I remember the days of my older sister and I fighting over the remote for the TV, a battle that I would often lose. During these times, there was one TV in the house, and it sat in the living room. During these times, adverts that would show TVs in bedrooms were a spectacle to me – I never imagined being would be able to watch TV away from the living room, let alone anywhere in the world with an internet signal.

Ten years have passed since, and now my wildest entertainment dreams are the norm; I can watch livestreams, TV programs, movies, content created by independent parties and much more on almost any electronic entertainment device, almost everywhere – but this diversification of glass-screened entertainment has befogged what TV really is.

In Mareike Jenner’s 2018 book, Netflix and the Reinvention of Television she stated that ‘different platforms caused the shift’ of television. TV hegemonized home entertainment before the gaming industry contended and before streaming services amassed their billions of users. So is TV – an entertainment form defined by the appliance itself and its ‘liveness’ – dead?

Statistics such as ‘nine in ten 18 to 24-year-olds saying they bypass TV channels and choose to watch content’ on other platforms suggest that it’s certainly not on the throne of home entertainment anymore (Marketing-Beat, 2022). Traditional TV is not completely dead, it can never be truly dead because of the impact that it has had on entertainment as a whole; 30-minute narratives, home entertainment, dramatic tropes, sitcom and more. Afterall, there are still 1 in 10 that choose to watch traditional TV.

What caused the dethroning of TV was the entrance and growth of streaming services that offered near complete control to the viewers. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon prime and such services did not kill TV, they redefined it. Such services became so powerful that they even caused the likes of HBO and Disney, previous broadcast TV channels, to rebrand and become streaming services.

Streaming services are powerful, but they cannot kill TV, because they are built upon TV’s evolution to VCR, DVD and box-sets.