Television VS. Online TV Shows

It's Tuesday night, and your favorite TV show is on, but you have a huge test to study for. Sadly, like the good student you are, you study for your test rather than watching your favorite TV show. I am sure this has happened to many of you, and if not for a test, other activities have prevented you from watching a television program you really wanted to see. Where do we turn to? The internet. More and more television series are appearing online. It is almost as if, why do we need television at all? As long as there is a link for it online that we can watch, we don't have to wait for a specific time at night to watch the show with all the commercials. Instead why not relax, and skip most of the commercials?

There are so many online websites now to watch television shows; tvduck, projectfreetv, ch131, CW, ABC, etc. The list goes on. All the big television stations have an online website with the television shows played on their station. It's easy access! Why do we use television anyway? Background noise? Now I am sure many of you have televisions in your room, and do watch things on it, such as sports games, the weather (etc) but how much do you watch things on your computer? Maybe this is just for me personally, but I do not have a television in my room, so mainly all of my television shows are watched online, especially since even if I wanted to watch any shows, I am usually busy with clubs and band in the evenings. Online television shows have recently become a big deal, because many of them aren't copy righted, so technically they are illegal. Remember SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act)? It was a bill to 'promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property and for other purposes' (1) And there was also PIPA (Protect IP Act). So think about it if these bills went through.. and all those who committed piracy acts would be shut down. How many websites do you think would still be up and running? On January 18th, over 115,000 websites including Wikipedia shutdown, striking the SOPA and PIPA bills. (2) I remember if you went to the Wikipedia website on January 18th, it was dark and you couldn't click into the search box. Along with websites shutting down, millions of people wrote to congress asking them not to pass the bill. As for now, the bills have been postponed to address at a later date, but it will be interesting to see where this takes us. I know that these bills addressed a lot more things besides piracy, but it is interesting to think what would happen to the internet if millions of websites were shut down. Would more arise? Would people strike?

Technology has been dominating our lives constantly, and this is just another part of our lives that we must consider. Will televisions soon be a thing of the past to our children or grandchildren? I am sure that television will still remain in our lives for a while longer, but who knows if it will ever die out. We have access to so many more things than we ever had before and only we as the consumers can decide where we want to go from here. The producers won't produce things that we won't buy. Television is great, but now advertisers can place their ads elsewhere around the world, on automobiles, before movies, online, and so what will be left to support these stations? Maybe the future will have television combined with the computer as one product, we do have online streaming now. So even if a show is 'live' we can see that online as well. It's hard to tell how long the technology we have will remain in the future, because in my life span so many different types of technology advances have been made. Only time will tell.




(1) http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c112:1:./temp/~c112oJ2iyR:e0:
(2) https://www.google.com/takeaction/