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Comment by imron | Hacker News Reader

You cannot kill story-telling, that's for sure, but the medium certainly changes.

TV didn't kill radio, and the Internet won't kill TV, but it will lessen its role and importance significantly, with the physical TV essentially being relegated to the role of a large, communal monitor as TV content moves to an Internet first model.

I basically watch zero over-the-air TV these days, and if there is anything of interest it will also be online (either legitimately or not) if I really want to watch something.

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Yes, that's pretty much what I meant to say as my comment above. I have not watched TV in a decade, but I hear these calls of TV dying all the time. The thing is, TV is not going to die because it is essentially fulfilling the core needs of human urges (that is, to hear and tell stories). The TV may take another shape and form, as it has in the form of Internet videos and video-watching. Who tells and creates stories (the production houses) is also insignificant.

However, TV has indeed evolved over the years. It has gone from fictional shows like Lost which made space for semi-fictional reality TV shows era (Lost was a precursor to Survivor), to Cinema-like experience of GoT. TV has also seen itself evolve so fast that fictional shows like House of Cards lost itself to the reality on the ground.

These are human evolution in terms of what we're telling ourselves via our stories. It matters less how we're telling stories (Netflix, Internet, CBS...doesn't matter).

>Lost was a precursor to Survivor

Umm. Lost premiered in 2004. Survivor premiered in 2000.

> I have not watched TV in a decade, but I hear these calls of TV dying all the time

When people say TV is dying, they don't mean TV shows will stop getting made. They generally mean you'll get all your content over the Internet (legally or illegally) instead of laden-with-ads over-the-air or cable TV.

By your own admission (haven't watched TV in a decade), TV is already dead to you.

You're arguing semantics.

If the cinemas all die out, because everyone's renting movies at Redbox or Amazon Prime or using Netflix and watching movies at home, are you going to argue with someone who says "Movies have died!"? If you do, then you're being pedantic and annoying, because they're right: the cinemas in that scenario have died. The format of a ~2-hour story in video hasn't died, but the tradition of going to a business, open to the public, to watch it on a large screen in a room full of strangers has.

Same goes here: when someone says "TV is dead", they mean watching ~50-minute video episodes through an antenna, or from a cable TV provider, with commercials interleaved. That format is dying out.

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