There is really very little television (if any at all) that doesn’t depend on advertising. And because of this dependency, telelvision seeks before anything else to turn you, the viewer, into a passive receiver or so-called ‘consumer’ (though that term implies activity) of entertainment and information. The more passively you sit and watch television, the more likely the ads are going to be effective. Even pseudo-educational networks like the Discovery channel operate on this mechanism; they’re merely exploiting the ‘academic’ niche of entertainment.
The same is basically true of big budget movies, too. E.g., Inception was not made to make you think; it was made to entertain you and it was made to make money, and it did those things very well. So in most cases I’d be uninclined to compare television to film because the two media are usually driven by the same motivating factors ($).
But whereas television is all about money, there are still loads of independent films whose function isn’t reduced to selling something, to merely entertaining a passive spectator. So I think there is still some kind of non-commercial integrity to the medium of film that television, by virtue of its purpose, will never possess. This is not to say that television is bad or that it can’t also make us think as artistic films do. But one must remember that, in TV, there’s a complicated rhetoric and constant attempt to manipulate viewers that makes earnestness and sincerity, like, immanently impossible within the limitations of the medium.
Of course, there are also limitations to film. Socially/contemporaneously it seems to possess a smaller capacity for relevant discourse than television does; TV is like frighteningly good at commenting not only on the world and events as they’re happening but it’s also really good at commenting on itself in all sorts of ways (ironically, endearingly, cynically, faux-sincerely) that film, generally, cannot.
I guess it comes down to what we as viewers are individually interested (or disinterested) in. For me, film continues to be the more interesting and valuable form.