The convergence towards TV in the digital transformation

It used to be called television and it ended there. We knew what it was doing and what it was for. Not today, television means many other things, because you see much more on the screen: family photos, newspaper pages, your favourite websites, satellite broadcasts, video games, on demand movies, e-mail and social networks, radio and music. Everything has changed since television also entered the digital age, when the chips replaced the cathode ray tube. Little or nothing is left of the old TV. The dimensions of the screens have grown and those of the other parts have been reduced to infinity, transforming the TV into frames. The TV has incorporated everything, slowly, constantly, reaffirming its central role. Two screens, those of the computer and the smartphone, tried to do the opposite game: take the TV content and bring it into their story lines and they got some success, but those who produce computers and mobile phones didn’t expect the old television to be able to react. The magic word in digital transformation is “convergence”. Everything “converges” towards the television. Until a few years ago, when the world was analog, the various media could not be mixed, each had its own technology and there was no way of putting together, for example, the pages of a newspaper and the radio waves. Today it is no longer the case, because everything has turned into bits and a radio bit is equal to a newspaper bit. This means that television and radio programmes, newspapers, movies, games can pass through a single terminal and end up on a single screen, that is the TV screen.