The end of TV?
I had this for an extra credit assignment. I went to Mac D to write it out. Then suddenly, it got so interesting, i decided to blog it. Here it goes :p
Talking about the end of television spells out the notion of more computers, more bandwidth and gadjets that you can only see a person using in the shows like Star Trek. However, it's a pity that technology has not come to that stage yet and we're not yet ready to have wars with the Klingons or face being assimilated by the single-minded Borg.
Television will be around for a very long time, if not forever. The largest threat that television faces is the internet, but the thing that holds the Internet from indefinitely taking over the status quo, is ironically the very thing that created it: technology itself. People might have thought that shows could be streamed online so fast, that you could just download them and get it for free, so why watch tv? It's because the fact that would only be true 20 years ago, when images were still black-and-white and video games were still 2D. Now, you have 3D-graphics-cards and over 300 types of colour streaming on tv. It would take at least 1 gigabyte, compared to the hundred megabits, of bandwidth to get all that information streaming on the Internet at a tolerable speed. Plus, the screen on YouTube that you watch is only around four or five inches, but the show on tv can go as big as the tv screen goes. Imagine the huge monitors that NASA ground control has. TV can transmit shows on that thing, live and streaming with no buffer time!
Another thing to remember, is that a kid with a video camera that does not give a shit about making a good movie, will alwaysk be that kid with a video camera that does not give a shit about making a good movie. Let's not talk about people that are born to be stars; let's talk about the average person. The first thing you do when you get your hands on a Panasonic AGDVX100 24P digital movie camera, you're going to do something so utterly amazing (to yourself only - serious): you're going to say "hi" to it, I repeat "it". Unless you're really into making movies, you don't plan your whole life based on something you can't have. It's a pretty expensive piece of equiptment too, so let's add to the list something that you can't offord too. But, unless your mum or dad is some camwhore, tough luck them getting one for you. So let's add something ou would never end up having, as well. Conclusion, not everyone is born a star and even stars have a long ladder to climb, by then you'd already be in a studio shooting something for the one-and-only tv! So tv is here to stay because shows are bound to get better as the viewers get more bored, and everyone prefers a 50-inch-high-definition-television-screen compared to the 19-inch-GeForce 8600-equipted-computer screen. Plus, you got things like the PS3 and who knows, you might have an arcade station parked in the living room in the near future.
Another matter to realise is that tv allows the best form of instant gratification. With tv, you can laze around and click through the channels available on cable for a good show that's bound to be showing somewhere. However sucky you might think tv shows are or however predictable tv shows might have become, there are still bound to be one or two good shows showing on one of the hundreds of channels you can get on cable. The probability that cable tv is showing not a single good show is like trying to say that the whole world just experienced a wave of brainwashing and tv became the number one enemy of the citizens of earth. Don't tell me that the 300 channels or more on cable, not one of them, all showing different shows, all having differene audience types, all having different strategies, don't have a single show that you are even a little bit interested in? I mean, that like having 300x300x300=2,700,000k varieties. And the probability of you only liking one is like 1/2700000 which is lesser than you getting a hole in one! It's almost impossible that you like only one, which means that you probably like more than one. You can get that tv show by just clicking through the channels, when you find it you just got your time filled with nothing more than a press of a button!
Another thing to consider is money politics. Although there may be a lot of worth in your movie clip that you produced/directed/hosted yourself, there's only a limited audience, because not everyone knows you and thus not everyone is going to watch your little homemade video clip. But you couuld get more coverage through a big time tv company. That's where money politics comes in. TV still holds the big money, because everyone on the net is mostly out for free stuff. Anyone charging is going to lose viewers that some of them can only pay for their Internet bill, let alone buy your video clip. While tv companies hold that revenue, they hold the big bucks. So, however you see it, you're still going to turn to them if you wanted a bigtime hit on the big bucks and celebrity status. The megalomaniacs who control the cash flow are not going to say, "Okay, sure, let's scrap tv, it's getting old." It'd be corporate suicide and they're not about to let go of their billions of dollars of monthly turnover just like that - unless their the next Bill Gates. So, they got the money, you want it and they're not going to let go of it and you can't make them - not yet, at least.
Another matter of thought is the issue of convergence and diversity. From an economic perspective, it's a good thing because multidisciplinary actions have always brought on much faster and better technological advancement in any field(s). Look at the PDA, it's a convergence between fields of computing, accessories and handphones. However, corporate entities don't like this. There's proof of this when phone companies began to build and launch phones that could act like mini-computers. The computer manufacturers were afraid that handphones would eventually replace computers, leading to their loss of employment. What happened? Some agreement was made that handphones wouldn't integrate too much of computing stuff into their products. Don't you notice that PDAs are somehow not that "hot" anymore? What happened to all that hype when a mini-keyboard for handphones was created? Now it's all been replaced by Intel's Core 2 Duo technology that's taking the computing market by storm. Perhaps these PDAs are still in use, but advertisers seemed to have lost interest in promoting them and they've somehow reframed PDA into a sort of accessory rather than trying to make it a neccessity like they did with handphones and computers. In this same context, television will end if Internet somehow integrates with tv. But corporate entities don't like this, so there's some logic to thinking that they are somehow controlling this merger. In a sense, corporate-moneymaking has taken control over the flow of technological advancement to a certain extent. Money is all that counts, right? What's an invention or research, compared to being able to make a million bucks the next day?
Here comes something wacky :p
Let's say, you take everything off the tv set and make it all available online, and people can download it then view it on tv for a charge. Or they have subcriptions and you go to this site to download content. Of course, there's still free stuff for the sake of preserving the market in an economic sense. By then, everyone would be couch potatoes, gliding in wheel chairs, having "muscle" therapy, getting homeschooled, doing work from home, Mac Donald's would be serving with robots with dine-in meals more expensive than delivery orders and we'd all be having virtual sex for virtual babies (that is a problem, end of the line of the human race. Maybe we'll all become virtual entities living in cyberspace with cyber babies and anyone who holds the plug could accidentally commit murder by tripping over the powerline. Wow...) Okay scrap the last part, we'd still have social events and really, really nice cars like the Honda S2000 :p. So the future aint so bleak - hopefully. Back to the topic, tv might serve for a totally different purpose. Internet takes all the shows and movie stars still have all their money, just that everything's on the net. But what bugs us mostk when you're watching shows or online? Those friggin advertisements and pop-ups! Don't you just hate them? Let's get rid of all that from the Internet and put it on tv. If you've not already guessed it, i'm saying that tv becomes the new yellow pages and you click channels not for shows but for adverts for stuff you want. Shops, your local grocery store and even Mac Donald's can advertise on channels with no more advertisement length limits! Why? It's not disturbing the shows anymore. Imagine the totally new dynamics of advertising, example: making an advert series and it'll be war of the advertisers. Plus, news channels can broadcast live on their own sites on the net, with newscasters doing live feeds 24/7. Wow what a future - if it actually happens, lol.
Conclusion, however big an Internet fan i am, sadly tv is here to stay. But there's nothing that says it wont stay for the better, right? ;)
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