Is it dead or just different?
Do me a favor and check out a site called Heavy.com. For all that I have seen in the discussions of Exploding TV, sites like Heavy.com seem to have been left out of the conversation. And yet, as far as I am concerned, they are at the head of the revolution. Here are three things that Heavy.com does that are odd considering that the structure of “Network Television” is a “dying thing”. (Sorry for all the scarequotes): 1. Heavy.com does not produce most of its material. 2. Heavy.com distributes material that it receives for free (insofar as the audience is concerned since they get it for free) 3. Heavy sells the leftover loadng space to advertisers interstitially.
Another way to put the last three tenets is that Heavy.com distributes what you want, when you want it, so long as you are willing to pay for it with a certain amount of attention. The odd thing is, whereas banner ads annoy the crap out of me because I am generally trying to do something else (i.e. read an article); I find that in “watch mode” it is not such a large endeavor to look at some commercial propaganda so that I can see a streamed and mashed-up version of a G.I. Joe PSA.
Exploding TV is correct as long as we are talking about how the media has changed the storyline within the medium. But the business-model is no less likely to change than Max Headroom: 20 minutes into the future is likely to become science fiction.