If television chained entertainment-junkies to the couch, online video has now released their shackles. Faster broadband, the rise of mobile phones and tablet devices, and services like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube that stream shows to people anywhere with an internet connection have freed viewers to watch programmes wherever they wish.
Pay-television executives have also chosen to take part in this liberation movement, by offering their subscribers “TV everywhere”. Their companies give their customers an access code that lets them watch channels streamed live—or individual shows on demand—on their mobile devices, much as they can on Netflix or Hulu.
So far TV everywhere’s rollout has been slow.
Even so, new competitors are trying to grab the remote control. This week the Wall Street Journal
said Google (which owns YouTube) was seeking deals with television
companies to set up its own internet-streaming service. Intel is
expected to launch a similar service later this year. Netflix, Amazon
and other online distributors will plough a combined $750m this year
into making their own exclusive shows, to differentiate themselves from
each other and from cable channels.
Read more at The Economist
