Cut It Out

The latest trend that all the cool kids are doing: cutting the cord.  That is, cancelling your cable, and getting all your filmed entertainment from Netflix or DVDs or YouTube or piracy.

I'm not surprised this is happening.  In fact, I'm surprised that it's taken this long.  A few years ago, Apple introduced its AppleTV, which would allow people to buy TV/Movies with the ease of iTunes.  I figured that was the beginning of the end for broadcast Television; it would decay slowly over the next decade, just as we'd already seen from the music industry.

But it didn't happen, at least right away.  Apple ran into the problem many companies have had with reinventing television: it's hard to talk people into paying for a box to plug their TV into, which they don't really need because their TV works fine as it is.

Now it's finally starting to happen.  There's plenty of downloadable video on the Internet - a lot of it legal - and plenty of people have some sort of set-up they can watch it on, whether that's a TV with a video game console, a tablet, or anything in between.

And once again, the threatened industry is only dimly aware of the threat.  Today, HBO and ESPN announced apps that will allow people to watch their content on AppleTV.  That sounds good, but it's only available to people who already subscribe to those channels on cable.  So this service will appeal to cord-cutters, but you can only get it if you're not a cord-cutter.

So having gotten my first prediction about the end of conventional television wrong, allow me to make another.  The big catch keeping many people from cutting the cord is live sports, which are still not often available anywhere but plain-old-TV.  But you know that the sports leagues are fretting over the thousands of (disproportionately young) viewers no longer able to watch their product.  It'll be difficult for sports leagues to distribute their content over the Internet, since they'll be screwing the networks that pay big bucks to show their games.  But I think they'll be the ones that push the TV world towards confronting the problem.