The Evolution Will be Televised

Side Prediction: In the future we will stop weaing pants.

"Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!"

"Why do you always have to say it that way?"

"Haven't you ever heard of a little thing called Showmanship"

    -Futurama 1x01

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the future lately, (mostly about what I will have for lunch and for dinner, and possibly the vaguish possibilities of a zombie apocalypse.) However, if the world is lucky enough to survive the undead uprising of 2026 I do have a few idea on where we are heading both technologically and culturally, because I as I explained briefly in a previous blogs, the two things are inexplicably linked in our society.

This actually lead me to my next point:

PREDICTION 5. THE DEMISE OF TELEVISION

I know it sounds as hard to swallow as any of the programing on TLC (at what point did they stop being "The Learning Channel," and start being the "The Exploit the Depraved and Hapless For Profit Channel?") but it's already happening. It is also best for me to clarify that I do not mean television shows, just live television as we think of it. Already TV is becoming much more personalizable (is that a word?... it is in the future.) With things like On Demand, Hulu Plus, and Netflix (all of it streaming right through my PS3) the world is already starting to become a place where TV is something we no longer have to schedule our lives around. According to a survey done by TiVo only 38% of the TV watching Americans do is "live," and Netflix is the 15th most watched channel in the US. This statistic also takes into account people watching delayed TV and is rather self-servings for the TiVo corporation, but it does make a certain amount of sense. Personally, I do not watch "live" TV unless I am bored, (which is not as often as I would sometimes like.) With the ability to shape my TV watching around my schedule I can see no reason for anyone to go back to watching TV shows according to a somewhat draconian programming schedule... well except to make sure that your jerk co-workers don't spoil the ending to Game of Thrones for you on Monday morning, (Thanks Matt... Jerk.)

All of this is compounded by the fact that with premium channels it is possible to get upwards of 1,000 channels on your TV and most of them are filled with crap I will never watch in a million years (and by that I mean reality shows.) Americans will only ever watch the smallest fraction of everything being broadcast. Even if we go with a safe estimate of an average of 500 channels that every American TV viewer has access to, and say they run programing for 20 hours a day (also a low estimate). That means we are still looking at 10,000 possible hours of TV watching to be done in a single day. According to the NY Times the average person spends 4 hours and 39 minutes. (The 39 minutes must account for the fact that no matter what I do, something always interrupts me before the end of Law & Order... All I want to know is if he is found guilty!) That means that the average person spends 4.65 hours out of our estimated 10,000 watching TV. Thus, using our numbers the average American TV watcher will only watch less than .05% of everything being broadcast on a daily basis.

This is an unsustainable system, and more importantly an annoying one. The reason there is so much crap (reality shows) on TV is because there is so much airspace to fill. I just paid my cable bill which was about 88 dollars. Roughly 30 dollars of that is phone and internet (I only got the phone because they made me get the damn bundle package.) I ran some quick calculations the other day I determined that I am paying roughly $50.00 per month for my basic cable use. I barely use it. Instead I could cancel my cable (and phone landline), just pay for my Internet, and also pay for Hulu Plus for an additional $9.99 per month and not only get the benefit of watching almost any show I can think of (except premium channel shows) but also of watching any episode of almost any show that I can think of. Even if I was feeling crazy and I added on a monthly subscription of Netflix I will still be saving roughly 20 to 30 dollars of money per month. Why am I not doing this?

Side Prediction: The trend of 3D movies will die a horrible
death only to be resurrected in another forty years.

My own financial issues aside, I can see a world where TV and movies all exist within a digital Internet queue. If you feel in the mood to watch Doctor Who, you pull up the menu, scroll to the episode you want to watch and let it fly. New episodes will be added on a weekly basis as well as new and old movies. There will probably still be some "live" screened channels such as the news and sporting events, but I am sure even that will give you the option to watch at a later time. There is a lot of implications that come with this cultural shift. Not only will phrases like prime time programming, day-time programming, or even Saturday morning cartoons become meaningless, but we will move to a world where our culture is no longer bound to the shackles of TV. We will come to treat TV more like personal movies. We will be able to watch them when we want, and we will probably become more discerning in our choices. A lot of the filler that exists will drop off and shows will compete with each other not just across "time-slots," but on a one-to-one basis. Without a need to fill airtime shows like Backwater Hicks Doing Backwater Things, I Married My Ancient Alien Abductors, and anything on HGTV will probably not survive the transition. These "boredom" shows are what people watch when they can't find anything they like on. Such shows will become obsolete, and hopefully take the reality show industry down with them, (but that may be wistful thinking more than conjectural based prediction.) Also, in this scenario the DVD rack will become something of a relic. When everything is a remote click away there will be no need to keep physical DVD's or Blu-Rays anymore. Things being as they are, I am sure that there will still be advertisements, but we will learn to live with it.

More importantly, this will really open the door more independent projects created not by big name production studios but by average people on the internet. If we start streaming all TV from the Internet it will be easier for local and Indie productions to make the jump to mainstream TV watchers. This trend will only be helped by the rapidly dropping costs of professional-grade cameras, production equipment, and digital graphics and editing programs. Culturally, this should make for greater competition and higher quality programing. In the long term, this could even spell the end for the monopolized TV industry and their network corporations. If the playing field that is TV is leveled according to quality and viewing demands than that can only be a good thing for anyone who enjoys watching quality television.

Even as far as the "industry" is concerned they should not see this move to personalized-streaming TV watching as a bad thing. In actuality, this could be the move that saves TV and movies. Online piracy is a fairly common problem. More and more websites crop up that allow people to download torrents and illegally stream movies and current TV shows. If the networks and production companies get behind a TV system where everything is streamed from the internet and available when a consumer wants it for a minimal price than I predict you will see a lot of these pirate sites close up shop pretty quickly. As a disclaimer, piracy will never go away, but after iTunes came on the scene pirate programs like Napster and Limewire wound up losing a lot of users and content. Usually, if there is a simple and cheap way to get what consumers want they will be too lazy to go through the hassle that piracy entails. If it comes to having to pay $9.99 a month for any TV show a person wants or having to set up a torrent downloader, search through the internet for a reliable download source, and finally spend a few hours downloading the content most of the lazy consumer driven public will choose the former rather than the latter.

More than likely the "industry" will survive along with some of its more powerful corporations, but maybe those who will have the greatest to loose from a system like this is the actors (or more specifically the celebrities.) In a world where there is greater accessibility to TV creation and little to no live TV the status of celebrity will start to lose a lot of meaning. A lot of this leads me to my next prediction THE DEMISE OF CELEBRITY, but I will talk more about that in my next post. For now... I'm hungry.