From the Wall Street Journal to the Winston-Salem Journal, and a lot of sites in between, consumers are being tutored on how to cut the cord with cable, telephone and satellite systems and watch TV on the Internet via computer or mobile phone.
"One of the perks of not having cable or an antenna to receive channels in your house is you don't end up sitting in front of your television sitting through terrible shows you would never watch normally--and you weren't planning to watch," avowed TV addict Ian Purdy told the Winston-Salem Journal. Purdy picks and chooses among his favorite programs via computer links, the paper said, because it's "easy to feed a TV habit without turning on a TV."
There are, all the articles point out, a number of technologies available to make online viewing happen. There are also drawbacks. The picture on a PC, laptop or phone will never equal a large-screen TV and there is limited content. Plus the chances are becoming greater that the viewer will pay for that content in some way.
Still, according to a survey conducted by electronics shopping site Retrevo, 64 percent of Americans watch at least some of their television online and 23 percent under age 25 watch most of it there. "It's a growing trend," concluded a Tubular blog post by Bobby Hankinson. "It may be just a matter of time before America's hearth becomes nothing more than a streaming clip of the Yule Log."
For more:
- see this story
- and this story
- and this blog
- and this how-to