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Cable Isn't Your Only Option For Watching TV

Tribune file photo (2007)

Collette Macon, 29, of St Petersburg, watches episodes of her favorite TV shows over the Internet.

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By RICHARD MULLINS rmullins@tampatrib.com

The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 6, 2009

Ryan Bennett has a message for the cable company, and it goes like this: Buzz off.

Oh, he loves his favorite shows, "NCIS" on CBS, "Hell's Kitchen" on Fox. But he has found a way around the cable company and doesn't plan on giving it any more of his cash.

"It's just easier to give that box back to the cable company and watch whatever we want online," Bennett said.

How does he do that? He fires up his home PC and brings up CBS.com. For NBC shows, he goes to Hulu.com, or he goes to Joost.com for oddball videos or uses Boxee.tv to find a dozen other TV shows or movies.

If those names just look like an alphabet soup, don't worry. They'll be familiar enough soon. Although Web TV isn't as simple as one off-the-shelf product, content owners are desperately trying to find more ways to reach viewers and are cooking up deals with TV manufacturers and a range of Web sites to make it easier.

And the audiences are showing up.

Case in point. When Tiger Woods returned to professional golf last week, more than 1 million people went to PGATour.com for hole-by-hole action. For Day Two of the match, 100,000 more people tuned in.

Best of all for TV fans, Web TV is cheap. So here's what TV on the Web means to you:

You can toss your cable TV box.

Thanks to an awful economy, more Americans are eyeballing any monthly bills they can reduce - such as cable TV. True, it's simple to downgrade to a lower-tier package with fewer channels, but that can mean doing without a favorite channel.

Bennett connects a spare PC to his 42-inch Sony HDTV using cables, effectively turning it into a giant computer monitor for online videos. "We avoid renting another cable box and DVR," Bennett said, "And we probably save $50 a year in electricity the DVR would use up."

A recent study found 17 percent of U.S. households watch TV episodes on a home computer, and 8 percent hooked a PC directly up to a TV to watch shows on a bigger screen, according to Parks Associates, a technology research company. Most of the time, people said they wanted to watch shows for free or avoid ads.

Cases like that could be one reason the largest U.S. cable provider, Comcast Corp., this month said it lost 233,000 basic cable customers in the last three months of 2008 - 575,000 in all of 2008.

There's a lot to watch.

In just the past 12 months, major and minor networks have rushed to put more shows online.

CBS has many of its top shows online, including "Lost," "CSI" and "Survivor." NBC has many shows on its online project Hulu.com, plus movies such as "Liar Liar," "Grease 2" and "X-Men."

World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. has clips from recent matches, and there are videos and live streams from the BBC, CNN and even home shopping channels HSN and QVC.

Some established gadget companies are expanding online: Slingbox, now owned by DishNetwork, normally uses a set-top box to stream video to viewers but is now testing a free, online-only version with hundreds of shows and movies, such as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "60 Minutes" and "Night of the Living Dead."

This doesn't scratch the surface of video available at sites such as YouTube.

It's easier to find shows.

The sudden wave of new content has spawned a small industry of Web sites to help find shows online, including TV.com and OVGuide.com.

One of the breakout services is Boxee.tv, which promises to find any TV or movie anywhere it's posted online, and it makes the video easy to share on social networking Web sites. Partners include Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central and Last.fm. For a time, several networks are cooperating with Boxee, though NBC recently pulled back content.

The quality is improving.

If online video suffers a major drawback, it's image quality, which tends to be paltry. But that's improving. Newer video sites such as Joost and others have image quality far better than the early days of YouTube.

And YouTube took a major step forward in December by offering some videos in 720p resolution, which counts as high definition. (HD videos have a small tag at the bottom that says "Watch in HD.")

More shows are coming.

Entertainment companies long fought putting content online. Now they have a long list of reasons they should, said Phil Leigh, founder of Inside Digital Media.

First, the incremental revenue from selling ads during shows. (The sci-fi movie "Gattaca" on Hulu includes several 30-second ads for bagels.) Second, networks can reach new audiences - such as people in airports with notebook computers.

"Big fans of 'Lost' who don't have DVRs can go to the Web to see an episode that they missed," Leigh said. "That way 'Lost' keeps the viewer up-to-date and loyal and also gets the revenue from the ads."

There's a lot to keep up with.

With all the developments, TV viewers have a lot to untangle.

No single product makes the entire experience possible. Rather, TV viewers must handle a range of gadgets, programs and links, with segments of the chain constantly evolving: Boxee with more shows, Hulu's shifting catalog, PC speeds improving, easier connections to the TV.

Growing broadband use helps the trend along, and already 83 million American households have broadband, according to Parks Associates.

Meanwhile, Netflix has partnered with television makers to stream movies directly to television sets - bypassing cable TV companies altogether.

All of this makes for an awkward mating dance, said Leigh, as the companies that own the shows balance revenue they generate online with the risk of upsetting cable TV companies that provide far more viewers - for now.

Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919.

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