I know there’s a good portion of you that are going to instantly groan at the headline, either because it’s a territory that’s been hashed out a number of times from a number of different angles or because you’re one of those folks who simply doesn’t believe there are such thing as “killer” technology (I’ve had that conversation with a few folks recently).

But Duncan Riley put out an interesting, if not provocative, editorial this evening entitled “Television will be the first traditional media medium to fall.”  Personally, I have always felt that radio would be the first to falter, though in a neck-and-neck race with newsprint, but Duncan Riley puts some new stats to work in support the prediction today:

The television switch off is real. In the United States, 2.5 million viewers switched off in the spring on 2008 compared to the same time in 2006. Statistically this is only a small percentage of the overall viewing audience, but among those still watching television, the amount of television they watch each day is declining.

The decline in television viewing is stronger among younger statistical groups. In Europe, a 2005 study from the European Interactive Advertising Association found almost half of 15- to 24-year-olds are watching less TV in favor of browsing the web. A study reported in The Guardian in 2007 headlined with “Young networkers turn off TV and log on to the web.” The television switch off in the United States among younger people has seen the average age of a TV viewer increase to 50.

The stats are compelling, and certainly point to an uncertain future for Old Media television, particularly in the face of the ever increasing volume of studies showing that pretty soon we’ll be watching video online more than we’ll be sleeping. Duncan goes on to say that while newsprint and radio have some harrowing times ahead of them, they’ll survive. At least, for now.

I’m not sure that I agree that TV is the first to go, though. Certainly Duncan makes a compelling case, and I’m not one of those folks who thinks new technology incapable of killing old technology (you certainly don’t see a lot of eight-tracks for sale these days, and photograph developing is quickly becoming a thing of the past). But we’re seeing a lot more rapid detioration taking place in the music and radio business than we’re seeing even in newspaper and television. It’s an interesting deathrace between the industries, and it’s difficult to call a ‘winner’ to the finish line.

Newspaper death watch.
For instance, newspaper decline is largely financial in nature.  Certainly, when you’re talking about business, that’s the most important factor to measure a media type’s life span. Is that what we’re really talking about here, though? The death of the media type or the changing of the guard in terms of the dominant companies behind them. In either event, newsprint and text delivery of news is increasingly being dominated by online blogs and news portals. Circulation may be technically up, but revenues for the companies that resist the transition to online delivery are most decidedly down.

Wise newspaper publications are managing some sort of a transition to an online revenue, but most companies that have their base in serialized news in the printed form still have problems adjusting to the new formats that we in the blogging business take for granted.

Duncan is very positive that newspapers will always go the distance because of the need for quality journalism.  Unfortunately (at least for the newspaper industry) I don’t see this as a particularly convincing argument.  Quality journalism can and does take place outside of newsprint, and for a much greater profit. Some traditional text journalism outfits may realize this and make the transition.  Most won’t.

Disclosure: I may be particularly negative towards newspaper futures due to the fact that in a previous life I consulted for several newspapers in their New Media efforts. In my experience they’re generally not a very forward thinking bunch.

TV death and destruction.
As I said, Duncan makes a compelling point for the impending doom of television, and I’d go even further than he in my prognostications of doom for the media type. Again, like I said regarding the newspaper business, when you’re talking about the death of a media, you’re potentially talking about two things: either the media type itself or the industries behind that media production.

In this situation I think it’s silly to say we’ll stop watching video in our livingrooms on television sets.  Where the video that plays on those sets comes from is very likely to change very soon. Just yesterday I talked about a very clear path for Netflix and Roku to make a play for the livingroom very soon, but they’re obviously not the only ones competing for eyeballs.  TiVo, Apple, and a cadre of other set-top device manufacturers are working on taking real-estate in your entertainment center.

Traditional television has something that no set-top box solution has tackled or mastered yet (aside from coverage of live sporting events), and I’ve talked about it in the past here in my editorials on the subject: the “veg-factor.”

To illustrate the veg-factor, think about the type of media consumption you do in the morning, while you’re getting the kids ready for school, or fixing breakfast in the morning while you’re getting ready for work. Morning show format news-ish programs are designed for this low-engagement, veg-factor consumption. They’re, in large part, designed to be background noise that delivers some entertainment and utility to your morning.

Likewise, in the evening, you come home from work, you switch on the TV and catch the local news or a Seinfeld re-run, and leave the TV on through Wheel of Fortune or whatever reality program du jour is on this season. Most people won’t even touch the remote until prime-time starts. That’s the veg-factor in action.

Very simply, no one is doing this for the set-top box experience. Until there is a one-to-one equivalent for this, you won’t see a complete replacement for television.

Radio apocalypse.
The radio business has been even more dominated in recent years by mega-conglomorates and mergers. With this has come the ‘Clearchannel approach,’ that has driven almost all radio towards a formula for profit. Anecdotally, this was hashed out recently in the comments of an editorial I recently wrote about the impending doom for radio at the hands of the iPhone’s on demand music applications. Sean and I talked about this the other day, and the argument is compelling that radio is doing a decent job of killing itself, and requires no new technology to hasten its death.

But the fact remains that new technologies like smartphones and other pocket devices coupled with the impending ubiquity of wireless Internet access makes things look pretty bleak.

I say that, and I can almost hear Steven Hodson’s voice cracking as he crankily reminds me that impending ubiquity of access is anything but certain (most likely because he reminds me once a week on Elite Tech News). He makes a compelling case for it, but recent news like the coming embedded “Internet Chips” from Intel as VentureBeat reported on the other day makes me think otherwise.

Here’s the thing that really makes radio’s future look particularly bad compared to the rest – the record labels.  Talk radio is very ably making the transition to podcasting and other forms of online audio entertainment media types, but the record labels have very famously dug in their heels and made it next to impossible for broadcasters to adapt their business models for the online environment using popular music.

Given that, it isn’t surprising to see radio clinging the hardest to their dying business models. I predicted back in December that we’d see an end to at least one major record label this year, and I stick by that assessment. Given that the mainstream record labels are so integral to traditional radio’s survival (and their demise is key to online radio’s ascendence), I think it’s now more than ever we should be looking to traditional radio as the first to die off.

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