With a POD no earlier than 1900, make it so that television is not a viable medium for popular entertainment and communication by the year 2000.
In that case their's no real way, Television became popular because people like being entertained, even more so when they can see stuff, plus TV allows for the creation of fantastical fiction that you can't otherwise create.
Yeah, you can delay things (such as by having the Coronation not televised which would push back the date for widespread TV purchasing in the UK), but once you've got Radio and Cinema (of which the early versions are around by 1900), someone's going to see that there's the potential for a lot of profit in combining the two, and that's essentially going to give you TV.
You need to push back inventions about 10 years and have *Hulu, *Youtube, and *Netflix be a lot more successful, and you need to make sure that by then the Internet becomes the dominant form of entertainment, instead of TV.
The thing is, those things are only used by a relatively smallminority now; people (especially here for some reason) may like to go on about how they don't a TV/have'nt watched on in years, but the reality is that the large majority of people, including of Generation Y, continue to primarily watch TV, only really using the Internet stuff as additional sources when they can't find something.
I'm not looking at delaying things, I'm looking at fast forwarding the invention of certain things and successfully convincing people that watching shows on the *Internet is a lot better than watching it on *TV.
Circa 1925, someone invents a cheap, compact film projector suitable for home use. It becomes a popular fad among the rich, but remains inaccessible to the masses because of the expense of film prints. Nonetheless, it popularizes the idea of watching films at home, creating a demand for a cheaper, more portable means of distributing movies for home use.
The answer is magnetic tape, a technology which had recently been invented in Germany. In OTL magnetic tape remained a cumbersome reel-to-reel affair until the 70's. But in TTL, economic demand leads to a massive investment in this technology. As a result, the compact cassette is invented several decades earlier, circa 1935. The technology completely supplants vinyl records, and is snapped up by film studios, which begin producing home versions of their films. Initially these are a niche item, but sales increase after the end of WWII, when home cinemas become a canonical fixture of every proud middle-class home.
Because this medium develops as a direct offshoot of the film industry, it is cinematic in its conventions. It consists of newsreels, short subjects, and feature-length films. There are serials, but not TV shows as we know them. There are no commercials, because cassettes are bought at shops, like records. In short, there is no distinct medium called "television". It is simply cinema in the home.
Crucially, the latency inherent in the technology allows radio to retain its relevance and prestige for much longer. People still depend on radio for up-to-the-minute news, sports, etc. Even after it becomes technologically feasible to broadcast live images, the convention persists due to habit and protective regulation fostered by the two industries. The same cultural duality that once existed between radio and cinema continues to exist to the present day, except that cinema migrates from theaters into people's houses.
same here. tbph, watching stuff over the internet or a similar function (like netflix) feels kinda like cheatingI watch tv a lot less than I used to but I still watch it, and call me old fashioned but when it comes to movies I prefer to buy a physical DVD or record something on TV rather than stream or download.
same here. tbph, watching stuff over the internet or a similar function (like netflix) feels kinda like cheating
well personally i still watch Netflix on my flatscreen when i want to, and i still use my laptop to watch just about anything else if it's available ONLY on the internetIt does, I also hate watching stuff on my lap top screen when I have a full sized one a couple of meters away.