ESPN subscriber losses raise questions about the TV ecosystem

Re:ESPN subscriber losses raise questions about the TV ecosy... by enobrev on Saturday December 10, 2016 @12:39AM (#13144242)

I have a hard time agreeing that these new series fall under the category of Television. TV _is_ explicitly the format in which the content is delivered (device and delivery). It used to be broadcast live, whether over the air or by cable, and those formats required payment for said delivery.

Now actual televisions aren't necessarily part of the equation. Plenty of people are watching these series on their phones and laptops and tablets, and sometimes televisions, but not in the way they used to be delivered to said screens.

I agree that we're in something of a golden age for episodic story-telling. I agree that this story-telling was born from broadcast television. I don't agree that it, in its current incantation, can be plainly categorized as "TV".

In the same way that a mobile device is no longer a telephone, though we may still call it one from time to time, and a TV remote is no longer a "clicker", no matter how many times my parents call it one.

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Re:ESPN subscriber losses raise questions about the TV ecosy... by labster on Saturday December 10, 2016 @04:06AM (#13144812)

Names of formats have a way of sticking around. The novel hasn't been new for a long time. Films are distributed with disks, and solid state disk drives have neither disks nor drives.

Language moves on. We already have a retronym[1] called "broadcast television" that incorporates what you're describing, while the definition of television will probably change with our devices.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retronym

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