So… the entertainment industry has known all of this to be fact for more than ten years. We all know that television is going to belong to sports and variety shows and the rest of it will go online.

There are only a few things I think are worth pointing out:

1) Netflix is a player, not the player. If you want to see democratization, you need only look at Roku or a Chromebox or any smart TV. Apple started renting TV shows and movies about the time Netflix Streaming kicked off; Hulu was a few months behind, Amazon a few months behind that. Now every network has their own streaming service, either standalone or boxed with something else. Almost every studio does. It isn't really about "networks" any more, it's about access to content… and Netflix is actively shooting itself in the foot by deprecating their streams to Roku (Hulu isn't, Amazon isn't, Crackle isn't).

2) The kids don't watch TV anymore anyway. That doesn't mean there isn't "water cooler" talk. I'll chat with people about The Wire, even though it went off the air more than six years ago. Most of the people following Breaking Bad did not start Season 1 on AMC, they started Season 1 on Netflix years later. "Event TV" is over, for the most part, but "shared experience" will be here forever. You can still talk to someone about the first time they heard Dark Side of the Moon and that album has been out 40 years now. Parents still talk about showing their kids the reveal at the end of Empire Strikes Back and that movie's been out for 30.

3) The article skims over the absolutely thunderous implication of streaming video: ads are going away. Yeah, you get them on Hulu, yeah you get them on some of the network feeds, but by and large, we'll watch content we paid for directly. My daughter will grow up never really understanding advertising. The merchandisers will have to find her some other way. Not gonna mince words: I'd shoot Madison Avenue in the face myself to ensure that future. The fact that it comes as a byproduct of the break-up of five massive media conglomerates is simply delicious.