 | |
 |
 |
The Revolution is Being Televised
Pity the television programmers. Or don’t, but let’s pause to consider their lot in life. After all, these are people who once made enormous sums of money by deciding whether a sitcom or cop drama should be broadcast on Monday at 8:30 p.m. or Thursday at 9 p.m. Television programs and actors’ careers often lived or died depending on whether they landed a good time slot. Programmers had power. No more. Television programmers are the latest exhibit in the obsolete job museum, alongside radio station music directors. Just as radio stations are now largely irrelevant to determining a song’s popularity, television networks will soon be irrelevant in establishing when and what video entertainment we watch. Let me emphasize that the death of television networks doesn’t mean the death of television. The hours per week we spend watching video content is sure to increase. After all, we’re purchasing impressive numbers of high-definition big-screen televisions and video-enabled cellphones and iPods. We must be using them. And a growing number of consumers, particularly youngsters, watch “TV” on their computer screens. There’s the rub: Digital technologies and the Internet are bringing programming power to the people. The video content we watch, the people who make this content and the way they get paid for it and how and when we watch that content are all increasingly being decided by… you. We used to hear about the 500-channel universe, but that was just us being unimaginative. The reality is closer to 500,000 channels as the Internet sucks TV into its maw. Websites such as YouTube.com and Heavy.com invite the public to upload their favourite video clips onto the Internet so others can enjoy them. Just two to three years ago, it was too costly for a website to store a lot of video and stream it to viewers, but now storage and bandwidth are much cheaper. More importantly, we’re moving from a population of regimented broadcast television consumers to liberated video consumer producers. This is a very big deal. |
