YouTube is not great, TV is not dead, but it is dying.
It will be over soon, and you can see its slow agony.
When most young people prefer to spend their time in front of a computer screen and do not care a bit anymore for what They are broadcasting on TV, when the only people who really watch regularly TV are the old people who have nothing better to do and nothing else they know how to do, when even the commercials beging to be less effective on TV, then you realize that something IS changing.
TV, the old style TV will disappear as well as the old style television set.
In its place there will be a monitor, big, small whatever, connected to a computer in front of which people will consume their meals.
With one hand, while with the other they will click with the mouse or in the future who knows, they will use both hands and communicate with the voice.
But hands or voice or whatever, THEY want to be a part of the entertainment.
They do not want to consume, they like to produce.
Because creating is million times better than watching.
In a conversation the amusing is being able to talk, not only listening
Yes TV, as sad as it can look to people of my generation, is definetely changing.
It began as Home entertainment, and to stay as it began it needs to follow the patterns of the new entertainment.
It has to become the Place where you watch and you show.
Just like the Internet.

Historically, movies were tied to theaters much the same way that TV sees itself linked to flow channels. I’m sure, that when tv came along there were those that argued that movies outside theaters would not be movies. And probably they said that theaters were important, because nobody would want to sit in solitude and watch movies.

They probably also said, that “theaters would never die” and therefore “movies would remain the same”. Well, they were of course right and wrong.

Theaters still exist (as will flow channels), but their role has fundamentally changed, insofar as theaters now primarily act as platforms for launching movies, not for all consumption of movies. Nowadays, a movie is watched so much more via dvd, tv and internet that it’s the movie itself that is an important medium; not the theater. In the same understanding, the flow channel could easily evolve into the big launch platform for “tv-videos” or whatever we choose to dub this new, liberated tv-format.

The fact that movies have gone through this change over time, may also explain why it’s been so relatively easy for movie studios to embrace new forms of distribution, whereas “tv studios” in many countries have been so closely connected to their “theaters”, that they see all new distribution forms as something that they must somehow combat rather than embrace.

And I’d hardly call American Idol Matisse.

With all due respect Jeff, are you seriously suggesting that armchair critics like yourself define a media in the same way and with the same weight as people who actually make television programmes? That’s rather like saying that the people who wander around galleries and go home to make a simple watercolour define what art is as powerfully as (say) Matisse.

There’s still a certain charm and allure about sitting down to watch something live, as it happens. In the same way as there is buying a Sunday paper and leafing through, battling the crowds at Selfridges or wandering round a record store. It’s easier to buy from Amazon, certainly, but far less satisfying than browsing

Keep up the great blog.

Cheers,
Kempton
Canada