David: I tend to disagree with most of your points. While breaking news and sports are better when live there is no reason that the CBS Evening news can not be consumed on a time-shifted basis. You need to move past the traditional consumption of a 30 minute network news cast. With online video you will be able to customize your news cast with a mix of local, network/national and global clips. Think of RSS feeds for video.

When you move away from a live feed the net can and does handle mass time-shifted downloads.

This is where bittorrent comes in. Rumors are that Apple will include a bittorrent like client in the next Mac OS. Think back to Sun’s old slogan, “The network is the computer”.

Speaking of Mac OS…if you still have problems with crashes, drivers (?! please!), and viruses then please go buy a Mac.

Time shifting is the way to go. I rarely watch live TV. I watch hockey games of my favorite team 2 hours after start time, after the kids are off to sleep.

I do agree that it is a few years away. We have 3 tivos in our house. My children do not understand that some people can not rewind their TV. My kids have grown up with Tivo and timeshifting. They don’t understand when we go to grandma’s that we can’t just go the the menu and put on Blue’s Clues.

Their generation will basically never be slave to network programming schedules. 100% of their viewing will be ondemand.

Some points/rebuttals below in no particular order:

The web’s infrastructure lacks the capacity to deliver high quality video to a large number of people. A live broadcast of say, the CBS Evening News, much less the Super Bowl, even in a highly compressed format would bring the entire internet to its knees. Then there’s high-definition, which requires even more bandwidth. Many ISPs cannot consistently deliver anything higher than 500KB/sec.

Consumers perceive computers and televisions as fundamentally separate. According to Forrester, Jupiter, and similar studies I’ve read, interest in products or devices that allow for full-on convergence is extremely low.

Computers are still expensive, unreliable, require constant attention in the form of driver, OS, browser, Flash etc updates, and are susceptible to viruses, hacking, etc.

Overall television viewing is NOT declining. It has actually been growing in recent years, albeit slowly according to Nielsen. Nielsen HAS been recording declines among younger viewers however, so maybe this is the point of confusion.

Finally, while the writer objects to the idea of fixed program schedules (and I do too), the hours of prime time were not conjured out of thin air! More people watch television from 8 to 11 than during other times of the day, so that’s when you want to schedule something you want the largest number of people to see.

Here’s some more thoughts on Apple TV.

It would make sense to begin offering a “season pass” to individual shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, CSI, etc as the studios and Apple would immediately lock in the profit and the content could easily be delivered similarly to a podcast subscription each week after the shows aired on TV.

Speaking of podcasts, I think people are grossly underestimating their impact on the viewing habits of those with access to Apple TV.

Consider:

There are now hundreds and and soon thousands of decently produced college lectures freely available as video and audio podcasts. These lectures represent true “edutainment” in the sense that they will be available to watch sitting on your couch. People will be soaking up some very interesting content. This category of content was never available to the general public before. How much of an impact do these college lecture podcasts have to have before affecting other programming?

Now that any person with a camcorder, and a good idea can create a video podcast, how many creatives will begin developing semi-professional content specifically for distribution as a podcast on the Apple TV via iTunes? There is no FCC to govern what is displayed. It’s the wild west as far as content development. Think it’s a joke? Look at Joost, Blinx, Blip TV. Podcasts like Galacticast use a greenscreen to great affect producing “The SuperMarios”. Tiki Bar TV is funnier than most of the crap on TV now!

With little barriers to entry and small production costs, there is no limit on the content (domestically as well as internationally) that will becoming online as audio and video podcasts. Musicians and bands can now go directly to their audiences’ big screen TV’s with recorded audio and video podcasts of their performances. Podcast concerts are going to be phenomenally huge on Apple TV.

Very good. I would just add that Apple TV will not be alone. For example, Sony Bravia TV’s, due out this coming June or July allow the connection of Internet broadband directly to the TV for watching Internet video on the TV.

And, Apple would be wise to figure out how it can get the ABC/CBS/etc free streaming to route through iTunes to improve the viewer experience which is currently pretty miserable.