I think it is amusing how artists thought of the television as a destruction to video art when it had also helped the artists expend their methods of presenting their work and had given them another method for distribution. For example, the methods used in "Four more years," 1972 was widely admired by mainstream television that it used its method for their interviews. It may be true that the goals of mainstream television were and still are vastly different from a video artist; however, some artworks did run on television, especially ones with a political idea.
With the use of television, artists were able to directly talk to the common people, something that was impossible when there was one copy of the actual art piece. I think that is why artists started to use video as a way to look for their identity. If you look at history, the mid-20th century was when people were done with the World Wars and wanted to look for their place in society. Women looked for equality and people in communist countries looked for their freedom. Video was a way they could fight for their passions because video was something that could be distributed widely and easily. With over 90% of households with a television, more people had access to art. In some sense, the television was the internet of the mid-20th century.
Chris Burden's "Through the Night Softly" was actually put on television in between television commercials for the wider audience. Even thought this is not done anymore, the fact that a video art was literally displaced in front of millions of viewers just made video art that much more successful.