Streaming television is better in every way than linear TV (by which I mean broadcast and cable TV, i.e. where a show is on when it is on and you can only choose the channel) and it seems possible that one of those improvements will hurts TV’s cultural prestige.

The improvement I have in mind is that streaming TV shows allow you to watch them whenever you want to. I remarked before (in Watching On-Demand TV) how being able to watch a show whenever you want decreases the urgency of watching it and also gets rid of the weekly rhythm that broadcast TV gave. It recently occurred to me that TV also accidentally gained cultural prestige as an accident of that delivery mechanism.

In the days of linear TV, if you wanted to watch a show you needed to organize your life so that you would be available at the time that the show aired. In the 1980s VCRs made it possible to tape a show when it was on to watch it later, but at first this required one to be around, so you were still organizing your life around the show’s schedule. Later on there were programmable VCRs which could tape a show while one wasn’t home, but it was often easier to be present than to figure out how to program the VCR.

Organizing one’s life around something signals that the thing is important. Here’s the critical part: it doesn’t just signal this to others. It signals this to oneself. Thus television shows gained a double-benefit from people organizing their lives around them. First, we knew that these were the sort of things that millions of people organized their life around, so they had to be important. Second, we organized our own lives around them, so we had to feel them important or we’d be fools for organizing our lives around them. When you and everyone around you acts as if something is important, that gives it prestige.

This was not the only source of prestige, of course. Back in the broadcast days when there were only three television channels, the fact that many millions of people were watching the same thing gave it prestige. The fact that it was common but one of few made it seem select. The fact that it was transmitted over public airwaves gave it the imprimatur of the government, which was more respected back then than it is now. Those things faded with the era of cable TV, when dozens of channels got rid of the exclusivity and the cable itself got rid of the government imprimatur. But the fact of organizing one’s life around the airing of one’s favorite shows persisted.

Even if streaming hadn’t come about, the advent of the Tivo and other digital video recorders which were aware of show schedules and were easy to program and never missed an episode would have mostly ended this aspect of the prestige of TV shows. Streaming has killed it more completely, though.

It will take some time for this to fully play out, of course, and a loss of prestige is usually not the sort of thing one notices, because things without prestige are intrinsically less noticeable. It’s also been going on for a while, so I think we’re already seeing the effects of it. It’s likely that the bigger effects are going to be generational; people (like my children) who grew up with TV not having this prestige will just naturally think of it differently.