Business Insider's Jim Edwards says that television is having a bad time of it:

Audience ratings have collapsed: Aside from a brief respite during the Olympics, there has been only negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011, according to Citi Research.

Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, "The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever." All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn't sound like a huge deal — but it includes internet subscribers, too.

Broadband internet was supposed to benefit from the end of cable TV, but it hasn't.

In all, about 5 million people ended their cable and broadband subs between the beginning of 2010 and the end of this year.

This is incredibly obvious, but whoever manages to fix television is going to make a fortune. The solution we have right now—an array of boxes, hooked up to an old-school television—is obviously better than paying an insane amount of money every month for an unchanging package of channels, most of which we don't even watch. But everyone's working on an elegant television that truly embraces the internet and makes it simple. It's been years since Steve Jobs bragged to his biographer that he "finally cracked" an interface that makes television a futuristic joy to use. Google TV flopped hard, although their Chromecast device looks like a second chance at a Roku-like box. Intel's supposed game-changing TV service looks to be a failure. But somebody's got to be able to change the way we watch television, because the audience for a cable replacement is there, and it's growing at a rapid rate. Once someone presents a truly simple, unified solution, those numbers will tip over into levels that will represent armageddon for the traditional cable industry.