Submitted by acohill on Tue, 12/09/2008 - 09:53
2008 may be the year that TV died. Lately, I have begun meeting and hearing about people that have simply disconnected their cable TV service. They can get whatever shows they want to watch off the Internet, fee or free, with less effort and with more convenience. If you are willing to pay a buck or two, you can watch a one hour TV show in forty minutes because the commercials have been removed--is twenty minutes of your time worth $2? Or put another way, if your cable TV bill is $60 per month, you can download and watch 30 hours of TV--without any commercials--for the same amount of money. If you don't mind the commercials, you can download and watch as many hours as you like for the cost of your Internet connection.
TV is dead. Cable TV is dead. Satellite TV is almost dead (satellite will hang a bit longer because in rural areas Internet access is still awful, so many rural residents can't switch to downloading TV shows). NBC has announced big cutbacks in staff and is likely to cut back programming hours as well--because fewer and fewer people have any reason to watch network TV.
The complete transition will likely take another ten years, but at the end of it, TV as we know it will have gone the way of the music store.
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