The Independent Voice of Southern Methodist University Since 1915

The Daily Campus

The Daily Campus

The Independent Voice of Southern Methodist University Since 1915

The Daily Campus

The Independent Voice of Southern Methodist University Since 1915

The Daily Campus

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Brian Richardson, Contributor • March 28, 2024
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Steve Jobs killed the TV star

I can safely declare that TV has secretly been dead for years. In fact, we’re carrying a rotting corpse into the mausoleum.

TV is making its new home on your tablet device. The days of huddling around a black box, like the days of huddling around a radio listening to Howdy Doody and FDR, are dead in the water. Steve Jobs is your god now, America.

Data collected by Motorola revealed that more households view television programming on a tablet device in their bedrooms than they do on a TV in the living room. The study (released last year) took a look at 9,500 consumers spread out over 17 countries and found that video consumption trends were shifting rapidly.

According to the study, consumers around the world watch an average of 19 hours of TV a week (Americans actually watched an average of 23 hours of TV a week). Films got a bump, too: 5 to 6 hours a week.

Now here is where the on-demand trend gets some love. A third of that 19 hours of television is pre-recorded content that consumers choose to watch at a later time.

The newest bit of jargon among media companies is the multi-screen viewing experience. The idea is that (like in that cheesy commercial), you’ll get up off your ass in the living room, hit pause on the Michael Bay flick you’re watching and poof, you’re in the bathroom with a tablet hitting resume and catching up on “Transformers 10.”

Companies increasingly want to load content onto mobile devices and engage consumers with that content through social media platforms. There are crappy aspects of this transition, but I think it’s good for us in the long run (good in the sense of easy consumption, not in the sense that watching 23 hours of TV on your iPad weekly is good).

A year from that study, though, we can make tweak projections and predictions to reflect our present reality. My forecast is that apps will kill TV pretty quickly. Mobile app development is the forefront of media tech today, and if you’re blessed with a subscription to HBO Go (and watching “Game of Thrones” every Sunday) you know exactly what I mean. The traditional models are dead.

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