I haven’t had a tv for more than a decade, and increasing numbers of my friends are getting rid of theirs.  At the very least, many of them are dropping cable or satellite and using their televisions primarily for dvds and Netflix.  There’s definitely a shift.  It’s not that we don’t like to watch television.  It’s just that we would rather not pay for an entire package with hundreds of channels that we won’t use.  We want television that we can watch at times that fit our schedules, and we want programming that’s catered to our interests.

Traditional television has never really been very good at this.  Sure there are innovations like dvr that make it better, but it’s still not as customizable as subscription services.  And so the market has responded with Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime.  $8/month for Netflix seems like pretty good value relative to cable, particularly when Netflix is producing a series like House of Cards and releasing a whole season all at once so I can watch it whenever if fits my schedule – all in one weekend if I don’t want to wait, or half an episode at a time whenever I can squeeze it in to a busy schedule.  Similarly, I pay for an mlb.tv subscription every year because I’m a huge fan, and it lets me watch almost every game all season long – including my San Francisco Giants who I’d have trouble seeing very often at all otherwise.

And now HBO is offering the same thing – a standalone streaming service.  I love some Game of Thrones, and True Detective was pretty good.  I might seriously consider a subscription to an HBO streaming service.

I don’t expect that traditional television is going to die out.  I don’t think that most American homes will be tv-less any time soon.  And that’s fine.  They needn’t be.  But the genius of the market is that it offers cable and satellite if people want to have tvs.  And it offers Netflix and HBO online, and subscriptions to baseball broadcasts, and other similar options for people who prefer to consume their television that way.  Consumers can send signals, as they clearly have to HBO, and we end up with lots of good options for people with wildly differing interests.

This is why I love the market!