Is Social Media Pushing TV to its Grave?

Why do people watch television? Well, that’s an extremely simple question that can be followed with these equally simple answers:

To watch movies or series.
To watch shows (social, cooking, educational, funny and so on).
To listen to music.
To follow up with the latest news.
If you take a minute to think about it, you would realize that social media provides you with the aforementioned benefits in addition to the added-value of being able to meet, connect and interact with like-minded people while doing so. Here’s how:

Digg, Reddit, Twine, Mix & others: Provide their users with a wide range of stories, news articles, medical advice, funny clips, creative websites, helpful tools and so on while having the option of adding friends, sharing stories and discussing issues with them.
Twitter, Facebook pages & blogs: Take Twitter for example, whether you are following up with world news on CNN’s Twitter accounts – like cnnbrk - or tech news on Mashable or Techcrunch’s Twitter accounts, Twitter also offers you a chance to interact, share information, promote ideas, links and posts as well as build work and personal relationships.
Youtube, Vimoe and other video sharing services: Not only can you use these channels to watch clips, series and listen to music, they are superior platforms to your average television in that they provide you with an option to rate clips, share ideas and meet new people as well.
Apart from these benefits, social media provides marketers with a relatively “cheap” and more effective way of promoting their products and services to a larger more diversified target audience. Furthermore, Internet advertising has the following advantages over television advertising:

Internet advertising is more targeted.
Internet adverting enables good conversion tracking.
Internet advertising has a lower entry-level fees.
Internet advertising has greater range (geographically).
Did you ever notice how almost all well-planned marketing campaigns have social media channels as a primary component? Let’s take Oreo’s campaign for example, they were unable to depend solely on television and felt the need to utilize social media for a comprehensive campaign with a wider target audience.

But it doesn’t end there!
Social media is not the only factor responsible for this phenomenon, the Internet as a whole and computers in specific are bringing the death of the television business closer and closer! In addition to that, new inventions such as Tivo and Slingbox are also players in this conspiracy against television!

Moreover, and if you look closely to Internet ad revenues in the first quarter of 2009 – as opposed to TV ad revenue, you are able to clearly see how seriously marketers are taking the Internet as a media channel when it comes to advertising.

Will it be missed?
Just like print media has suffered from the Internet and its social media platforms, do you agree with me that television is suffering as well? Do you think there will ever come a day when our houses will be television-free? Do you think there still is a real need for television these days?