“Experiment In Cord Cutting” Shows Good Enough Is Perfect for Most

Take this study with a grain of salt, and honestly this doesn’t tell most of us anything we didn’t already know. Are any of you ready to replace your Mom or Dad’s Cable Box with Boxee? Me neither. But it’s still VERY early on in the game.

The event, called TVNext, sought to explore how the television experience is at once becoming more social, connected and portable. For the “connected” portion of TVNext, Hill Holliday showed a brief six-minute video (edited down from about 15 hours of footage) that captured how these five families felt before, during and after their connected TV experience. As Hill notes in their blog entry on this experiment, criticisms specific to a device were omitted in favor of common themes that all five families had reported during their time with a device.

Gizmodo

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    Wow, average Joe is not ready for this kind of experimenting. They are passive in their choices and basically think that any of these devices will be their new cable box with Live TV on. Biggest issues: slow responsiveness, blocked content, being forced to choose what to watch.    
  • I think its kind of scary

    I think its kind of scary that someone would list “being forced to choose what to watch” as a negative. Really? Whenever I fired up the TV (all my life) it was because I was choosing to watch something. Channel surfing even (or now checking the guide), if nothing looked interesting I turned it off. The only time I would just let it sit on is if I had it on some 24 hour news channel and watched it passively.

     

    I understand all the other stuff but that one I thought was so obtuse that it kind of scared me a little.

     

    Also, I wonder how a 7MC based system would have fared in this throw down had one been given? 🙂

  • @Crim – yeah, it is a little

    @Crim – yeah, it is a little scary to think that some people actually think going into a tv veiwing experience that they have to watch something, anything no matter what. I agree, if I don’t have something already in mind or don’t find anything interesting, I find something else to do.

    I would have also liked to see how a media center or really any HTPC would fair in this test, escpecially with just an OTA tuner. I think some live tv at all, even just the locals, would have been a better experience for many people.

    Cutting the cord doesn’t have to mean cutting out live programs all together…