If you expand TV to include youtube and other streaming services, in a sense we're in an age of unprecedented choice.
You want to watch someone building a robot? Or building a sailboat from scratch? Smelting iron in a furnace they built themselves out of clay? Blacksmithing? Welding? Reviewing PC-98 Visual Novels? Taking apart LED lights? Picking locks? Shooting antique firearms? Using a tatoo-removing laser on themselves? Restoring classic cars? Fitting powerful rally car engines into classic cars?
We've got all of those, completely free and available on demand.
Back when there were only 4 TV channels, content had to have much wider appeal - requiring both mainstream topics, and keeping things simple enough to be accessible to almost anyone.
Great point! But even those services seem to have stagnated after an explosion in their growth phase maybe 10 years ago with novel attempts to capture eyeballs, and are becoming relatively samey in terms of content. The article even talks about the phenomenon of "instagram face" and "UGC all looks the same."
One of the weirdest to me is twitch, before twitch/justin.tv existed did you think a platform for live streaming by anyone on the planet would be used largely for watching strangers play video games?
When a new medium is presented, especially one with lots of access, people try lots of new things on it, some succeed and some fail. People pick up on trends and fads and tend to follow them, so those things become the thing you're more apt to see if you pick at random. Those trends evolve over time. If you're looking around you can find the 'different' thing that will become the new trend, and many more things that will die off.
You want to watch someone building a robot? Or building a sailboat from scratch? Smelting iron in a furnace they built themselves out of clay? Blacksmithing? Welding? Reviewing PC-98 Visual Novels? Taking apart LED lights? Picking locks? Shooting antique firearms? Using a tatoo-removing laser on themselves? Restoring classic cars? Fitting powerful rally car engines into classic cars?
We've got all of those, completely free and available on demand.
Back when there were only 4 TV channels, content had to have much wider appeal - requiring both mainstream topics, and keeping things simple enough to be accessible to almost anyone.