Damon Lindelof, showrunner of
Lost, boldly proclaimed it in
an article in the New York Times: "Television is dying."
By golly, I think he's right. Okay, okay, I've been thinking he's right for several years now. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that almost 100% of the TV shows I have watched since my sophomore year in high school (six years ago now!) have been downloaded. I am more surprised that everybody hasn't already ditched their TV sets for broadband internet connections than I am that (shock) "television is dying."
Sidebar: My first foray into downloading TV was motivated by a TV show not being available in my market.
Enterprise only aired on UPN, and UPN did not broadcast in my hometown. I discovered an alternate way to watch the show.
But now there are numbers to back up this assertion that "television is dying."
Ars Technica covers a recent study done by the University of Pennsylvania. Only college students were surveyed, so the below percentages are not representative of the general population. That being said, college students are the TV viewers of the future.
- 2005-06 Season: 72% of all shows watched were on a television
- 2006-07 Season: 55% of all shows watched were on a television
- Although the percentage of shows watched on a television decreased between the two seasons, the average time spent watching shows increased by 1.5 hours
Morgan Webb referenced in a recent WebbAlert that the 1988 WGA Strike is often considered one of the causes of the rise of popularity of cable over network TV in the late 80s early 90s. She hypothesized that the current strike might spark the transition from traditional TV to internet TV.
The strike might catalyze it, but the transition has already begun, and there is nothing the giant Hollywood studios can do about it. Indeed, "television is dying."
