In 2006, my parents who never watched much more than the evening news and maybe the Tour d'France, decided to stop watching TV altogether. Well, actually, our local government decided to switch from analoge broadcasting to DVB-T. Where we live, we couldn't get decent reception in this 'superior' format, so we still had a TV box in the prominent spot of our living room, but it was just a big black box now, that when turned on, showed the background noise of the Big Bang (or just snow, anyways).
Around the same time we got our first "high speed internet", in the form of an ADSL connection that gave us a whopping 4mbps download. I was now able to watch the news again by downloading it first and then placing my laptop on the table for all of us to watch. This never caught on. We just didn't watch TV anymore.
About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they'd produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It's clear now that even by using the word "convergence" we were giving TV too much credit. This won't be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call "TV shows," but they'll watch them mostly on computers.What decided the contest for computers? Four forces, three of which one could have predicted, and one that would have been harder to.One predictable cause of victory is that the Internet is an open platform. Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and the market picks the winners. So innovation happens at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds.
I still love watching movies and series, but nowadays I will watch them with friends on my beamer, or just on my iPad if I feel bored one evening. The helicon days of live TV broadcasting are indeed far behind us.
Friends with kids inform me that kids these days don't really watch TV anymore either. Their attention span and time are robbed by smaller screens nowadays.
Happy Times 😊
