Welcome to HickoryRecord.com. Skip directly to: our Keyword Search, Section Navigation, Content.

HickoryRecord.com - Hickory Daily Record

HomeNewsEntertainmentSportsLifestylesOpinionCommunityWeather Online Tools Jobs | Real Estate | Shopping | Classified

Modern Views: More people are watching TV without a TV

By Paul Farhi

THE WASHINGTON POST

Published: May 23, 2009

Danny Ledonne rarely misses The Daily Show. He frequently views its cable-TV cousin, The Colbert Report. For additional political satire and commentary, he often checks out HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher.

The thing is, Ledonne doesn't own a television. He hasn't had one since he was in college more than eight years ago. When he visits a friend who has the TV set on, he said, "It's like a quaint visit to an alien world."

These days, Ledonne, 27, can watch all the TV he wants with merely his laptop, cell phone or iPod. With full-length TV programs available all over the Internet (in both legal and pirated form), he does just fine without paying a monthly cable bill or even having a TV. In industry parlance, he's among those who have "cut the cord," no longer tethered to the sources that have delivered programming into the home since television's inception.

As alternative means of watching "television" rapidly mature, the Danny Ledonnes of the world are at the vanguard of a potentially potent economic and social force. They could be poised to do to the broadcasting, cable and satellite TV industries what free-music downloads did to the recording industry and free online news has done to newspapers -- that is, alter everything about the creation, production and delivery of TV.

Ledonne can construct an entire TV schedule without ever flicking a remote control. Thanks to dozens of videocasting Web sites such as Hulu, TV.com, Joost and Fancast, full-length episodes of more than 90 percent of the shows carried by the major broadcast networks are legally accessible within a day of being broadcast, according to Forrester Research (only about 20 percent of what's on cable is similarly available). And because online TV programs are always "on" and cost little more than the price of an Internet connection, Ledonne has gotten used to watching on his own terms.

"I don't want an arbitrary television schedule telling me when and where I'm supposed to meet it every night or every week," said Ledonne, a graduate student at American University and a video producer. "I want to watch when I want to, I want to be able to download it and listen on the bike or watch on a plane, and I want to do it for free with minimal advertising. Otherwise, I have better things to do."

The Sony in the living room isn't about to vanish, not with almost 99 percent of all American households still owning at least one TV. Nor are the cable or satellite industries in any immediate danger, given that 85 percent of the country still pays for TV service.

But watching video on computers and mobile devices is growing at a rate far faster than for conventional TV watching. According to comScore, a research firm in Reston, Va., online video viewing increased 42 percent last year, about 10 times the growth rate of TV viewing.

The trends plainly worry some in the TV business. Alarmed at the rapid online migration, cable operators have been pressuring program suppliers to limit the number of episodes they supply to Hulu and its ilk. Comcast, Time Warner and Cox are discussing a venture that would make more cable programs available online, but only to those who can prove that they already subscribe to cable.

"The reality is we are starting to see the beginnings of cord-cutting, where people, typically young people, are saying, ‘All I need is broadband,'" Glenn Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner's cable division, told stock analysts this year. "So the impact of that potentially over time is to reduce the number of (cable) customers."

Sabrina Jaszi, 23, of Brooklyn, uses her TV set for playing back the DVDs she rents from Netflix, or a few TV shows via the Internet (a connection she doesn't pay for, as her apartment building supplies WiFi).

"I don't have time to stand in front of a TV and wait to watch a program," said Jaszi, an editorial assistant at a New York digital-media company. Media, she believes, should be free: "I wouldn't say that watching TV online is about saving money, because it was never something that I expected to pay for in the first place."

If Jaszi and Ledonne keep TV executives up at night, Dan Jones is what they see in their nightmares. Jones owns a TV set, but it's connected to his Mac mini computer. He doesn't have to watch hunched over a laptop, a drawback of mobile and online video. He can stream Web videos directly to his TV set.

"Once you can get (series) on demand, you really can't go back to watching TV the old way," said Jones, 27, a video producer at Harvard University. He used to pay about $50 a month for cable, which he now thinks is "just absurd."