What is the Future of Television

Since the first television broadcast ever in the U.S. in the early 1930s, our lives have become more wonderful. For over 80 years, black-and-white television evolved to color television, traditional analog television into new digital television. Today, we can watch our TV programs and favorite shows anytime anywhere we need, thanks to the introductions of new media, the new media have impacted the over-the-air TV station for the past decade. What are the futures for the TV stations? How the new media are going to impact them in the future?

Let's understand a little about the history of television. During the very early years when the television was introduced, there are only few TV stations, but the numbers have significantly jumped after World War II. In the 1950s, there have been three major TV networks - NBC, CBS and ABC dominated the market, and that was considered as the golden age of TV. However, in the 1980s, cable TV networks began to eat up the numbers of audiences for tradition TV networks, VCR also made the continuing erosion of the three big networks' increased competitions. As the new TV networks like FOX, as well as WB and UPN (which have been merged as a new network called CW few years ago) began broadcasting, audiences have had more choices on TV programs.

There are generally three main things that impact the TV networks nowadays and the future, one is the development of VOD (Video-on-Demand), the other two, which are considered the biggest threats to the TV networks, are Internet and mobile media. The recent years of introduction of digital video recorder (DVR) marked a new milestone for the TV history. The DVR's main selling point is the abilities to record the favorite TV programs on a hard drive. In addition, DVR has been also developed a whole new ways to watch TV, the abilities to pause, rewind and fast forward a TV program, which is called on-demand. Because the service has become very popular in just few years, TV networks joined the TV service companies to provide the similar kind of services.

At this time, there are two other ways to be able to watch TV programs, one is the Internet, another one is the mobile media, these two media have been competing the major TV networks for many years, forcing them to explore the new media in order to survive. Internet even has been common use for our daily lives for a decade; it has not been the main function of promoting products of TV organizations until the recent few years. As the Internet developed in the later years, the major TV networks thought there are much potential to reach more audiences via Internet, as well as more efficiencies to promote their programs and products, then they changed the manner treating the Internet, and Internet has become important to the TV networks. For example FOX, when you log in to its homepage, you will find couple video clips on the right hand side, audiences can preview their favorite shows before they are on air, as well as some exclusive video clips. In case we miss the show, we can catch it via FOX on demand website. These kinds of services, like the abilities to have audiences interact with the TV networks, have never been provided before.

The mobile media is another kind of the new media that have the power threatening the survival of TV networks. The current trend of this kind of media is to send television programming to different handheld devices, particularly cell phones, before that, portable television sets had been in the market for many years. As the mobile technologies developed, TV networks felt that they should also explore this new medium in order to survive, then many cell phone service providers partner with them, offering customers mobile versions of TV programs. For example again, FOX provides a mobile TV channel with 24 hours programming to a Verizon Wireless user with monthly subscription fee. Mobile media has big advantages that people can watch their favorite shows anytime anywhere they want, just like Internet, mobile media can do more things than the traditional TV, and have become the key products for TV networks.

In my conclusion, all four major TV networks understand that the future of media will be the Internet and mobile media, this is also a major trend, TV networks want to survive for now even the future years, so they choose to treat the new media more positively, this is a win-win situation, and I think this status will continue in the future. On the other hand, when the analog TV signals are going to be shut down in about 10 months, we will enter another big milestone of television history. Accepting the new is the theory of survival.

Source: Dominick, J. R. (2007). The Dynamics of Mass Communications. The McGraw-Hill Companies.