By Any Means

Check out the TV cabinet in most U.S. living rooms and you'll find all the signs of a thriving industry: Giant new HD flat screens, digital cable boxes, DVRs, home theater systems, next generation game consoles, Blu-Ray DVD players.

But TV is actually dying.

Of all the hours spent in front of our shiny new systems, less and less is spent watching traditional TV, as in broadcast. Recorded programming, video games and DVD rentals are cutting deeply into viewing hours and advertising revenues.

If you want to see the future of TV, you need to get off the couch, head down the hall to the office and fire up a PC. Don't get us wrong.  Fifty-inch plasmas and HD are great, and they aren't going away. But the real future of TV is on the Web.

By the Numbers

The slow but steady exodus of broadcast TV viewers actually began well before the advent of the internet. Prime time viewership peaked back in 1983, when 105 million people tuned in for the final episode of M.A.S.H on CBS. Since then, the average broadcast prime time viewership has dropped from 45 percent of households in 1985 to 28 percent in 2007, according to Nielsen.

In contrast, video on the Web is booming. Thanks to an explosion of dedicated video sites and services, from Hulu and iTunes to YouTube and Veoh as many as one fifth of U.S. television viewers are permanently putting down their remotes and opting to watch their prime time programming online, according to Integrated Media Measurement Inc.

Consolidating Hardware

Of course, burgeoning broadband video services will not stay tethered to the PC and in fact some are already jumping back into the living room with the help of devices like the Slingbox and Slingcatcher.

Convergence devices have been trotted out for years, only to fail over and over again (remember Philips' AOLTV?). But real progress is being made. Consumers now have their choice of a range of "connected" boxes, from TiVo to cable company issue DVRs, gaming systems like the Xbox 360 or the PS3, or standalone media extenders like the Apple TV.

The need for add-on boxes is starting to disappear completely. HDTVs are already beginning to absorb hard drives and Wi-Fi, in some cases cutting out the need for a various other pieces of hardware.

At CES this year, Sony, LG, Toshiba, Panasonic and Samsung all unveiled Net-connected TVs and enhancements enabling direct viewing of online content on digital HD sets, including the ability to access online videos seamlessly from Youtube, Netflix and Amazon, without requiring a peripheral device such as the Roku or a Blu-Ray player.

Content providers also upped the convergence ante with a blizzard of announcements that make the TV look a lot more like a PC. Amazon expanded partnerships that will allow TV access to a library of some 40,000 movies streamed over the Web, while Yahoo took the wraps off of a new TV widget platform that will allow television watchers to access content from its Flickr photo-sharing site, among other things.

"TV shows will still exist in ten years, but (you) won't watch them on what your Grandma called a TV," says Jason Hirschorn, president of Sling Media's Entertainment Group. "In fact, when you ask the average person what exactly television is, they may not be able to tell you."

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