I was listening to an interview with Richard Osman (the tall guy from Pointless and many other things who I have a lot of time for) where he stated that he believed that broadcast TV as we know it has around ten years left in this country.
Now, in my lifetime, I’ve seen the 5th analogue channel launched – the imaginatively named Channel 5 on 30th March 1997 – and the closure of analogue services altogether towards the end of 2012.
Now, depending on your provider, there are around 600 channels available to you. The quality, in my view, hasn’t really improved – lots of channels have little, if no, original programming and are just repeats. America a few years was the envy of our little island having a vast array of channels, but it hasn’t proved to be that greater choice equals greater quality.
I can see that television isn’t the industry to get involved with if you want a long term career anymore. Digital platforms and the internet, in particular, are the future.
BBC Three is moving online later this year – and I have been one of those who have campaigned to keep it on TV. Yet, I sit here and question my belief that it would be better there. I no longer think it would be useful to keep it on TV and do see the reasoning behind the online move.
Mrs Pitts and I very rarely sit down to watch something being broadcast. Our cluttered Sky+ box tells the tale of the things we want to watch on a whim anytime we feel like it. I have recently permanently connected our smart TV to our home network – previously it was an ad hoc arrangement which didn’t always connect well first time – so that we can take advantage of video streaming to it from things like iPlayer.
The other shift in my thinking came when I saw a report recently that “time spent online ‘overtakes TV’ among youngsters” (source). As someone who is currently spending a lot of time teaching children about the risks of the internet, this is quite a big deal.
That shift is coming and TVs now will be used more and more for delivering streamed content instead of receiving broadcast material. That excites me.
As Richard Osman said earlier today, he believes that historians will look back on our lives as being the television age. We often have two of three of them in our houses.
Maybe we are reaching the beginning of the end of that era?
