Television’s Transition from Broadcast to Streaming Services

Bob Sillick from Editor and Publisher magazine, said that “television is the mightiest of media. It's the "window on the world", It's where consumer brands become legendary. It reaches almost every U.S. household (Sillick, B. 2024).”  https://go.openathens.net/redirector/volstate.edu?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/local-broadcast-tv-is-at-crossroads/docview/3168422012/se-2

I can believe this as when I was a kid, I remember fondly the entire family sitting around the television on a Saturday night and watching. It was the significance of a hard week coming to an end, and some much-needed family time. There was no remote control. I was the remote control. My father would give a command, and I would turn the knob to that channel. It was really easy for an 6-year-old, because there were only 4 channels to choose from, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. Life was easy, there was not a whole lot of thought to what you would watch. Families had a relationship with their televisions; it would entertain, through the evening and right before bed it would inform with the news, and generally all programing would end with the national anthem. Predominantly, all houses were on the same schedule. It was J. Fred McDonald that said, “Broadcast television has proved to be cultural glue which has held our society together by providing, on at least a general level, a unified, national culture with which the majority of Americans are familiar."  https://doi.org/10.2307/2712452

Now I could go into the problems of the desensitizing of everyone due to the overabundance of options, or I could go on a rant about how expensive Internet and Cable providers are, but instead I am going to talk about how broadcast television became cinema.  The big innovation of the modern-day television era was the introduction of cable TV, line of sight problems and distance limited the amount of reception of an antenna, cable was ran to be able to share antenna reception with homes, by 1988 half of American homes had cable TV. With cable TV more channels and more programming came. In 1993, the big three, CBS, NBC, and ABC began demanding a big piece of the upside from their prime-time program suppliers and began to produce massive entertainment programming themselves. Programs that they now owned and controlled completely (Decekm, P,. 2022) This to me is what changed the most with broadcast TV, as they began to produce their own content, it required more debt to be able to pay for the studios, the actors, the locations, and this made them vulnerable to take over, that is why now, Disney owns ABC (1995) , Paramount owns CBS (1999), and Universal owns NBC (2004). Merging with film companies made sense as TV shows evolved into cinema and allowed broadcasting companies to be able to continue as programming creators. As digital libraries continued to grow, more channels and outlets were required, leading to branching into multiple channels per affiliate.  

Think about the last time you walked into someone's living room, what is always there? A TV. How about every time you stay in a hotel? What is the first thing you see when you go into the room? A TV. TVs are not going anywhere, they are just getting smarter. I believe broadcast television will always be around, but the word "broadcast" defines the modern version of old-world television, and just about every signal, cable, Internet, mobile bandwidths (particularly the new version of 5G) is delivered digitally. This has opened the door to internet-based broadcasting in the areas of YouTube TV, Sling TV, and Hulu TV. Internet TV is becoming the new mainstream for watching television, as it is accessible anywhere, internet and a screen and you have live television. YouTube TV is already the third-biggest distributor and is expected to be the largest within the next few years, according to analyst projections (Flint, J. 2025). https://go.openathens.net/redirector/volstate.edu?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/youtube-tv-flexes-muscles-showdown-with-disney/docview/3267184456/se-2.

Gone are the days of foil-wrapped rabbit ears and roof-top antennas; the digital age has expanded how we receive our television and where we can view it. There will always be the antenna use, for one reason it is free, the same as there will always be those that have to have their local channels, as it is familiar, and for some reason people trust local newscasters compared to ones that you see on cable channels or the internet. Fortunately, all of the stations have made the jump to either watch through a broadcast channel or stream through an app. This includes local affiliates. Channel applications and Internet TV is creating a large portion of the world that will never know what it is like to get up, go across the room and change the channel or mess with an antenna.