The Price of Free

[Commentary] With broadband becoming the norm and connection speeds continuing to quicken, what has happened to music companies and newspapers is beginning to happen to broadcast networks and cable companies. People are using the Net to bypass the customary providers of television programming, along with the ads they show and the fees they collect. Blu-ray players are just the tip of the iceberg that the TV business is about to hit. Today you can watch snippets of shows on YouTube or entire episodes on sites like Hulu or Yahoo TV. You can view news reports at CNN.com, sports events at ESPN360.com and documentaries at PBS.org. You can download shows, sometimes without charge, from Apple's iTunes store and watch them on your iPod, iPhone or PC. Or you can stream them through your Xbox or Wii. Television is escaping the TV set and the cable box. We no longer watch the tube. We watch, to borrow ex-Senator Ted Stevens's memorable conceit, a series of tubes. As the technology of television changes, so, too, does the experience of watching it. In the past, TVs often served as the focal points of communal gatherings. Families or groups of friends would collect around the set to watch the prime-time shows or the weekend games. They would laugh at the sitcom slapstick, cheer for their local teams, chat through commercials and, during the duller stretches, keep one another from nodding off. TV may have been a vast wasteland, as Newton Minow, the F.C.C. chairman in the Kennedy administration, said in a speech in 1961, but at least it was a wasteland we shared. The communal mode of TV viewing isn't gone, but it's becoming less common. As screens proliferate and shrink, and as the Web allows us to view whatever we want whenever we want, we spend more time watching video alone. That's one funny thing about the Internet: it's an extraordinarily rich communications system, but as an information and entertainment medium, it encourages private consumption. The pictures and sounds served up through our PCs, iPods and smart phones absorb us deeply but in isolation. Even when we're together today, we're often apart, peering into our own screens.