Will the Web Replace TV?

dratcw writes "With the continuing writers' strike cutting way back on the number of new and original TV shows available, many media Web sites are providing alternatives to TV that can be found on the Web. A number of sites are offering features describing broadcast/cable TV alternatives while you wait for that next episode of 'Chuck'. 'What better time than during the writers' strike to (re)discover Internet TV and video? The quantity, quality, and diversity of online video grows by the day; and though it's far from perfect, it is at least interesting enough to make you forget that you're watching it on a PC monitor.'" Any web-based favorites you'd like to point out for fellow commenters?

LoadingReadyRun

[bipbop]

I've been watching them weekly since their hilarious "Rejected Wiiplay Games" movie. They're also the Desert Bus For Hope people. Anyway, they're somewhat hit-or-miss, but mostly hit IMO: http://loadingreadyrun.com/ [loadingreadyrun.com]

Already has.

[Hatta]

With various torrent sites, an rss feed, and XBMC the internet has already supplanted over the air television for me. It's going to be awfully hard for anyone to improve on that setup.

Already has replaced it for the past five years

[Pausanias]

TV? I don't watch a television device anymore, haven't for five years. The whole idea of attaching myself to a video broadcast at home seems so incredibly impossible to me. For the past five years, my chief source of entertainment has been reading and interacting with my favorite websites, posting comments, with the occasional game on the side. This to me is far more entertaining than the idea of gluing my eyes to a video broadcast. If there is a well-done TV show, I'll just download it off the bittorrent and watch it on the bus on the way to and from work.

Re:instead....

[MBGMorden]

I can agree. I already find it more convenient to subscribe to TV shows via iTunes than to watch them broadcasted. There are no commercials to get in the way, I always have a copy that I can watch as much as I want, I don't have to worry about timeslots or scheduling conflictions. If I want to do something else during the time it comes on, I'm free to.

Also, I've really started to love the whole idea of podcasts. Find a topic that you're interested in, subscribe to the podcast, and it's waiting there for you to watch each day. Having the newest one always available, stored, etc, is just an amazing use of technology.

At the same time, providers are going to need to ease up on bandwidth caps for this to work. Thankfully, my provider (Spirit Telecom) does no filtering nor bandwidth capping, but if they did I'd be SOL. Just my podcasts that I download each day run several GB, and iTunes video content runs about 10-15GB per month. Throw in online gaming, web surfing, patch and software downloads, other legal online video etc, and I'd bet I'm hitting close to 50gb per month in totally legal bandwidth usage. That's before even figuring in P2P usage (which I do use a bit, but very moderately - probably 8-10GB per month or so).

Re:Comca$t destroyed TV

[darjen]

I canceled my cable TV a few months ago and haven't looked back. I have over the air HDTV essentially for free (after tuner cost). I also pay Netflix $17 for their 3 at a time plan, and that fills the void nicely and is much cheaper than digital cable.

The answer is :"Yes."

[kilodelta]

In this household there is no cable television, just a little OTA 19" set for when something major is going on which is pretty much never nowadays. The SO just likes the background noise.

But with services like Joost, and all the online movie sites that are already online or coming shortly it's looking more like television is dead.

I've also taken to watching the Real News clips on YouTube. I like the concept, it's essentially a publicly supported news gathering organization. I'd like to see local groups do the same in communities all across the country. The key difference with Real News is that it isn't just 30 second sound bites, they actually do a bit of analysis.

Re:Comca$t destroyed TV

[ady1]

It can't actually replace TV until:

1. The bandwidth is fast enough to stream HD (or whatever the current standard is)
2. Production houses could figure out how to actually derive revenue for web exclusive shows.

Movies and shows out of copyright...

[CFBMoo1]

.. and in the public domain are just as entertaining today as they were in the old days. Google is great for that stuff.

Where is my Internet video?

[Fastolfe]

I'm still waiting for traditional cable networks (or even individual programs) to offer subscriptions, streaming HD content to my set-top box over the Internet. I don't even care if it's live. So much of what I watch is on the DVR anyway. Let me cancel my (evil) cable TV subscription and just get the shows or networks that I'm interested in.

Live IPTV would be nice too, but since you can't do QoS over the untrusted, public Internet, I'm not sure how you'd get CATV-style latency and reliability without violating "network neutrality".

Re:Already has replaced it for the past five years

[garcia]

I read, more than your average American and trying to read more daily, and I find that there is plenty of utter shit out there in book form. I spend entirely too much time trying to find things to read that don't suck as much as what appears in serial form on TV and the big screen. Take for example my post from December of 2003 where I talk about The Last Goodbye being the worst book I read in 2003 [slashdot.org] or the fact that I just read The Catcher in the Rye and found it to be a terrible example of literature that shouldn't be read by anyone -- especially those currently attending secondary schooling. On the other hand, I have read some decent books recently including Plenty and Animal Vegetable Miracle [slashdot.org] both of which have changed my life for the better.

I have watched some terrible TV shows such as Breaking Bad [wikipedia.org] which held my attention for exactly 3 minutes during the opening sequence and dropped it when the main character was getting a hand job from his pregnant wife. I have also watched some great TV such as Arrested Development [wikipedia.org] and Rescue Me [wikipedia.org].

I have listened to some pretty terrible music and then also gotten into some other really great stuff like Feist [wikipedia.org] and The New Pornographers [wikipedia.org] both of which are happy to allow you to distribute their live shows and which makes me support them all the more.

So while surfing the web, reading books and entertaining yourself in other ways is great for you, I do like to expand my horizons in many directions while not assuming that everything that appears on the TV is a pile of shit. Personally, I find people that are disconnected from TV an absolute bore as they have very little to talk about in the ways of popular culture that allows them to have something in common with the majority of Americans around them. People who don't watch TV are especially annoying when they continually let you know that they don't know Foo because they don't own or watch a TV.

