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Television is changing. Television is cleaning up its excesses, and decluttering its messy and unwieldy business model. The future of television is here, and it’s called streaming.
In the past, if you wanted to watch a television show, you really only had two options:
First, there was terrestrial television. This was where shows would be transmitted to your set via radio waves from a local television station.
The other method was cable television. In this, you paid a monthly fee to have shows sent to your television set via cables instead of radio broadcasts (hence the name).
Each of the two had their own strengths and weaknesses.
For the longest time, terrestrial television was the cheapest means available to watch television, as it involved simply buying a television set with a working antenna, and plugging it in your living room.
This made its programming available to everyone. However, this was also a double-edged sword, as that meant it had to appeal to everyone, from children coming home from school to bored grandparents in the throes of retirement.
While many shows benefited from this wide appeal, just as many other shows had their interesting elements censored, to avoid the risk of alienating a viewer with the show’s content. Violence and swearing got toned down, if not entirely removed. Saccharine happy endings were demanded. Protagonists were made to slot into familiar archetypes. Plotlines were predictable and cookie-cutter.
What I’ve just described didn’t apply perfectly to all shows broadcast in this mode, but it did describe the ideal show for their broadcasters. They wanted shows made to appeal to as many people as possible, which mostly resulted in bland programming that interested nobody.
Cable, on the other hand, had shows for more specialised audiences (e.g. adults, fans of mystery fiction, thrill-seekers, sci-fi aficionados), and so could have programming that had maximum appeal for a certain type of viewer.
The problem for cable television, though, was that it was inefficient and expensive. Cable television was frequently sold as packages of many different channels offered together, with a steep monthly price to match. Oftentimes, though, viewers often found that only a small fraction of those channels genuinely interested them. You couldn’t just stop paying for all those other channels in the package, though. As a consequence of how the business model of cable television worked, either you paid for channels you didn’t watch, or you didn’t get any cable television at all.
Both terrestrial television and cable television shared one glaring flaw, as well. Viewers had to meticulously plan their schedules around the programming they wanted to watch. If they weren’t at their television sets during the right time slot, then the show went on without them. If you happened to miss an episode due to a sudden emergency or urgent appointment, then tough luck, it could be ages before broadcasters decided to rerun that particular episode again. This was most of the reason why television was a largely episodic affair before the rise of streaming. Missing an episode in a serialised story could mean losing an important chapter required to understand the later parts of the story.
It’s no surprise then, that everything changed when streaming TV came onto the scene. Here were services where you could watch whatever episode of whichever television series you fancied at any time, without relying on an external broadcast schedule imposed from on high. Because of this freedom to pick your programming, viewers could watch their favorite shows whenever they found it convenient, instead of having to plan their life around their favorite shows. This meant one less thing to worry about for modern viewers, who already had enough worries on their plate. This also freed up shows to be as unique as they wanted, confident that their target audience could find them easily through the search function.
As a bonus, streaming services generally cost less than their cable competition, meaning less worry over one’s wallet as well as one’s time.
Like many other innovations throughout history, convenience wins over new users more than any other quality. With the advent of cheap or free streaming services, more and more people are "cord-cutting", cancelling their cable subscriptions (or never setting one up in the first place) in favour of more efficient streaming services.
As a result, many old and established media companies are suffering from this tectonic shift.
Today’s children are growing up with the notion that how you access video content need not be dictated by the whims of a fixed broadcast schedule. Just like with a book or a game, you can begin watching a television series any time you fancy, and go through the story at your own pace. You need not complicate your life by planning around external, arbitrary time slots.
Indeed, streaming TV might be one of the few innovations that results in less clutter in our lives, rather than more.
