how I watch TV these days
I have never owned a TV except for one year in my life, when I moved to New York from college. Even then, I did not subscribe to a cable package when I would realistically care to catch only The Daily Show and The Colbert Report–I simply could not convince myself to stand for such blatant price gouging. For most of the past decade or so, I’ve used P2P software such as BitTorrent, SopCast, Joost and social video sites to get my fill of TV.
Because this piecemeal, a la carte mode of video consumption has become so natural to me over these years, I was a little surprised to see that a battle is brewing between television channels and cable companies over making full episodes of The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park available on the Web on demand. One sentence that popped out was
“The Daily Show” is a bellwether for the evolution of Internet video. It is also one of those programs that signify for people why they pay so much money for cable.
Many friends I’ve spoken to say that they have signed up for expensive 60-channel cable lineups just so they can catch The Daily Show and a few other shows on Comedy Central, so I am not surprised to find this fact being corroborated in this article. Different cable companies are taking varying degrees of umbrage to the fact that they have to pay a lot of money to broadcast content that channels are giving away for free online. Time Warner Cable thinks this move will eat into its business model, whereas Comcast finds that webcasting has only served to increase viewership of its traditional channels.
I would be willing to bet that Comcast will be shown to be on the right side of history given how I watch TV these days. The core audience of the above three shows is the 18-30 demographic, almost all of which is net-native. These shows are already broadcast in segments that are so easily adaptable to the Internet; indeed, during the WGA writers’ strike in late 2007-early 2008 I was queueing up clips on the shows’ websites and catching what amounted to full episodes. These days I catch full episodes of some shows on Hulu.
Given the video-watching behaviors of my generation, I think ultimately webcasting will do for TV what MP3s did for music sales in their early days and ebooks do for book sales. Additional channels (and devices) of distribution can only benefit the content producers by attracting more consumers to traditional channels; good content has a way of rising to the top. Old ad-supported mass broadcast business models may be under threat, but I’d be quite happy to pay a reasonable subscription fee for ad-free or lightly ad-supported (a la Hulu) video-on-demand channels so long as I have flexibility in when and on which device I consume the video. Small wonder then that set-top boxes from Apple and Netflix are starting to make an appearance; they are but the first step on a long road to consumer choice in high-quality video consumption.
And hey, video channels at sufficiently tempting price points might even convince me to buy a TV again!
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