Television and the Internet Age
Out of all the different types of media through history that have been made massively available to society and adopted as standard, the one that rose to prominence the most rapidly was television. A case could be made that this phenomenon is because it was instituted later in history as compared to the rest, but then the internet’s slow growth to a household commodity could be referenced as a counterexample. Television seemed to boom overnight. At the start of 1941 radio held eighty-one percent of all broadcast audiences. By the conclusion of that same year, television would capture forty-one percent of that market. It does not take long to conclude that television grew massively quickly, right out of the gates. The world has watched television move from a handful of channels and programs broadcast in black and white, to the incorporation of hundreds of different channels broadcasting thousands of programs, to massive databases of television shows that can be accessed at a moment’s notice (Fiske). While it is hard to say where television will go in the next twenty five years, a look at the body of progress made over the past seven decades tells us that wherever television is headed, it is headed there fast. To determine television’s future, it is important to analyze recent changes in the way that it is consumed, and to assess the potential that these new avenues for consumption have to change television forever (Williams)
Five years ago, the pinnacle of television viewing convenience was the digital video recorder. Since the introduction of DVRs at the turn of the century and their ascent to gain a place as a fairly common household item, the DVR established itself as the ultimate television consumption device. Before the DVR, if you had not recorded a show onto a tape using your VCR, and you missed that show, you were out of luck. Suddenly with this new technology, television could be paused, even rewinded, and...