Is "Traditional" television a fatality of the pandemic?

No one expected the Covid pandemic to take the route it did. It caused lock downs unknown in history and prompted changes to work, schooling and entertainment. I want to focus for a second on Television. 

In my lifetime (which, I admit, is rather long at this point) I watched broadcast television go the way of the Dodo. The broadcasters are still around (NBC, CBS and ABC) but rarely do people get these from over the air any longer. Fox was created right in between the over air and over cable broadcasting. Cable, with its hundreds of choices, niche channels and great picture essentially ran circles around the quality and choice of over air.

Before the pandemic, streaming services were started. For those people with DVRs that time-shifted already, the move to streaming services was easy, if possibly unnecessary. Streaming Services offered a little extra content, but nothing that would make people move to it. Netflix still ran a great DVD business that delivered new content nightly. The move to streaming was slow.

And then the pandemic. Broadcasters like NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox treated the pandemic like a cross between the summer season of reruns and cheap TV. I don't know if they had other programing ready, but if they did they should have ran it. The crap on TV encouraged people to stream new shows and methods. 

Netflix started airing tons of new content, often from overseas (Germany, Brazil and Spain in particular) in dubbed versions. Broadcasters and traditional shows and contacts overseas should have leveraged this new source. Had they tried, broadcasters were better positioned to grab this content, but they let it go thinking no one would watched dubbed TV.

So, with pure crap on traditional TV (over air or cable) and without the ability to watch sports live, tens of millions of people started buying and watching streaming services. The combination of the pandemic, end of live sports and idiotic decisions by traditional broadcasters led to new viewing habits even by older people who are the slowest to ever migrate towards new media and habits.

Can broadcast / cable TV come back. The question itself is an answer. Think of other choices that people have made. Can Black and White TV come back? Can trains come back?  Can typewriters come back? Can land line phones come back? Cable is still around and will be for a while. But it will cease to be a growing industry or a cash cow. It may not die, but it will not flourish. Think of it like the half death plant you still water occasionally and can't throw out. At some point, you'll throw it away. At least younger people will.