I read this article with a sense of “Meh”, because I stopped watching “The Telly” back in the 2000’s, with only occasional exceptions like the 2011 Christchurch Earthquakes. Even then, social media proved to be better as people uploaded good quality videos and photos taken on cellphones, while TVNZ was shut down on local coverage due to damage. IIRC TV3 was able to keep going.

For me, TVNZ was the first to go, around 2000, as I finally embedded back into NZ from the States and was amazed at the amount of coverage of the British Royal Family, something I figured was due to Princess Diana hangover. Even so I hung on to their broadcasts of The West Wing, until the last season was dumped into the 11 o-clock slot on Friday night – and even then was intermittent. I went for BitTorrent, which in those days meant literal weeks to download a TV series. But to cuddle up in bed with Beloved Wife and watch the series in HD on the laptop when we wanted to, was bliss compared to the programmed bullshit of TVNZ.

Then it was TV3, dumped in late 2003, after months of John Campbell breathlessly telling me that the little munchkins arranged on the street to protest the Iraq War were an example of how the war was so terrible that even children could understand and be opposed to it.

That left cable; to be precise in NZ, SKY TV. The following recent news on cable TV is from America but tracks with my experience:

Here’s an experiment: Spend an hour or so surfing back and forth among basic cable channels, and then tell me what year it is. As I wrote about last August, cable is a zombie wasteland, a set of ghost towns airing reruns, movies, reruns of movies, and reruns of reruns. Suites of cable networks have been bundled into spin-off corporations by Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery as if they were parasitic, toxic assets that needed to be hived off before they infected and destroyed the host. These companies still make a lot of money, but that profit is collapsing as advertisers figure out that maybe viewers aren’t so keen on sitting through the 56th showing of The Office that evening.

Hell, even in the US I dumped cable TV back in the early 90’s for precisely this reason; why the hell should I pay for a hundred channels I’d never watch simply so I could have ESPN and CNN (yes, I did watch them).

But cable isn’t the only issue. Of the top 68 highest-rated single programs on all television in 2024, broadcast or cable, 65 were sporting events; number 39 was the Sunday Night Football studio show during a weather delay in October. Only two scripted shows, CBS’s Tracker and Young Sheldon (which ended last year), made the top 100. Sports are the last thing keeping the broadcast/cable television apparatus alive, and the gradual movement of sports programming into streaming, most notably Amazon’s grab of a share of the NBA contract for next season, signals that will meet its end, too.

Even sport wasn’t enough to save SKY for me. I knew that the night in 2001 when I went to bed with the Springboks playing against the All Blacks in Otago, a game with all the filthy weather and cold of Carisbrook – but now with lights at night. That year the Bok’s backline wasn’t good even on the high veldt, so with the backs wearing gloves I settled in for what I knew would be a dull game. With 20 minutes remaining and the All Blacks leading by only 9 points I switched off “The Tube” and headed for the sack. If you had told childhood me in 1976 that I would do such a thing I’d have laughed at the impossibility of it.

And so to streaming…

We are in the midst of this giant transition of television from networks into streaming channels that have no fixed lineup. Appointment viewing, other than live sports, is simply a thing of the past. Small armies of staffers that built the model of a television network, thinking hard about lead-ins and demographics and time slots, are no longer needed.

Netflix worked pretty well from the late 2000’s on. Sure, it required a bit of buggering around with a VPN, the NZ connection further covered by foreign payment services, but it was worth it for a few years because as almost the only streaming service they could pull an incredible range of TV shows and movies from other companies.

Except that those companies, like Disney, discovered the sweet, sweet revenue streams of streaming and began to pull their stuff from Netflix. The latter threw hundreds of millions of dollars at developing new series and as usual in the last century of TV and movies, had hits like The Crown and Better Call Saul, and misses (Fubar, the Arnold Schwarzenegger action drama) on perhaps a 50:50 basis.

I dumped Netflix around 2017, so missing the last three seasons of Better Call Saul – something I will correct at some point – and retreated to the world of the mid-2000’s, BitTorrent and all, with only the occasional side-trip into “One Month Free” on things like HBO for series like Chernobyl (HBO) and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (Prime).

As you can see from this history, Broadcast TV, Cable TV, legacy TV, “linear TV”, is dead:

But even talking about winners and losers in this category obscures the ratings reality. The CBS Late Movie, a rerun it aired against The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in the 1970s and ’80s, had an audience in 1972 of nearly seven million adults per film, nearly three times as many viewers as Colbert’s “top-rated” Late Show a half-century later. The movie cost nothing but library rights. The Late Show costs $100 million a year.