How do you watch TV? If you’re over 30, it may go something like this:
It’s Thursday night, and your favorite show is on at 9:00 p.m.
8:55 PM: You open your fridge, grab a beer. Open the cupboard, grab a bag of chips. (For the “creative” among you: Open your wine fridge, pull out a bottle of cabernet sauvignon, and grab some organic crackers from your pantry.)
8:57 PM: Yay! Only three minutes. Turn on your TV, watch the credits from the last show. Check your watch… only two more minutes. Watch promotions for the new upcoming “cop drama.” You would flick to something else, but you wouldn’t want to miss those crucial first few minutes of your show.
9:00 PM: Your show starts. You’re happy. Take a sip of wine, eat some cheese.
9:12 PM: Damn! Commercials. OK, well if you’re between 30 and 50, you probably flip aimlessly through other channels. Or if you’re super-savvy you pause your Tivo and grab a refill. If you’re over 50, you sit patiently and watch commercials.
9:16 PM: OK, back in business. Boy, that cliffhanger kept me guessing.
9:23 PM: Commercials again. Repeat routine.
9:30 PM: That was fun. Steve Carrell is so talented. I wonder what’s going to happen next week. Guess I’ll have to wait until then!
Sound familiar? It should. OK, well here is how people under the age of 30 watch TV. Now, some of them tune in like you do every Wednesday night because they just can’t wait another minute to see who’s next to get utterly humiliated on Project Runway/Biggest Loser (take your pick). Most, however, choose to tailor their TV schedule around their lives, not the other way around. That means using the Internet. Sites like Hulu.com and NBC.com actually allow you to watch many of your favorite shows on demand, for free, legally, with the blessing of the networks that air the shows in primetime.
This method has its drawbacks, most obviously that many of these online video options are unavailable outside of the U.S. I went to school in the States and was shocked to discover, upon my return to Toronto, that I was blocked from viewing my favorite shows (the Canadian distributors of American shows are none too keen to have their ad revenues siphoned off by the internet). There are, and have been for years, unauthorized ways to watch your favorite TV online – but they’re dubious at best, unreliable in quality, and are ultimately destined for obsolescence once TV goes online legitimately.
There are obviously still bumps in the road. As Caroline McCarthy writes on “The Social”:
If the content providers finally work things out with the set-top box makers and Web video hubs, it could be terrific for me and other people who’ve gotten totally fed up with Stone Age TV offerings. For now, however, it’s just a dramatic mess and recent signs are indicating that it (the debate) is taking steps backward as opposed to forward.
There really is no technical barrier preventing anyone, anywhere with a broadband connection from viewing ALL their favorite shows on demand – regardless of jurisdiction. It’s just the leaders of the old paradigm are fighting the currents of the new – it’s the cable vs. online slug-fest. This won’t last forever – the method for distributing content will move, more and more, onto the Internet, and it will be driven by the Net generation and the unassailable appeal of customizing TV.
So, is the old model dead? Will TV go online on for good? I welcome responses.
February 26th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
I don’t get why anyone would want to watch television shows on a small laptop screen, or even worse, on a mobile device.
Maybe I’m just a closet videophile, but after watching stuff on my HDTV, I don’t even like to watch the analog cable channels I have, or even worse, my Series II TiVo (which compresses the hell out of the feed).
Maybe one day there will be a high def “Apple TV” device to watch these videos on your HDTV in 1080p. But right now… that’s not what people are doing.
February 27th, 2009 at 8:38 am
You mention Canadian content providers not wanting to lose their advertising revenue. The other side of that equation is having enough bandwidth to be able to watch either streaming TV shows or Netflix (or Zip.ca for us Canadians). Bell’s new Fiber service had a 30 gig cap upon launch (seriously?!?) and my Rogers account has a 95 gig cap (which when split among five Internet fiends isn’t that much). Until out Internet providers also begin to offer better packages, I don’t see online TV as being a likely option in Canada.
To Buzzcut, just do what we do. Connect one of the spare laptops to the TV and use it as a media box. Although we’re normally too busy multitasking to be fussing over quality
February 27th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
I generally agree with Buzzcut. The Internet is great for grabbing shows that I have completely missed, forgot to record, or want to see short clips of. However, once you’re used to the quality of a large screen HDTV with stereo surround sound (particularly for shows with high production values, such as my personal favorite of ‘LOST’), watching a streamed version online is the equivalent of pulling out the rabbit ear antennae. Instead of the Internet, I almost everyone else that I know) more than anything else. I’ve become so used to the commercial-skipping powers of the DVR that I can no longer tolerate watching anything in real time unless they are truly live events (such as sports). The DVR allows people to watch TV shows on their own terms while also utilizing the expensive high quality home theater systems that they have in their homes. While the Internet will certainly continue to play an increasing role in how we receive content, I don’t subscribe to the doomsday scenarios of television’s demise (just as radio has survived for over 7 decades after TV was supposedly predicted to kill that medium off).
February 27th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
*Typo in sentence 3 of my comment above. It should read: “Instead of the Internet, I (and almost everyone else that I know) has had TV viewing habits transformed by the DVR more than anything else.”
March 1st, 2009 at 11:13 am
I just turned the cable on my television off three weeks ago. If I want to watch “The Office”, which I did last night, I take my laptop to bed with me and watch it on a rented dvd without commercials or interruptions.
It turns out that we only used the television in our house for watching rented dvd’s and playing Rockband and we only turned it on for 1/2 hour of cable comedy watching while eating dinner. By the way, my 13 year old daughter was completely with me in turning off the cable tv. She has her own personal mac laptop with wireless and high speed connections. She spends most of her time messaging her friends around the world, watching YouTube, doing her homework online and playing games on the internet.
Now the old tv cable bill is enough to pay for the new dvd rentals, I never have to be affronted with irritating commercials on what I should or need to buy, and our family does other things that allow us to become more creative and fulfilled in our lives. Turn off the fantasy and turn off your television. You will be amazed at what happens.
March 20th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I think the key thing with TV is choice. There’s always going to be TV’s, they’re just going to get bigger and more like a movie theater as technology becomes cheaper. People are going to get their shows from the web and hook that up to their TVs. Sometime’s I’ll watch TV on my computer in full screen or I’ll check out shows in a small youtube format. Shows will be available on all sorts of mediums. The one thing that won’t change is that television’s format, episodic narrative that gives you time to connect with characters and plot will always be around and hopefully get even better and able to connect with all sorts of niches.
And you’re wrong about unauthorized methods of watching TV, shows need to be provided to every country at the same time or people WILL find a way to get TV shows and not bad quality. It looks pretty damn good and already tons of people watch Heroes, Prison Break and other shows months before they get them not to mention shows like Dr. Who and Merlin from the UK.
April 17th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
For me watching TV shows on my laptop will not replace the experience of watching them on a real TV. Maybe if you live alone it doesn’t make that much of a difference but I found that anticipating that favourite show on a Monday night and sitting in front of a TV with couple of glasses of wine was a fun, bonding experience that I shared with my roommate. Even though it might sound a bit contradictory, watching TV can be very social. My roommate and I had our cable cut off three months ago and we have hardly spent any time together since then. It turned out that what often brought us together was the TV! Internet has not been able to replace that.