As part of our ongoing series that tracks the gradual transition of video content to the boob tube to online outlets, I want to draw everyone’s attention to two excellent articles in today’s Washington Post about this trend. One is by Paul Fahri (“Click, Change: The Traditional Tube Is Getting Squeezed Out of the Picture“) and the other by Monica Hesse (“Web Series Are Coming Into A Prime Time of Their Own“). I love the way Paul opens his piece with a look forward at how many of us will be explaining the “old days” of TV viewing to our grand kids:
S it down, kids, and let Grandpa tell you about something we used to call “watching television.” Why, back when, we had to tune to something called a “channel” to see our favorite programs. And we couldn’t take the television set with us ; we had to go see it! Ah, those were simpler times. Oh, sure, we had some technology we thought was pretty fancy then, too, like your TiVo and your cable and your satellite, which gave us a few hundred “channels” of TV at a time. Imagine that — just a few hundred! And we had to pay for it every month! Isn’t the past quaint, children? Well, it all started to change around aught-eight, or maybe ’09, for sure. That’s when you no longer needed a television to watch all the television you could ever want. Yes, I still remember it like it was yesterday . . .
Too true. Anyway, Paul goes on to document how some folks have already completely made the jump to an online-online TV existence and are doing just fine, although the idea of us all gathering around the tube to share common experiences may be a causality of the migration to smaller screens, he notes.
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