Death of TV

Recode projects the image of the decline of TV through this article.

After years of steady increases, the number of TVs in homes shrank to an average of 2.3 in 2015, down from an average of 2.6 televisions per household in 2009, according to the latest available data from the Energy Information Administration.

Source: TV sets are starting to disappear from American homes – Recode

I don’t see it as a decline and certainly this is not the death of the TV screen. This is about the balancing of the types of display devices in the home through the growth in new technology.

The reality is that before the last 10 years we had a main display in our living area and a collection of satellite screens to allow the continuing consumption of video when we were in our kitchens, dens, children play rooms and bedrooms. It is these ‘satellite screens’ are the ones that are in a process of conversion from the single use TV to the multi-use computers and tablets that now inhabit those satellite areas of the home. This is not the death of TV, but the expansion in the utility of displays in the home so that they do more than entertain, but actually provide our access to other utilities and entertainment. This is an actual increase in consumption points in the home, not a reduction, and ultimately there is still a need for the main screen. We are migrating from 3 screens to 14 for a family of four.

The article also ties this to a ‘reduction’ people watching TV, but that depends on whether you see that as the device or the service and I fall on the side that TV is the service. From that perspective, this is not a contraction but an actual expansion which also goes along with the view that actually more and more people are actually paying for TV but that TV is from a wider variety of sources. Where we have ‘cord killers’ moving away from the traditional PayTV providers, in actual fact they are converting to the new world PayTV providers that provide their content over the Internet. Even then, the overall PayTV numbers the world over are actually increasing and not decreasing, even more so when you add the new world Pay TV (OTT services) to the numbers. TV, as a service, is not dying… we just have a lot more screens to watch it on.

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