Actually, it’s just the opposite; Firefly coudln’t survive on broadcast television (or at least, not with with the kind of promotion and marketing Fox was willing to pitch for it) but it has done pretty fantastically in the DVD market. In generally, for every worthwhile show there are twenty shows of craptastical filler. There’s really no reason to broadcast something cheap like a talk show or reality shows (which I think are a fad that is going to fade although not completely disappear in the next few years) and there are such a glut of choices in filler for those who need it that it’s just not worth the distribution and overhead costs for the major networks to make it viable.
I think the problem you are indiciating is the ability to put together enough capital to produce and market a show totally independent of the large captive market share of broadcast television. However, the cable networks have demonstrated the viability of lower budget, niche oriented programming; it doesn’t bring in the same breadth of audience that the major networks do, but they can tailor it a specific demographic that provides a consistant viewing audience. As the major broadcasters price themselves out of the market, and technology increases such that people can ignore advertising, I’d expect that more niche oriented programming will emerge, promoted by more viral and word-of-mouth marketing methods. I’ll be surprised if the Big Three plus Fox have anything like their current prominence in twenty or even ten years.
Television won’t die, but it’ll become more merged with other forms of Internet-based media, to a point that you’ll no longer have a seperate television, radio, cable box, computer, broadband modem, et cetera; it’ll all be one integrated system, more or less a progression of current multimedia enterainment computer systems. I suspect independent gaming consoles will also become a thing of the past, as much an anachronism as those Pong consoles with the dial controllers you used to get at Sears, as processing power and memory continue to drop in price and increase in performance. Game makers are already losing money on the console hardware, and if can all be done on a basic consumer grade console via licensing then there’s no reason to take a loss on selling dedicated consoles.
And to make an analogy to radio–which some predicted would survive television–yes, it in fact survived, but in a much altered form, shifting away from programming in the sense of story-telling and hard news reporting, and into genre music distribution, talk radio, and niche news and entertainment like NPR. The main popularity of radio in the Sixties and beyond, after television took root, was its portabilty, a feature that is rapidly being subsumed by broadband media.
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