From the summary: "And since adult household members pay the cable bills, TV content has to be grown-up content: "The Sopranos," "Mad Men," "Breaking Bad," "The Wire," "The Good Wife."
Never in my life have I read such nonsense.
For one thing, of the shows cited, not a single one is from the last five years. (Yes, some ended within the last five years, but the most recent of the bunch in terms of start date is already six years old. Two (The Sopranos and The Wire) are more than a decade old, and predate the existence of YouTube. Only two of the shows listed are more recent than Netflix's unlimited streaming service. These shows are hardly indicative of a reaction to the internet.
Secondly, a ten-second glance at your TV is enough to confirm that these shows are a tiny, tiny minority. The overwhelming majority of shows -- while extremely adult in nature -- are plotless, crass and utterly childish drivel that is the furthest thing possible from grown-up content. Think, for example, of the entire catalog aired by Bravo, a channel once devoted to "fine arts and film", but now almost entirely populated by "reality" TV drivel. If anything, this would prove the opposite of the assertion: That TV's response to the internet has been a dumbing-down to provide a constant stream of lowest common denominator trash.
However, I wouldn't make that assertion because unlike the submitter of this article, I understand that correlation doesn't equal causation. It's just as possible we'd have gotten the same drek on our TVs even without the existence of the Internet.