I was a Pats fan when they were bad, but that was 1975 and I was young and I lived in New England and you rooted for them anyway.
I'm in Walmart this morning and I see a young kid with his father, probably as young as I was when I was really aware of television. As they're walking towards me on the same aisle and the dad and I acknowledge each other, the kid points to a television and says "That's a television. We don't have a television!"
His father is pretty quick to remind him that yes, they did have a television. I look down at the kid and tell him "Dude, if you're America, your house is littered with televisions."
The kid is quizzical and I couldn't gauge the dad's reaction as they walked off. It was probably something like "That's a weird thing to say to a kid" or "Oh, wait, he's totally right".
American households have an average of 7 screens. If you figure the suburban scenario of:
- TV in the living room
- TV in the master bedroom
- Computers
- Mobile phones
- Kindle/Nook/iPad
So, most of those screens aren't connected to what old people traditionally think of as "television", but that's no longer relevant. With the rise of YouTube TV, PSVue, NetFlix, Hulu, AmazonTV, lots of traditional TV content has made it to regular TV screens. I even got ads for the first two from my game consoles trying to get me to watch the Super Bowl via a free trial of their service.
The Nintendo Switch now even has a YouTube app. Facebook has original shows now.
That is only part of the story. We're at a point now where this is only a fraction of the video content that's out there. People on their own generate lots of their own video content. That's what YouTube was built on (an average of 300 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute), and that's what streaming services like Twitch are built for. Facebook and YouTube also allow for streaming. Twitter got in on this action by acquiring Periscope.
So, if you're not up for the Super Bowl but the couch is too comfortable today, just remember there's lots of other things out there to watch. (Including my channel, SuperMonkeyCube, and my dog's channel, Kal and Friends.)
