A focus on quality of life
I do think that people today want better quality of life. Just yesterday I was asked quite an interesting question. What if you didn%u2019t spend any money on any products having to do with fashion or technology, or basically on stuff you don%u2019t really need, to put it in a broader sense, then what would you spend your money on? Just living of the bare necessities and nothing more. Where does your disposable income go? Take a couple of minutes to think about that question, before you read on%u2026and I’m sure you’ll come up with stuff that is about improving the quality of your life: educate yourself, work on your health, travel?

The Black Death of TV
So, if we take my friend’s premise for granted and we do experience a focus on the quality of life and suppose that it was caused by a new kind of Media Black Death. Then what was that Black Death, the disease that infected us all? Well, not really all of us. The Black Death of TV was caused by the industry itself.

As ‘airtime’ has become less and less scarce, anything can go these days. We’ve got more than 10 TV channels in the Netherlands, I won’t even count the ones that are present in the US. Not only did audiences shatter and become fragmented all over these channels, making the business models less and less profitable, every single channel was chasing after the same TV hit (going for the head of Anderson’s Longtail). Did reality TV even exist a decade ago? Now every channel I flick to is reality TV. It is this hit-factory attitude that caused a disease to grow. A disease that has killed innovation (not in technological terms, but more importantly in storytelling terms). Maybe that is what my friend was trying to get across with ‘the status quo of doing business’.

The revival of TV as a business
Can TV survive? Sure they can, if they find that focus on the quality of my life and are able to help me in filling that in. That doesn’t have to do with the box or the content, but rather with the business. And I know TV execs want clear cut answers (or rather still: “give me that TV hit”), but that will not get them better. Ask yourself: would your life be qualitatively better if it looked just like your friend’s, if you continuously looked for the maximizing effect?