For me it was just losing interest in how television presents media, after becoming involved in the internet I had no desire to go back to that kind of entertainment, it has probably been at least 4 or 5 years now since I've owned a television. With television you've always been merely a passive observer. You idle in front of the TV set, you have maybe a few hundred channels to choose from (many of which stream generally the same programming), and you consume whatever is available in whatever way it is presented by that company. Most of the content is filtered through highly funded companies with a particular set of motives, all of the content is censored to some extent (you only see what has been approved of by the provider), you can't interact with the content in any meaningful way (no public commenting, no public remixing, no sharing etc), and it's almost always unreasonably priced.
The internet removes all of these limitations on the consumer end and in addition adds the ability to create and distribute your own content on an international scale while still giving you access to the high budget content and mainstream media if you desire it. And thus television is rendered completely obsolete. The only reason (at least as far as I can tell) that people still buy and use televisions as their main source of media consumption is because they are familiar devices that they have been using for most of their lives and either don't want to transition to a new form of consumption or are unaware of what the new form of consumption has to offer.
It has been interesting watching the assimilation of television for the last half decade or so. We have new televisions coming out (Smart TV's and so on) where they've basically become a very large / high resolution computer monitor. Everyone is looking for HDMI cables so they can stream content from their $400 laptop computers to their extremely expensive television sets that they wasted $1500 on. Advertising for televisions no longer boasts new features, it's always about newly compatible services like Netflix which are of course entirely dependent on the internet in the first place.
North American entertainment doesn't suck, big budget North American entertainment companies suck. They haven't provided anything new or interesting for consumers, their services like Netflix are more of the same in a new package. If we want to see something new, something less typical, something that isn't censored according to somebody else's moral standards, something that isn't restricted from user interaction / remixing / tributes etc, then we need to involve ourselves in the user created content universe that is consuming the internet right now.
The common argument I hear in favour of high budget mainstream content providers is that the user created content universe is completely diluted with low quality content, and that may be true, but it's very easy to circumvent that issue. It's not a quality issue, it's a filtering issue. If you're interested in using the internet as your main source of media consumption you need to know where to find high quality material that interests you and how to filter out all of the shit you don't care about.
With music, I've found the best way to find free high quality content is through netlabels. All of the artists work for free because they simply enjoy creating and sharing music with as many people as possible, the content sent in to netlabels is reviewed by netlabel staff, and then the chosen highest quality content is neatly organized into a freely accessible website with categories for each genre, reviews and descriptions of the music, and several links to stream, download, share, and donate for the content you like.
With video content it's much easier to find higher quality material through host integrated filtering on websites like YouTube where you can view massive lists of channels organized by viewer rating, view count, genre / category, type of content, etc. If you want content that isn't restricted by YouTube's terms of service (which can be very strict at times) then you can head over to Google and simply search using specific terms that relate to your interests.
There's so much amazing content out there that will appeal to your interests, but you can't expect it to be delivered to you, especially by companies that are paid to deliver only a specific brand of content, fortunately the process of diving in and looking for it yourself is entertaining in itself.
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I use the internet for my info; barely hit the tube anymore. Occasionally you get pretty good movies too so I'm not complaining much there. 
