The battle lines have been drawn and the war is raging on your living room. The prize is your eyeballs and, eventually, your cash. This is the war of television content in the form of movies and shows–a war that only a year ago wasn’t on the horizon. But as more and more companies come up with services and products to deliver content on the fly, one has to wonder if the major cable providers are in a full retreat. This is, afterall, what consumers have been begging to their cable providers for the past several years. Content that they want, not what is force-fed to them by Comcast and Verizon.
But it really goes one step further than that. If it were only the content on demand, Comcast and Verizon might be able to salvage their customer base. But with Hulu and Amazon’s new On demand service, consumers can take their shows with them wherever they want. This industry really hasn’t seen such a dramatic change in media since the arrival of Tivo a decade ago. Now most homes have some sort of DVR in them, whether it’s Tivo or the DVR supplied by their cable company.
So what does this mean? Unfortunatly, there is still this intangible thing missing from Amazon and Hulu and I just can’t quite put my finger on it. Of course, I am talking about the remote control. It won’t be until I can sit on my sofa with a drink and a bag of Doritos and channel surf these services until 3 AM that I will be cancelling my cable service. Until that happens, I will continue shelling out $150.00 a month for 25,000 channels I do not even watch.
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