I'm thrilled that they have made the personal choice to avert their senses from something they feel has no worth but for them to assume that the rest of us are mildly retarded for having a well rounded media experience is just ridiculous. Use TV as a part of your overall experience rather than the majority and you'll find yourself enjoying it a little more than you realize.

Re:Comca$t destroyed TV

[TooMuchToDo]

I have Comcast in the Chicago suburbs. I was tired of paying $55/month for digital basic cable. Got rid of the TV service, but still have cable for internet, but I get most of my content from Netflix's unlimited Watch It Now. Installing a HDHomeRun in some datacenter space I have in the next couple of weeks (which is in downtown Chicago) to let me stream digital/HD over the air signals to my home (which isn't close enough for reception). The web replacing TV indeed.

still waiting for *actual* alternatives

[abes]

I'd like to first state I don't have cable TV and I don't have an antenna either (which doesn't do much good in NYC anyways). I still watch TV through both legal (web sites) and illegal (torrents). I generally don't mind the ads, as long as they don't interrupt the show too much (though both ads that come up in the *middle* of a scene are really fucking annoying, as well as watching the *exact* same ad repeatedly .. I'm pretty sure there's a way of advertising without being a complete asshole..).

I also try the various alternatives out there. I do Netflix, so I can watch low-quality on-demand as well as old series over DVD. I use Joost, though their interface is really really (extremely) horrible, and their content is slightly better than that. For reasons I'm sure make sense to someone else, each 'channel' can only maintain a small number of shows, so you won't be able to watch an entire series of a television show, and only a small percent of that channel is watchable. Which means that while they have the opportunity to create a system where you can actually watch exactly what you want, when you want, trumping TV once and for all, they don't. They completely and miserably fail. Did Also, did I mention how horrible the interface is?

Someone else mentioned Miro. It's a fine idea. Only, I can't find any content I really care to watch, especially as most of it are snippets from full programs, and have a total length of 5 minutes. I know the 5 minute clip is supposed to be the next revolution, but I'm sorry, it really isn't. Sure, I watch the quick YouTube clip every now and then, but it doesn't replace a full-length TV show. Additionally, for actual revenue to occur, an add would have to be added, which would likely double the length of the clip, and make you watch ads for half of your viewing experience.

Do we have the technology for alternatives? Definitely. Is there a method of revenue currently in place for it? Probably .. companies are already advertising with some of these companies (e.g. Joost, NBC, ABC, Fox, etc.), though exactly how to manage is still being worked through (again, putting an ad mid-scene does not work). What's holding things up? Most likely things like stupidity, licensing issues (amount of content you can host), and lack of momentum (at least until the strike, people's appetites were sated enough).

Re:LoadingReadyRun

[pilgrim23]

In the 1980s I spent a while working a night shift job and this weaned me from the televison habit; The only TV available in my off hours was daytime TV. Thus, I read books instead.
    Facinating thing reading; you use your mind to generate the special effects and in spite of no ability to run the film fast, change hue and color depth to things never found in reality, and above all: not need to leave a cliff hanger for a general apeal for brighter teeth, or some poorly built automobile.

A few years back I found a device that allowed me to connect my computer directly to a TV and thereby play avi and mpgs. well then. that is more like it! Since my tastes run far more to the documentary, my machines now have terrabytes of storage devoted to how to build a Michelson-Morely interferometer and what it means to the "Ether", how bosons become bozos in Bose-Einstein condensation, or the French perspective on the Lousiana Purchase. Somehow, the drug addictions of Hollyweirdos has no effect on my TV viewing these days... let the strike continue...

Already happened... (At my house)

[microcentillion]

For the last 20 months, My roommate and I have not even taken the time to buy a set of bunny ears for the TV to pull local channels. The only purpose the TV in our front room serves is to watch DVDs or not-at-all-pirated-100%-legal-backup-copies of stuff on the media PC hooked to it. And to be a paperweight.

The only weird part is that since I am not used to it anymore, if I am in a room with a TV on at someone else's house I get distracted by commercials and appear comatose for 30 seconds.

Apples and oranges....

[172pilot]

The web is a delivery mechanism, and the TV is a display mechanism... One can not replace the other... What will [and is] happening is that the CONTENT CREATORS have been pushed down to a level playing field with anyone with a video camera and a cable modem... Ultimately the TV is just a big PC screen, so when you add a Tivo, a Microsoft Media Center PC, a MythTV box, or whatever, you've got a nice network aware media player that will give you the CONTENT that you want on the display device that you want.

It's going to force the major networks of the world to put out some decent content, or they'll go the way of the AM radio....

Shift Happens

[PodBayDoor]

To suggest that online shows wouldn't exist without TV is short-sighted.

Do you think that the music industry should have died when gramophones started becoming popular, offering a viable alternative to radio? How about LP's? Cassettes? Did MTV kill the industry? CD's? Maybe DVDs? No.

Cinema reinvented itself by focussing on what it does well - big screen, big sound and someone else to clean up the popcorn.

It's simple - the medium moves on and media producers take advantage of the new features.

The drive for the in-progress media upgrade is that Internet is replacing TV by offering more choice from small providers, more interactivity for "viewers" and more effective advertising through *targetting* with *global* reach. This pull/push will cause more well-resourced shows to be released on the internet.

Also, TVs/monitors are now big enough and integrated media center/console/computers smart enough that you can use them in the living room, so you can read books, play games and experience local and broadcast media and content from your sofa. It's the (current) best of all worlds. Enjoy it!