The Death of Television
This is a writing sample from Scripted writer Shannon Talley
Once Upon a Time, we used to watch television, ACTUAL television. We used to rush home because our shows were coming on at a certain time, or rush to do our homework so we wouldn't miss anything. In today's world we don't have to worry about that. Thanks to media convergence, more and more of our shows are becoming accessible at any time or any place. I personally don't go out of my way anymore to make sure i'm home into to watch a certain TV show. For instance, the final season of one of my favorite shows Parks and Recreation premiered last week and I didn't fret about missing the initial air date. I am subscribed to several different TV streaming sites like Hulu Plus and Netflix. Hulu is great because episodes that come on TV are put up on the site 24 to 48 hours after it's air date. Netflix is great if you feel like going on a binge watch. Anyway, I knew that I could catch the show the next day so I went on about my business. More of the world is becoming like this. We are neglecting scheduled programming because there are so many opportunities for us to view the show elsewhere. There are certain devices such as Apple TV, Google Chrome stick and the Amazon Kindle fire stick that let you stream Netflix, Hulu and other on demand sites such as HBO go, Showtime etc, on your television (so there is still use for the TV after all). These devices have yanked us away from network programming, however television still does fairly well for things like sporting events because people would rather watch those live. It's interesting to see where the future of network programming is going. As media continues to converge i have a theory that networks will automatically just stream their shows instead of having allotted showtimes for them during the week. We shall see…
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