Comment You keep using that word... (Score 1) 194
How Television Is Fighting Off the Internet
You keep saying "fighting off", but this...
Television shows can be sold again and again, with streaming now a third leg to broadcast and cable, offering a vast new market for licensing and syndication. Television is colonizing the Internet [...]
...this sounds more like "embracing" to me. Maybe we should clear up what we're talking about here.
TV, the medium, is dying a slow death. It has been slow to adapt to the changing reality and hasn't reacted at all to changes in the market. But the content distributed on the TV medium? The shows themselves? They have a bright future. That said, it's just a matter of time before we stop referring to them as "TV shows" and start referring to them by some other name such as "serials" or simply "shows". My guess is that within 20 years the kids will look at us funny if we say "TV show", yet that content will still exist in some other form online. And already, we're seeing some changes in the format, such as with Netflix's shows, which can vary considerably in length from one episode to the next.
For an analogue, think about the news industry. The news isn't going away anytime soon. We have an insatiable appetite for it. But newspapers? They've already lost the fight against the Internet, in much the same way that TV is losing it now. We'd scoff at anyone suggesting that newspapers are fighting off the Internet by posting their news content online. The same is true here.
We'd do well to not conflate content with the medium on which it is distributed. Old media is dying, but its content remains relevant in our society.