5 THE END OF TELEVISION AS WE KNOW IT

Of all the media considered here, the narrative of existential foreboding was strongest for television. Of course, existential threat seemed the case for music, although reality was less severe and, in time, became the case for newspapers. But there was no particular reason to expect that the internet's arrival would deliver the destructive implications predicted for television. As I've recounted more extensively elsewhere, the most pervasive frame of stories about the future of television in the early 2000s was of television's impending death or, with gesture to R.E.M. that I've reproduced here, "the end of television as we know it."
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Notably, this discourse—which hit its apex from roughly 2005 to 2007—emerges well after the piracy crisis in music and before smartphones, social media, and the recession challenged newspapers. At this point Netflix was still mostly distributing films by mail (Netflix 1.0) and was far more closely associated with film than television. Obvious television assailants remained unclear.