For years, most of my friends have avoided television subscription. Cable is expensive, and television is mostly bad. Now, my remaining televsion-enabled friends are cancelling their subscriptions too. Nowadays, when we watch TV, we watch the internet.

The conventional TV listings are a depressing litany of low-content, low-entertainment pap and fluff. It’s barely adequate to it’s main task of diverting your attention from the fact that time is passing while you are sitting on the couch without better things to do. There are exceptions. Some good miniseries, an occasional documentary or they might show a good movie, even one or two funny sitcoms. Well, maybe one. I think there was one, I can’t remember it now. And there is the Daily Show.

News on TV has long since been outclassed by the speed and superior editorial content of the internet. Google news will tell you everything you need to know, and if it is happening somewhere else, it will tell it to you while the news desks of those places are still in sunlight. Blogs contain a greater diversity and often integrity of editortial remark regarding current events. See metafilter, del.icou.us, technorati, and memeorandum, or go straight to your favourite blog and follow the trackback links. And every good newspaper, from the Christian Science Monitor to the Onion, has an online edition. The only decent news on TV is available once a day and in limited markets. Except, I suppose, the Daily Show.

Decent movies occasionally still show up on cable, but not often. Netflix, on the other hand is a wonderful way of getting all the films you’ve heard about, getting them conveniently, and watching them on your schedule. Do they have Netflix in Canada yet? If not, my financial advise is buy the franchise. And movie rental stores still have the benefit of making an event out of movie watching that combines sitting inside with going outside as a group, and bantering endlessly and unprofitably about what to take home.

So news and movies are done better by other options. What does that leave TV? TV shows. But those rare shows of quality are never on when we want to watch them, and stacked through and through with television commercials designed by experts to break the mood and tension of the shows they bullethole. Sitting down in front of a television is rarely an entertaining experience.

The thing is, for me and my freinds, we don’t get our TV from TV anymore. We can have the shows we want, and only the shows we want, when we want them, from bittorrent. Try a search on isohunt for Battlestar Galactica, or Band of Brothers. It’s all there. With commercials helpfully removed, which is an extroardinary plus, and I suspect one of the reasons why the other replacement for TV on TV–TV on DVD–is doing so well even though it’s so expensive. And this downloading of TV isn’t just a novelty for geeks to show off their bandwidth. When my TV-watching friends do, their routine tools are a computer with broadband and an attached TV set. Cable is out of the picture.

Somebody even developed a how-to on scripting the equivalent of a bittorrent PVR, which would automatically search for, locate and download each new episode of your favourite shows as they become available online. They typically become available, by the way, almost immediately after they’ve shown up on the television. That means as soon as they show up on the television /anywhere in the world/, which is why most hardcore north american Battlestar Galactica fans had seen most of the first season before it arrived here. Likewise, I imagine, the new Doctor Who. (Tangentially, none of this has stopped Battlestar Galactica from being hugely successful. Possibly the opposite.)

Getting a real tin-and-wiring PVR would do all of this for us more easily. But Tivos are expensive, and require the additional expense of cable, and are voluntarily giving up their usefullness as collaborationist gestures to big media. So bittorrent ahoy.

Okay, so it isn’t a sustainabe model. Unlike music, where the artists exist as truley seperate entities to the music labels to which they only attach themselves because of begrudging necessity, TV studios are integral parts of the TV networks that distribute their product, and probably couldn’t survive independantly. So their is no possibility that the undermining of TV distribution via Big Media will lead to a re-alignment beneficial to the artists that create the TV content. The only way they’re getting paid, unless the system changes more fundamentally than even optomists could predict, is if TV networks keep selling ads and people keep buying cable subscriptions. But for my friends, if there is a but, few of us would likely be willing to pay for cable (or less, satellite) anyway, so it isn’t as if we’re depriving the creators of money they would otherwise be getting.

I suppose my point isn’t that it is moral or immoral to get TV from the internet, although it might be, or convenient or inconvenient, although it certainly is. My point is that some of my friends have already made the switch, and are doing it as a routine matter, which may mark some sort of turning point or at least sign-post in the evolution of the delivery of entertainment video.