Television has been an invaluable source of news and entertainment since the late 1930s, connecting us globally and ensnaring our attention spans for over 80 years. Although how we've watched TV has changed -- even just from tube to flatscreen -- our fascination with the medium -- and the content that runs on it -- remains the same. In the beginning, watching TV was often a community activity, with neighbors joining each other around one screen to take in the daily news, a boxing match or a new sitcom. Now, with the advent of the DVR, Netflix and OTT services like Roku you can watch pretty much anything you want, any time you want -- and that's exactly what everyone is doing. Check out the timeline below to see how TV and media consumption have changed over the years. We've come a long way from RCA's TRK-12, and we've entered the world of entire weekends dedicated to binge-watching seasons of Friends.
2015 and beyond...Per a 2013 Nielsen study, the number of American houses with TV units has been dropping since 2011. In fact, the U.S. had more than five million Zero-TV households in 2013, up from just over 2 million in 2007. People are making the switch from traditional cable companies to watching videos online on their mobile phones, or through streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc. in a trend called “cord-cutting.” In an April 2014 report by Experian Marketing Services, they reported that “cord-cutting" had grown by 44% in the past four years, with 7.6 million households using high-speed Internet for streaming or downloading videos instead of traditional cable or satellite televisionThis trend is only expected to rise in 2015. Michael Greeson, co-founder of The Diffusion Group, a company of analysts focused on the future of television and video, predict that the number of U.S. broadband subscribers will exceed the number of pay-TV subscribers by mid-2015. eMarketer estimates that more than 113 million people -- 35.5% of the U.S. population and 45.0% of Internet users -- will use a connected TV regularly by the end of 2014, and in 2015, the majority of U.S. Internet users will access the web through such a device. Furthermore, they predicted that the connected TV audience will post double-digit growth rates through 2017. It seems that although the way in which we're consuming media is changing, we're consuming increasingly more of it every year. Whether through streaming services or traditional cable providers it is clear that television is here to stay.