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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Gwilym Mumford

The Guide #192: How reality TV and streaming has shaped 21st-century TV

Composite for newsletter: Great British Bake Off, One Direction, The Queen's funeral and Coronation Street
Composite for newsletter: Great British Bake Off, One Direction, The Queen's funeral and Coronation Street Composite: Love Productions/ ITV/ AP

To try to get our heads round the fact that we’re somehow a quarter of the way into the 21st century, the Guide is running a miniseries of newsletters looking at how pop culture has changed over the past 25 years. We tackled music last month and we’ll be looking at the state of film next month, before sharing our favourite culture of the century so far, and asking for yours too, in July.

Today, we’re taking the temperature of TV. Like the music industry, television has seen its entire business model upended by the streaming revolution this century. That has meant what was once a universal activity – an entire nation sat around the glow of the old cathode ray tube – has been replaced by people watching a galaxy of different shows, or watching the same show but at completely different times.

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