When I first learned about YouTube I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved the immediacy of it and the easiness of it. It started to deeply cut into the time that I would normally use for television. YouTube made it so easy to find really anything I could possibly want to watch. But I still ended up watching TV. I would watch afternoon TV, which is generally reruns of shows and stuff I have already seen, because it was relaxing. I can turn my brain off and the TV would never stop displaying images and sound. I don’t even need to be actively thinking about what I am looking at or hearing. But YouTube demanded my attention. If one video ends I have to make the constant decision to change the video to something else. YouTube needed me to be paying attention. Also YouTube does not allow me to stream live TV shows the times they air or watch sports live. So even though YouTube cut into my normal TV times, I still ended up using the TV quite a bit.
But, everything changed with Netflix and Amazon. Now practically anything I would want to watch can being accessed on both of these platforms and I can use them on my TV so my cable box became nothing more than a dust collector. I do not even have cable at my apartment here. I strictly use YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon to watch whatever I want to watch. So this leads to the question on whether or not the rise of YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix have killed TV. Really the only things TV has going for it right now is news and sports and older users still watching. A lot of older people, like my parents, still watch cable TV almost daily. It would really take a lot for them to get rid of it. So it is people who have gotten used to the TV that still use it primarily over things like Netflix and YouTube. TV has to start finding ways to compete with the programing available to Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube offer. They are all creating original series now that have gotten a lot of popularity. This means that TV has to start finding more quality programs to put on air because people will not put up with watching a bad or poorly written show, if then can watch something they actually like online. TV is dying and they need to start being more creative with their programming if they want people to plug back in and use their cable boxes again.