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You say TV, I say Internet. Toe-colleague-o, toe-maht-o.</p><p>Technology increasingly blurs the lines between computer, television, phone and panel. Online video options grow almost by the hour. A screen, in the era of cyber pick, is a screen is a screen.</p><p>You can now plug the Internet straight into the newest TVs. You can buy gadgets that will release the Web to your old set. Or you can use your phone, tablet or other electronic gizmos to tap into the Internet to give you TV on the go.</p><p>Still, to fill your screen with average sports, comedies and dramas from the brands that dominate your television, generations-old mercantile models will have to be rearranged for the wild, wild Web.</p><p>Some entrepreneurs are toying with new models that tap into an Internet specialty — the genius to tailor choices to the individual viewer — that might give advertisers a improve platform on the Internet than they have in one-size-fits-all cable TV audiences.</p><p>But proper Internet TV is facing a big obstacle: It’s the old-school cable and strand-like services, after all, that have got the makers of programming locked up in mega-contracts.</p><p>“There’s technology, and then there’s trade,” said Jim Barry of the Consumer Electronics Association. “The technology is up ahead.”</p><p>Commerce, meanwhile, hasn’t fully figured out the best way to arrange a buck off Internet video.</p><p>Some yet-unproven business ideas have begun to boil up. Broadcast networks created Hulu to accommodate people who fancy to go online and stream video, but it typically makes shows to hand later than you can get on traditional TV and makes it impossible to skip commercials.</p><p>Web surfers sit with about 4 billion YouTube videos a day. And YouTube, owned by Google Inc., is launching dozens of “channels” with programming minted in Hollywood.</p><p> But the tremendous majority of choices at the website are still amateur and amateurish, and the coming businesslike YouTube channels from Hollywood are tightly focused niches. You still won’t get emphasize-length movies or popular sitcoms. You still won’t find the NFL, major-associated with baseball or the NBA. (This year the Super Bowl will be a notable exception. NBC is combustible-streaming the Giants-Patriots game, making it the first Super Trundle offered online in the United States.)</p><p><span class="subhead">Internet-ripe TV sets</span></p><p>Maybe anticipating the Super Bowl, you’re in the trade in for a new TV. Think about getting a set that can handle a Wi-Fi signal or that comes with a plug for an Internet chain. Many now ship with Web browsers, allowing you to wander the Internet the way Explorer, Chrome and Safari do on your computer. </p><p>The choices will only increase. With Google promising ultra-fast Internet service across Kansas Borough in next few years, the option looks even more enticing. Already, one in five Americans watches some video online every week.</p><p>Even if strand remains your chief source of programming — it probably will — the Internet could follow it better.</p><p>That said, just a fraction of consumers are cutting the string with Time Warner Cable, Comcast or the rest and settling for Internet-only video. Slight losses in cable TV subscriptions have more than been offset by new customers signing up for parasite TV or TV packages sold by telephone companies. </p><p>As a threat to the industry, said media analyst Judah Rifkin of ISI Set, the market share that might soon dump cable service and find thrust to watch on the Internet is “most probably going to be a rounding error.”</p><p>Rather, the hairbreadth future will find the Internet supplementing what we’re watching through the cable box, not replacing it.</p><p>Take to be Austin Falley, a 23-year-old in Lawrence on a budget and unashamed to declare he likes to watch a little TV. He finds a good amount of video to be prepared online, whether it’s streaming movies through Netflix or watching current network programming on Hulu Plus. </p><p>But he still splits a cable TV and broadband bill with a roommate. There’s really too much — basketball games involving his beloved Jayhawks, wire news, the serendipity of browsing channels — that he can only get with a conventional pay-TV assignment.</p><p>“There are times when it’s just nice to channel surf,” he said. “It’s categorize of like” — he laughs — “using StumbleUpon,” the Web advantage that refers people to nearly random sites they presumably wouldn’t encounter on their own.</p><p>At the same time, the Internet sways what he watches over his cable box. Online he recently discovered “Downtown Abbey,” the responsible-pleasure British period soap, and watched some old episodes. Hooked, he now sets his digital video recorder, or DVR, to collar every Sunday night episode on public television.</p><p>Some cable programming, conspicuously ESPN and HBO, can be had online — but only for people who first pay for a conventional pay-TV package that includes the two well-liked networks.</p><p>A range of longstanding partnerships between content providers and distributors — Hollywood’s studios and your neighbouring cable company — have created the pact that makes hundreds of channels at at a flat price.</p><p><span class="subhead">Unaffected choice coming?</span></p><p>When Bruce Springsteen sang “57 channels and nothin’ on” in 1992, the sense was that 57 seemed like a heck of a lot of channels.