Live Internet Television

Taking this leap is going to be scary!

Unless I chicken out, I’m about to make a test case of myself, going fully online for my TV within the next month.

Who knows what our approach will end up being, or if we’ll go back after trying this. We’re starting with buying individual shows via iTunes and watching them on the TV or laptop, depending.

I’ll be able to watch non-wholesome TV like Real Housewives on the laptop in private without disgusting my husband and poisoning my children (we can watch other more general programming like Top Chef together as before), and I’ll be able to break my unhealthy addiction to TV cable news, which is really not very good at this point in time (Better real news at NYT online, memeorandom, Politico, and HuffPo).

News stories published each day — like this one from CNN and this one from Fox — tout the growing number of American families responding to severe economic pressure by ditching monthly cable bills in favor of getting their TV entertainment online.

What’s the experience like? We’ll see about our family — I promise to share possibly too much! — but in the meantime let’s look at two common viewer profiles.

I’m online a lot anyway, so it’s easy for me to find the content I want online

This is the group that is best served by today’s offerings. These folks are adept at Web surfing and don’t mind going to a lot of different sites to find and watch what they are looking for. They probably also have a pretty robust Internet connection, so they’re less subject to hiccups and buffering gaps that plague online streaming.

None of this prevented the massive disappointment that was the inauguration streamed live online or the “online” Superbowl which, as I understand it, was only online live if by “Superbowl” you mean pre- and post-game shows and highlights.

This crowd of savvier-than-average technophiles will still need to forgo or replace  “incidental TV” (dipping in and out of  talk shows, news interviews, weather channels, local news, movies, food shows, etc. easily and inquisitively) with broader and more imaginative Internet reading/clip viewing.

I love traditional TV on the couch with my family — but I don’t want to pay for cable anymore

This is the group that is least well-served by today’s offerings. There are a lot of services out there delivering the content these folks love, but these folks have to jump through a few hurdles:

1. They need to be willing to watch the shows they love after the episodes originally air.
2. They need to buy a web-enabled TV or set-top box (such as Roku or Boxee) — or figure out how to connect their computer to their TV so the computer content is projected. (What’s easy for geeks is not easy for the average non-technical person.)
3. They need to be willing to make and manage a set of bookmarks, favorites, or other ways of easily accessing the archived show episodes online at a variety of broadcaster sites — Hulu has a lot, but by no means all TV episode content.
4. They need to understand they will be exposed to a lot less of the incidental TV which clutters their viewing habits but also offers benefits. There’s no current way to effortlessly surf TV channels online, dipping into talk shows, news interviews, weather channels, local news, movies, food shows, etc. easily and inquisitively.

What’s been your experience of online TV? What do you predict for me? Will I come crying back to Comcast?

Bringing the Internet to television (Boxee, for example, and all the new widgetized hardware that was shown at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show) means you can watch archived and online-only content on your Big Screen.

Bringing TV onto the Internet is a whole other paradigm enabling you to surf broadcast content as it airs, wherever you are. Not only can you bring the TV you already watch with you, but it will be possible to access live broadcasts from indie producers and desktop publishers with international and specialty content.

The direction content crosses over from one medium to another means very different things and gives users very different but complementary powers.

Onwards with the [r]evolution!