This is how television dies; not with a bang, but with a freakishly tall ginger giving a silly interview at one of the world's most successful corporations. This isn't exactly news, seeing as how it happened nearly two months ago, but I've spent a long while now fascinated with Conan O'Brien's 48-minute talk at Google in May. Of course, because they own the site, Google uploaded the entire thing to Youtube in a length-defying webcast after an initial run on Gizmodo. Aside from being as funny as most of the stuff Conan does on camera, the interview is a commentary on the inevitable death or transformation of television as a relevant medium, a commentary that was at least partially intentional.

Since a significant portion of my career revolves around TV, I'm pretty interested in how it's changing both for the average viewer and for the rather massive corporations who produce its content. While it's tempting to say that television, like radio, will never truly disappear even as it becomes less relevant, the very nature of the Internet makes me think we'll see a day (and fairly soon) when most people don't own TV sets anymore. Television didn't kill radio because it couldn't do everything radio can do. You can't safely or effectively watch TV in your car. You can't jog with a TV in front of you unless you're on a treadmill. Radio's simplicity and portability ensured its survival in the age of television. The Internet, though, isn't a specialized technology like TV. Rather, it's a technology that combines all existing forms of human communication and makes them all cheap, light weight and instant. Internet can do what radio does better than radio does it and it's about two inches from being able to do the same for television.

In his Google interview, Conan O'Brien says as much and I believe him. Why? Because if there's one person in the world who understands the entertainment industry, it's Conan. Though he has ostensibly allied himself with the multitudes of his viewers, Conan isn't one of them. He's a man who has been a part of more pop culture sensations than practically anyone in history. He got his start at Harvard University writing for The Harvard Lampoon, which is basically a recruiting ground for the top tier of TV writers. His first job out of college was writing for HBO while he performed with The Groundlings improv group, another alma mater of some of the biggest names in show business. Conan then spent three years as a writer at Saturday Night Live before transitioning to the writing staff for The Simpsons where he wrote some of the show's most beloved episodes. After that he spent 16 years hosting Late Night, then O'Brien got his fateful seat on The Tonight Show. As the past year of entertainment news has demonstrated, NBC fired Conan just in time for him to start ruling the world.

The point I'm trying to make is that TV isn't going to change just because the people who watch it prefer the commercial-lite, on-demand version they get on the Internet, it's going to change because there are some very powerful, very savvy people stoking the fires of that transformation. To see Conan O'Brien sitting next to the vice president of Google is to see the most popular voice in entertainment and the most powerful company in the communications industry breaking bread together. Meanwhile, network television budgets are getting slimmer, a record number of people are giving their cable providers the boot and the best a bloated corporation like NBC can do is buy into a dying cable company and an Internet platform that will die as soon as they start charging people to use it. I'm more willing to put my faith in Google and O'Brien than NBC/Comcast for the future of television. I don't trust Google because I like its products and I don't trust Conan O'Brien because he's funny. I trust them because, as evidenced by their incredible success and almost limitless goodwill, they seem like they know what they're doing.