Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape
INEXPENSIVE broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands two weeks after the Times reported that web video is already pulling viewers and marketing dollars away from television, so the question it answers is not whether audiences are moving but what kind of video they are moving to. Its answer: cheap broadband has done more than make lab-to-screen media innovations viable — it has detached watching from the living-room set entirely.
First-order effects
- A generation of producers whose native medium is the Internet gains direct access to audiences without needing network carriage, while YouTube and iTunes sit as the confirmed beneficiaries of inexpensive broadband distribution.
- Advertisers already flagged in mid-November coverage as shifting money toward web video now face a supply of formats built for the small screen rather than repurposed TV spots.
Second-order effects
- Broadcasters and studios are pushed to treat the Internet as a primary outlet rather than a promotional annex, since the audience and the ad dollars are migrating to where viewing is unchained from the set.
- Production economics tilt toward low-cost, short-form work optimized for laptop and phone screens, pressuring traditional program lengths and formats that assumed a fixed broadcast schedule.
Third-order effects
- If viewing keeps decoupling from the TV set, 'television' stops meaning a device and becomes a category of content distributed over broadband — a redefinition with consequences for carriage fees, ratings currency, and who counts as a network.
- The pattern points toward an industry where distribution gatekeeping weakens and the scarce assets become audience attention and advertising measurement, not spectrum or cable shelf space.
The trend: Television is being reshaped by inexpensive broadband into a medium defined by the producer and the screen in hand rather than the broadcast schedule, with YouTube and iTunes as the early distribution winners.