Broadcast Television Is About to Go the Way of AM Radio

" Before World War II, life for most people was dominated by time-sucking work in agriculture, factories or small businesses like the local mill or general store. Nobody had much leisure, and even time was a bit arbitrary. As Steven Johnson writes in his book How We Got to Now, before railroads standardized time at the end of the 1800s, every town had its own time. Even if TV had been around then, it wouldn’t have fit with that universe.

TV grew up as soldiers returned from World War II and created a new lifestyle built on military-like precision. That generation invented a middle-class, male, white-collar worker who arrived at the office at 9 a.m., ate lunch at noon and left at 5 p.m. to drive home to a newly minted suburb. It was a scheduled, structured existence, giving people a “life” cleanly separated from work. News came in newspapers playing to that schedule, thrown on the porch in the morning before work or in the early evening, before dinner.

TV was made for that lifestyle: soap operas for the wife during the day; evening news when the husband got home; prime-time shows starting at 8, when the kids were in bed and the parents were ready to relax with a highball—all served up on one shared screen in the living room.

The home, the family and the office are all getting blown into tiny fragments that you can reassemble any way you want. Life’s old schedules are gone. We work everywhere and all the time, and enjoy entertainment everywhere and all the time. TV has changed to try to accommodate that, adding hundreds of niche channels and DVRs, but it still relies on schedules and structures like cable bundles, and remains centered on a wired single-purpose screen in a fixed place."

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Broadcast Television Is About to Go the Way of AM Radio