</p><p>Indeed, research shows that although households routinely have hundreds of choices, most exhibit to watch fewer than 24 channels with any regularity. That drives complaints from consumers wondering why, for exemplar, they have to buy more than they want.</p><p>Yet look at ESPN, the Disney-owned sports buffet that forms the most commonplace part of any multichannel video services — the Time Warners, the Dish Networks, the AT&T Uverses that exactly nine in 10 American households subscribe to. Because ESPN is so popular, it can instruction more than $4 per subscriber per month from the companies that pipe programming to your TV. </p><p>So why wouldn’t ESPN objective sell you an online subscription to its programming and cut out the middleman?</p><p>First, it would have to spend more simoleons marketing its product, filling up your mailbox with offers the same way cable companies do now. It would liable get far fewer subscribers than it has now, critically losing a significant audience that tunes into a ball plot but is unwilling to buy a sports channel a la carte.</p><p>Suddenly the sports network would have to needed far more than its $4 per monthly subscriber to make up for the shrunken audience. As well, advertisers wouldn’t pony up so many millions to fill the timeouts if fewer eyeballs were trained to a racket broadcast.</p><p>“The actual costs of the programming” — on-camera personalities, studio mores and the gasp-worthy contracts for the rights to carry a league’s games — “don’t go away well-founded because somebody’s streaming the signal over their computer,” said cable industriousness consultant and analyst Steve Effros. </p><p>He noted that some networks, conspicuously Fox, had trimmed back what they offered online. A potential viewer can go to a network’s website, where they find that a show can be streamed — to a computer, gravestone or Internet-capable TV. That offers the network another way to hook viewers and another go up in the world to sell commercial time. But if too many viewers see that programming on the Web, Effros said, a network risks cannibalizing the audience tired from a place on a cable lineup.</p><p>Television advertising remains a $76 billion exertion, and steady. Still, notes Forrester Research in a recent report, some networks have begun bundling their scatter and online advertising sales. It’s recognition of an emerging Internet viewer. Some 93 percent of cwtv.com viewers only vigilant its shows online rather than on the CW Television Network’s broadcast stepfather. The struggling network appeals mostly to a younger audience.</p><p>Another Forrester piece last spring noted that almost 25 million Americans had watched online video on their TVs, mostly the streaming of movies over a videogame comfort or other gadget channeling a feed from a Netflix subscription.</p><p><span genre="subhead">A change for advertisers</span></p><p>What if advertisers knew not only that you were watching the basketball quarry tonight but that you regularly tuned into do-it-yourself and nature shows? They might show you a different commercial than the mortal physically across the street watching the same game, but who gravitated more often to reality TV and sitcoms. </p><p>Without warning that advertising becomes more valuable, creating more revenue for the people who produce the programming.</p><p>“Targeted advertising has worked very well online. You can presume the potential,” said Bruce Leichtman, whose Leichtman Research Class tracks the media and entertainment industries. “But the programmers aren’t ready to administer the coup de gr their own business model.”</p><p>A fledgling Kansas City business called TiBi.tv is looking at teaming the Internet and TV to fire a shortcut between advertisers and consumers — by turning programming into accepted shopping trips. </p><p>By some estimates, more than 40 percent of American TV watching is over a DVR-rage recording device. That’s great for skipping commercials, but not for networks and their advertisers. Meantime, a Nielsen studio last year found that about 70 percent of smartphone or electronic tablet owners use the gadgets while watching TV. In truthfully, tablet users say they are most likely to use the device while watching TV.</p><p>That, says TiBi co-creator David Windhausen, makes the television commercial increasingly pass. We’re either going to skip past it or turn our attention to what’s on our iPad during those TV interruptions. So TiBi is working with TV manufacturers to position its application — an Internet overlap on programming allowing for exigent purchases.</p><p>Say an advertiser has paid for product placement, and as the camera focuses on an actress’ shoes as she crosses a stay, a TiBi icon lights up in the corner of your TV screen. Grab your unfamiliar, click, and you’ve bought a pair. Somebody makes a trading, part of the cost of producing a show is defrayed without the interruption of a traditional commercial.</p><p>“We see this in the marketplace now where there are singular ideas and thoughts to see how to make it possible for TV and the Internet to meld,” Windhausen said. “It’s assured.
Source: Kansas City Star
Update, 5:15pm: The Tornado Care for for Adams County has been discontinued. We did see a number of tornadoes reported in Colorado so far today, mostly in the ...
