The Golden Age of TV Is Over

[Spot's Meow]

The old guard, TV stations with set timeslots, ads between and in shows/movies, is slowly dying and i don't see many of them survive the next 20-30 years. They will be replaced by a handful of the biggest streaming services who have the money to produce premium content at the highest quality level and people will get used to it as the internet infrastructure spreads and solidifies to allow high definition streaming to the farthest corners of the world.

While I don't doubt that streaming services will continue to grow, I do think that there will still be a place for free TV stations for a while yet. I don't mean cable channels, but rather the free broadcast channels you get with an antenna. In fact, in the past few years I've noticed a flourishing of such channels. When we first switched over from analog to digital broadcast, there were about 10-15 channels that we got by antenna in our medium-sized metropolitan area. Now, we get 30+ channels, with more being added every so often. And these aren't just shopping or infomercial stations, they actually have good content. There's ones to focus on westerns, murder mysteries, classic movies, etc. Is the content brand new and cutting edge? Not really. But it's reliable, entertaining, nostalgic at times, and best of all, totally free after you pay for an antenna. I think that there's enough room in this world for both these types of stations and the streaming services to live side by side.