ABSTRACT
Television is dead. According to various pundits, it was killed by cable TV and the VCR in
the 1980s, by the Internet and video games in the 1990s, and by Netflix, TiVo, and the iPod in the
2000s.
Considering its multiple deaths, television’s corpse is remarkably active. The “total tele-
vision universe,” to use Nielsen Media Research’s term, still contains nearly 110 million
homes —approximately 90% of all households-in the United States. And over 25 million
Americans watch TV’s most popular programs on conventional broadcast networks each
week. This dwarfs the number that go see a particular movie, rent a DVD, play a video
game, browse a Web site, or download video to an iPod. Despite assaults on their primacy,
broadcast networks-ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS, and the CW-and cable/satellite
networks-ESPN, USA, Lifetime, TNT, HBO, and so on-are not prepared to concede
defeat. Television remains the principal medium through which most people obtain visual
entertainment and information and through which advertisers reach the largest audiences.
