For the first question, why web series are becoming popular with today’s generation, the answer is pretty straightforward - convenience, uncensored, creativity, choices, cost effectiveness and no or minimal ads.

1. Convenience: It’s pretty self explanatory. People can now watch shows anywhere, any time. Instead of having to record their shows on TV or scheduling everything around to make time, web shows allow the convenience to watch whenever and wherever on whatever device they find convenient. Plus, you get to binge watch instead of waiting for a new episode every week.
2. Uncensored: Television censorship is annoying, especially Indian censorship which treats adult audiences like children by dictating what they should watch. Have you seen Game of Thrones on TV? I can guarantee a majority of adult scenes would have been deleted. Have you seen a horror movie on TV? A lot of the horror scenes are cut out. The benefit of shows on the internet is you can have profanity, nudity, gore and even have stories surrounding sensitive subjects that are too taboo for TV.
3. Creative storytelling: There’s a factor of creative freedom that TV studios don’t allow. This means web series can be as creative as they want with their storytelling, Sacred Games is a great example and there are many more. TV shows have a strict format and time slots which means shows have to be constructed in a predetermined manner. This restricts the level detailing a show can give. With the creative storytelling in web series, audiences get the best quality and unique stories that they can truly enjoy.
4. Choices: Shows on TV have a lot of limitations, so a lot of genres don’t get screen time. Shows like soap operas, kid shows and family entertainment shows mostly get most screen time. Other genres don’t even figure in the schedule. How many historical fantasy fiction shows or murder suspense supernatural or sci-fi romance shows can you name on TV? Very few, if any.
5. Cost effectiveness: This is a no-brainer. A majority of people have mobiles and a lot of them have laptops and PCs. Internet connectivity in India is now easy, reliable and cost friendly. Why would you pay monthly for 100, 200, 500 channels of nothing of interest to watch, with time consuming advertisements when you can explore a whole world shows and movies online? Don’t enjoy Hindi shows? Watch something from a different region, nothing interesting in Indian content? Switch to an English series, nothing there? How about Japanese anime? Chinese action flick? A South Korean drama? A French noir? The world is your oyster.
6. No or minimal ads: Again, pretty self explanatory. Although I will say some of the free online content does have ads, you can get ad free premium content as well.

As for the second question of how TV shows are getting affected, I’d say there should be a considerable drop in viewers as most people hop on to the net. But I don’t think people will stop buying cable because people still want to watch sports and news live. As for television shows, they’re mostly going to get slowly phased out with smart TVs that connect to online platforms directly providing another avenue to access web shows.

However, having said that, web content is going to get heavily populated soon with a whole range of production companies starting their own streaming platforms. So we could see some of the same issues we see with TV happening online like advertisements making a coming back because subscriptions don’t cover the costs with so many platforms cannabalizing the market share. More competition means lower pricing which means these streaming sites will have to look for other revenues which will mostly come from advertisements.

Plus, with so many platforms coming online, customers will have to pick and choose what they want to see because they won’t be able to afford having 8–10 streaming site subscriptions.

Then companies like Roku will start coming up that will build a network of streaming sites and allow you to access multiple streaming sites at a single cost instead of having multiple subscriptions just like your local cable guy.

But TV shows more or less are seeing a demise with only kids content and family entertainment being their bread and butter in the future. But sports and news will still be popular.