Here are two new data points in a discussion Jerry and I had back in September: will the Internet kill TV, and if so what will Internet-based TV look like?
First, Matthew Ingrahm points out Prom Queen a web-only soap opera that’s released in daily 90-second segments and has apparently racked up 5 million total viewers over the last month.
Second, Rob Hyndman points to the TEDTalks video series. As Hyndman points out, there is a long tail of video content out there: shows that individually couldn’t attract a large enough audience to secure a spot on a traditional cable lineup but that collectively could generate significant traffic. As the Internet eliminates the artificial bottlenecks now imposed by the need to organize our video watching into “channels,” the number of different things people watch is poised to explode.
My guess is that our children will have as much trouble imagining a world with only 100 channels as we do imagining a world with only 3. And there’s a good chance our grandchildren won’t even know what a “channel” is.
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