Paul Graham has a great post up today entitled “Why TV Lost”
Money quote:
Facebook killed TV. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, but probably as close to the truth as you can get in three words.
Paul focuses a bit on, as he says “TV networks”, by which I think he actually means network affiliates.
The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. But they're still dragging their heels. They still seem to wish people would watch shows on TV instead, just as newspapers that put their stories online still seem to wish people would wait till the next morning and read them printed on paper. They should both just face the fact that the Internet is the primary medium.
I think the folks with the most to lose here are the cable companies and the network affiliates. I definitely want to watch the latest version of “The Office” – however, streaming it off Hulu (i.e. from NBC, not an NBC affiliate) works just fine. In this instance, the only reason I *might* need cable would be for the connectivity/bandwidth.
If I were a network affiliate who paid hundreds of millions of dollars for my license, I’d be wondering if my station was going to be valued for local news only. If I were a cable company and spent billions of dollars building out and maintaining government-granted monopolies, I be even more worried – panicked actually.
Now, when does Tivo get on this train and let me record/stream from Hulu? I can already stream from Netflix and Amazon, so I’m sure the hurdles aren’t technical.