IS TV DYING????? REST IN PIECES

Holdup!!! IS THAT WHAT I HEARD YOU SAY! TV IS DYING?!?!?!
We all been there, watching TV from sunset to sunrise, and even just possible imagining to marry your TV. Well before you call it quits with your TV, just listen to me a bit, TV is dying, and that's a good thing!

We had theaters, movies, radio then TV. But all media have a lifespan and I for one am pleased that TV will be demoted to a has-been medium. It will not disappear. Nothing disappears. But it will die back to being a minority medium. That’s inevitable. I’d argue that it is also a good thing. TV among the young has been falling year on year for the last ten years, as they drift towards the highly participatory culture of the web, through second screens, social media, games, downloaded and streamed media and smartphones. For the first time the young are fleeing from TV to the internet where they communicate, make, share, collaborate. 

I argue that the use of TV is dying because of video games, a new popular website called Youtube and the all so famous social medias.

Video Games
Kevin Spacey is the star of the new Call of Duty game – it’s that serious. The games industry is now bigger than the film industry and has sucked a whole generation of young people away from watching TV. This is not second screen stuff, this is using other devices, games consoles, PCs, tablets and mobiles to do something they see as far more thrilling and participate than TV. One effect is the raising of the game with regard to interactivity. These gamers don’t want second and third rate TV. Their bar is too high.

Youtube
YouTube has become a direct rival to TV. It has become a searchable media platform, with over 1 billion unique users and over 6 billion hours watched a month (an hour for every person on Earth). This is waymore than any cable network. Then there’s Vimeo and Vine. Kids have watched viral youtubers such as KSI, or Pewdiepie for hours on end, that even watching TV for a split second will create second guesses.

Social Media
Another pull that takes millions out of the orbit of TV is social media. Facebook, Twitter, blogging, LinkedIn, Flickr, Instagram, WhatsApp, SnapChat. The rise of social media platforms with audiences as large as 1.5 billion and others at many millions, has bitten a huge chunk out of TV viewing. Even when people are watching TV, they’re usually doing something social.

TV is dying. The money, mainly ad revenue, is flooding off to other screen-based media. TV screens are becoming a small subset of all screens as mobiles, tablets, consoles and computer sales go through the roof. In terms of content traditional TV fare, soap operas, sitcoms, quiz shows etc. have to compete with streamed stuff – movies, as well as games, YouTube, Social Media. The TV industry is also dying as new players enter the fray, Netflix, Amazon…. I, for one, do not regret its demise. It has been a 50 year aberration, dominating our lives but it is a passive, wasteful medium that has trapped us into fixed content and patterns of thought.