To the great chagrin of floundering Tonight Show host Conan O'Brian, NBC was sold to Comcast Corp. and not Jay Z as he had hoped.
Usually, I get really scared about the size of these huge media conglomerates. You see, someone forgot to tell the FCC that it was more important to stop Rupert Murdoch from owning the entire country than it was to stop unpixelated pictures of Adam Lambert kissing a man from appearing on Good Morning America. But seeing NBC going down for pennies on the dollar is something I find kind of heartwarming.
You see, it actually means something wonderful. Television is dead!
I'm not just talking network television. I'm talking about all television. The networks will go first, but soon it will all be gone. Personally, I think it's a good thing, maybe even a great thing — just stay with me and let the future enfold upon you like a gentle dream.
Being a network now means next to nothing.
Some people claim that there are still hoards of people down South or in the poorer urban landscapes of our country who only have access to four channels. Not only do these people only watch these four stations, but they are so lazy and ignorant that they pick what they are going to start watching at 8PM and then leave on that same station until they go to sleep at night.
Really?
I remember 1975. There were three channels that got good reception. You didn't have a remote control. Imagine having to describe that to your kids: Back in the day, we had to get up off of our asses and actually manually change the channel! I bet they'll be more likely to believe that you walked three miles to school through three feet of snow from the age of five on up. There were other weird UHF stations, but you were likely to get a lot of fuzz and vertical skipping with them. A show would have to be really good back then to actually make watching UHF worthwhile.
It's no longer 1975.
The people without cable television these days are mostly intellectual snobs who have forsaken the medium completely. On the other hand, there are ten times that many people who now have remote control cable access in their cars.
(When I was young and my family went on a road trip, I'd be crunched up on the floor of the backseat of an Oldsmobile with a comic book or two. My sister’s kids ride in a luxurious van. They each have their own recliner and their own entertainment system. If my parents drove at night, I was basically stuck staring at the back of my father's head for two hours. Today's kids have their choice of like 400 different DVDs to watch. That, in and of itself, is better than any vacation my family ever took! )
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