Hacker Cinema
Betas
2013 · TV series · 1 season
Created by Evan Endicott, Josh Stoddard
Four socially awkward friends in Silicon Valley try to launch a social networking app called 'BRB', which aims to connect people they should know, not just those they already do.
4 positive4 negative4 neutralfrom 12 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
13 comments on Hacker News
I really wish social media would "peak" to towards meeting people in real life semi-spontaneously.
No profiles, no media uploads, no digital showboating. The best relationships I have with other people fall in this category. Real life,common interests,no digital uploads.
Just add attributes of your geolocation and hobbies [biking, yoga,tensorflow,etc] or let it crawl your digital profile(s) to autobuild your attributes identity. The system will group people with similar personalities/attributes. Every once in a while, "the system" it sends you a text "Free at 9am? Mountain biking at X park for an hour with beer after with 3 new people? Text yes to opt-in"
Get revenue by having businesses bid on being the beer spot. Refine the algorithm by having an anonymous rating system after the fact.
I like Meetup but it must be taxing to always manage the organization/logistics of a meeting.
Yes. I just realized I blended the show Betas,an episode of Black Mirror, and the 2016 movie Nerve together.
Edit: Grammar
In SV, one of the characters asks a call girl if she takes bitcoin. She says "I hate this fucking town." It's funny.
In an episode of Betas, on character slaps a bitcoin down on a table to place a bet. It showed how well they they did their research.
You should also check out Betas (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3012184/), a light-hearted SF startup culture comedy show by Amazon. Sadly, it never got a second season.
Try Betas, I thought it was much more entertaining and closer to the dream (Reality always sucks)-
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3012184/
I second your feeling about Big Bang Theory, but I don't think SV is that bad. Personally, I liked the competing show "Betas" a lot better because it had subjectively more soul and better dramaturgical timing, but other than that Silicon Valley is mildly entertaining. Compared to BBT there is not a lot of pretentiously presented flavor text with at best a tenuous connection to real science, so I think Silicon Valley might at least have better expert consultants than most professional-themed drama and comedy shows. That still doesn't mean one can or should expect total factual accuracy from a TV show, it's still just entertainment - it just has to be enough to make you believe for a few minutes.
When you have billionaires in Silicon Valley comparing the 1 percent to Jews during the Holocaust, and all that shit…
So I haven't seen it yet, and I do plan to watch the first episode. But quotes like this — from one of the producers — make me not want to bother. Yes, this quote is justified, because SV is full of billionaires like Tom Perkins, and not struggling, creative people just trying to get by.
The reason I'm hesitant about this show is that it seems to be mocking something that isn't worthy of mockery: people genuinely trying to make the world a better place. You can laugh all you want at the What's App buyout, but assuming that the ridiculous events that make the news are the reality of life in the Bay Area tech industry is ignorant, isn't it?
Maybe the show isn't as caustic as I'm assuming it is. Maybe I'll love it. I really liked the Amazon series Betas. But the premise of this show — which seems to amount to "SV is full of assholes" — doesn't sound promising.
> Betas is a funny caricature of the startup life we all live.
It is? I tried watching the first episode and I couldn't even make it through the whole thing. That shows was the most cringe-worthy thing I've seen in a very long time.
I quit watching Betas because I couldn't be bothered to wait a week between episodes.
They are attempting to produce movies and TV shows, though they're not having the creative or commercial success that Netflix has.
This may have something to do with motivation, and with the resources committed accordingly. Netflix is a TV and movie company, and it saw original content as a life-or-death strategic imperative. So it gladly spent $100M on "House of Cards," right off the bat. Amazon is a much larger, more diversified retailer, for whom TV and movies are but one small slice of a much bigger pie. Amazon hasn't taken this area as seriously as Netflix has, possibly because it doesn't consider the mission to be as central to its very existence. Its output, to date, has been fairly unimpressive and unambitious. ("Alpha House" and "Betas" have high-caliber casts and writing staffs, but word on the street is that the shows were ordered and rushed into production as a competitive answer to Netflix's recent successes.)
They've made at least one TV show called Betas (I do not recommend it)
Horrible compared to what? For that price, you could buy one second-rate DVD per month. Or buy half a season of TV episodes for streaming. Or half a ticket to a movie theater. Or 3 weeks of Netflix/Hulu/etc -- Prime is cheaper even if you allocate $0 in value to the shipping perks. For that price Prime is giving you thousands of movies and TV series, including some awesome original programming (Betas, Alpha House). It's hard to argue there's not $6/mo of value there if you can find just one thing a month to watch.
Quick tangent for those saying they pay for Prime but have never used the Prime Instant Video part --
Seeing as you're here on HN, you might be interested in one of Amazon's two original TV series, "Betas". It's a comedy about a social mobile app startup going through a YC-like incubator, followed by a demo day, attempting to raise funds from VCs and angels, while spurning buyout attempts from a caricature of Zuckerberg and avoiding hit-pieces in Valleyswag.
Yeah. In the world where people are LARPing the Betas tv show, creating a product that provides immediate value to paying customers by solving a complex yet common problem is kind of wtf.