In March of 2007, media giant Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube in response to the very common practice of users uploading copyrighted television shows. Around the same time, comedian Demetri Martin lampooned the lawsuit on The Daily Show with hilarious postmodern poignancy. As the show’s resident “youth correspondent,” he ironically and perfectly summed up how young people view streaming video content on the internet.
“The only thing I like better than watching a TV show is watching it smaller and blurrier,” Martin exclaims in the video. “What’s next? Are we gonna have to start paying for music, too?”
My current demographic — Men 18-34 — first experienced free copyrighted content after the serendipitous marriage of two technologies in the late 90s: peer-to-peer internet file sharing (read: Napster, Kazaa, etc.) and rewritable CD drives. Suddenly, young people learned, through friends and experimentation, how to navigate the 21st century bootleg market with amazing ease and efficiency. Anyone familiar with a PC could make a free mix CD of their favorite songs, while more tech savvy teens obtained new albums and movies sometimes months before they saw wide release. The sphincters of RIAA and MPAA officials across the country tightened at an alarming and unprecedented rate.
Even as we grew up and got hit with litigation in our college dorm rooms, the vast majority of users still flippantly dismissed, and continue to dismiss, control efforts by parent companies the way that Martin does in his segment. The whole situation is funny because young people realize these implacable facts: entertainment consumption has changed, the new technologies are here to stay, and media companies have to evolve.
Many major companies like ABC and Showtime have slowly accepted and adapted to the paradigm shift by allowing select content to be seen on their websites. CBS did an excellent job providing streaming coverage of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament with their “Madness On Demand” service, and ABC even plans to offer shows in high definition. These major concessions, paired with the proliferation of popular streaming media sites directed specifically at television and movies like Joost and Hulu, beg the following question: will television as we know it die like the dinosaurs?
Speaking as both a “youth” and as a correspondent, the future of our TV and movie consumption hinges on the balance between two very simple aspects of viewing: quality and expediency. When people my age watch video on the internet, we sacrifice a lot of quality for an even higher level of convenience.
If someone tells you about a show, and you can count on the Web for that show’s whole first season on your computer literally two minutes after typing in its name on Google. A cheap college student will always be willing to wait out a couple ads-or dodge some spyware downloads-as long as the content they reach is legit and they don’t have to pay for it.
However, as long as guys have the time and equipment to watch the game or the babes and explosions of Sin City in glorious HD, then television as we now know it will live on at least a little longer. Computer hardware simply hasn’t caught up to plasma televisions in that respect. Video on Demand services offer HD quality and one-click expediency, but their “pay to play” business model sends most of My Generation back to their laptops. Most guys I know will shell out for a sweet entertainment system and some choice DVD’s, but they are less likely to pay for VOD on their TVs.
Once television proper or the Internet manages to maximize both of those all-important aspects, we will see a real change in how we watch the boob tube.