mann movie.