"Hacker News" is showing its entrepreneurial, money-focused side in this discussion. You have to be obsessed with business models to be convinced that televisi

"Hacker News" is showing its entrepreneurial, money-focused side in this discussion. You have to be obsessed with business models to be convinced that television is "losing" to the internet, just like you had to be obsessed with business models to believe that the internet was "killing music" a few years ago. Everybody still watches television and uses it as a cultural reference point when relating to other people. Despite the flourishing variety of internet-native art forms, people still turn to television for a regular fix of programming. The appetite for television programming is just another entry on the long list of things that the internet, which "changes everything," isn't actually changing. You can pass hours of time on YouTube, but the content, while passably stimulating, just doesn't bear repeating. You can't crack your friends up by making some sly reference to it a month from now. Unless, that is, you're watching something that is well-written, well-produced, and well-acted. And in that case, you'll probably call it "television" to distinguish it from random thirty-second clips of some guy farting at his cat (America's Funniest Home Videos notwithstanding.) When music moved from live venues to vinyl, it was still called music. When it moved from vinyl to cassettes to CDs, it was still called music. Now it's on the internet, and it's called... music! Television programming has been called "television" or "TV" for over half a century. I bet people will still call it "television." We think about it as "television versus the computer," but the younger generation thinks, "Why is it so hard to find television on the internet? I want to watch TV on my computer, not on the TV." That isn't contradictory at all. That's just the way the words are used. If you pick the right meaning of "TV," then TV might die, but it isn't interesting unless you stand to make or lose money on it. The TV that most people care about has a long life ahead of it.