TV (Natural Selection)

CAIRO – 12 August 2017: Netflix is going crazy, with one hit TV show after another. Everybody is on Youtube now, and Facebook just announced it will be paying its video content creators a share of the money from ad breaks.

With all this going on, one might start wondering how soon we will witness an inevitable change in the way TV works.

In an interview with Variety, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s CEO, argued that it is only possible for TV to survive through following one of two modules: either through paying a subscription and not having to see ads (like in the case of Netflix and HBO), or through ad breaks in free content. Other than that, he did not think cable TV, which relies on both subscription and advertising, will survive for long.

All this might make you wonder if this will lead to a sort of natural selection process, where TV channels, whether live or streamed, will have to exert their best efforts to win over the viewer, which might lead to more creativity and the extinction of cheap, meaningless content. We can only hope.


Netflix - Matthew Keys - Flicker