The Wife is out of town for a few days, visiting friends, and I’m here, working. I had thought, with the house to myself, I’d throw some movies into our upscaling DVD player and watch them on the television. Today I watched parts of 4 movies I’d seen before, and all of a suprisingly good sci-fi film called “Primer“. None of them, of course, on the television itself. I found myself resisting the urge to go into the living room, because watching the movies on my computer is easier, faster, and when I need a break, I can command-tab over to Safari or a number of other useful distracting applications.

This set me to thinking – will my son ever watch movies or television shows on the actual television? Probably not. Computer monitors are getting bigger and better every year, and while they are not the size of HDTV’s, they are close. Further, video is a very passive broadcast device, and I think my son’s generation will never get into it the way mine did. Sure, they’ll watch television programming, and movies, and whatever else, but it will be via Hulu, NetFlix’s pretty cool Watch Instantly and YouTube. They will probably also surf the ‘net, play video games, and chat with their friends, while they are consuming broadcast media. They will happily context-switch away when the forced advertisement comes, and then tune back in once their interest is caught again.

The times, they are a changin’. TiVo has proven this time and again. Why would you want to watch something when you can’t control what, when and where you watch it? Why do you really need to be home at 4:30 PM to catch your favorite bit of entertainment? For my generation, when we were growing up there never was an option, other than laughably trying to set the VCR’s timer to get the show for you. With broadband internet access getting faster every year and hard drive sizes tracking Moore’s Law closely, media is becoming more and more unchained from the television and more adapted to the user’s particular whim of consumption. It’s a (now classic) question of atoms versus bits – and Nicholas Negroponte’s ‘Being Digital’ is still as good a read as it was when it was released, 13 years ago.

Not that this doesn’t scare the bejeesus out of the broadcast industry and government run media everywhere. Just look at the Boxee/Hulu integration mess from earlier this year. In a nutshell, people are running Hulu Desktop out to their televisions, via set-top boxes running free OS’s. The content producers gave Hulu a very specific license – that doesn’t cover ‘televisions’ as a playback device. Boxee tried to get it worked out, but in the end Boxee lost, the customer lost, and in doing so, the content producers lost. They seem to have lost touch with the fact that the people who are consuming Boxee represent the next wave of consumer spending – and pissing them off makes for a wary purchasing public. Now, instead of watching through Hulu, they are back to their BitTorrent clients, downloading the shows to watch later. This is bad in a few senses, outside the legal aspect – once downloaded, these shows will never be purchased by these consumers.

It’s the music industry versus Napster all over again – and we can see how well this is going for the music industry. Consumers have realized that they don’t need Big Content, and Big Content doesn’t yet realize how badly they need consumers. For many years, the only way the media was distributed was in channels that were strictly controlled, monitored and monetized. Those channels are now dying – digital downloads are set to pass CD sales in $/year this year or next. For $1/month, you can get customized radio through your web browser that is tailored to your listening needs. Who needs Clear Channel in this world?

UPDATE: iTunes Music Store now has %25 of the US music market