A year before I got married, a chief of medicine at a hospital I used to work at said to us residents “I’m a high-def snob — I only watch stuff on high definition.” Well, I scoffed then, but about a month after I got married, I ate a whole lot of crow. Delicious high definition crow, that is. One of the things I got as a wedding present to myself me and my wife was a high definition set. I admit that now, I too, am a HD snob and will watch almost anything in high definition, including professional baseball and PBS. PBS!
And with that introduction, I’d have to say that yes, television as it is now on standard resolution sets is dead — and the future for that sort of broadcast is some sort of symbiotic relationship with the Internet, as both a distributive medium, and a marketing arm. Standard resolution television will never go away in the same way that Radio, and even newspapers will never fully go away; they’ll evolve into something else entirely that we may not recognize from our vantage point in 2006.
High definition television, will, however, continue to live on, and stave off that future for a few years at least. And I’m in Mark Cuban’s camp on this one — the Internet is fine for watching grainy 480×640 (if that) home movies of some yahoo(!) setting himself on fire while you’re killing time at work on some 19″ monitor; its not fine for watching the latest and greatest serial drama’s in eye popping 1080p with dolby 5.1 sound.
And personally, I’ve found with a better set and a vastly improved HD signal piping through, I’m actually watching MORE television, not less.
How the internet intersects with High Definition is when, sometime in the future, some enterprising group of individuals is able to develop a compression algorithm to shrink down the size of a HD broadcast into something manageable to pass between individuals; and/or, the development of a information transportation system better than bit torrent.
When this happens, and only when this happens, then we’ll be able to make a blanket statment like “Television is dead”; the internet will have its role in chopping up the poor remains of standard broadcast television, but like the neanderthal, its being left behind for a more evolved type of organism altogether.
Now, if you’ll excuse me … I have to getting back to watching Heroes. ;)
