Update: The Atlantic gets it.

Recently, the country has witnessed this year’s edition of the regularly-scheduled squabble between Viacom and one of the cable TV providers; this year’s competitor being Time-Warner. There was a similar squabble with Dish Network a year or two ago.

In a nutshell, these squabbles occur over Viacom trying to negotiate a new price for their product. When the squabble gets big, the negotiatinos will reach an impasse, at which point Viacom threatens to pull the content from the cable TV provider. At this point, Viacom directs angry customers to put pressure on the cable provider, and the cable provider directs angry customers to put pressure on Viacom.

Time-Warner played a new card this time around. Time-Warner told customers where to go online to get the TV shows they couldn’t get on cable. Viacom’s response was to threaten to block users coming from Road Runner (Time-Warner’s internet service) and that would probably have put the kibosh on that workaround for the majority, but it does bring up a bigger question, and that question is: Is cable TV still relevant?

Let’s look at the ways in which cable TV fails to work for the customer.

First off, despite there being hundreds of channels now, there are still many times when there is nothing on that you want to watch. Many of the channels are pure junk of one type or another, to one viewer or another. Despite my having no interest in shopping at home or watching sports (and yes, I accept that others views differ on this topic), I have to buy packages of channels that cater to these audiences in order to get the channels I want. What really upset me was a year or two ago when Dish Network moved the National Geographic Channel into a higher tier to make room for another sports channel. This raised my bill by $10/month for one channel of interest! Part of this, in turn, is because companies like Viacom, Turner and others require that if a cable carrier carries one of their channels, they must carry (and pay for) all of them.

But this recent squabble got me thinking. The vast majority of programming on TV doesn’t benefit from being tied to a particular time slot. In fact, there is so little benefit there that the channels themselves have started overlapping the closing credits of one program with the opening scene from the next in order to make room for more commercials. As such, why do we watch TV in this format?

Mind you, there are ceratain types of programming for which this is appropriate, and my list (which I don’t guarantee to be exhaustive) consists of: 24-hour news stations, call-in talk shows, live events (concerts, sports, etc). Anything else should be released from the shackles.

How do we do this?

As I see it, there are three models we can use.

The first model is already here. Make TV shows available on DVD, and go buy them or rent them or order them from Netflix, then watch them, commercial free, at your leisure. Doctor Who doesn’t need to be watched at 9:00 PM; he can be watched just as easily at 6:43 PM, 10:51 AM, or, for that matter, 3:11 AM. Whenever. The problem with this model is scaling it to the level of TV viewing that takes place in most households.

The second model is to send video on demand over the Internet. I mentined Netflix a second ago, and they are, at this point, able to do this. The problem that may be encountered here is that many of the household Internet providers are also cable TV providers, and so this puts them where they can abuse their position by making it difficult to use that much bandwidth. This could, reasonbly, be hammered out.

The third model is to send video on demand over the existing TV infrastructure. Who says the show has to be sent in real-time? It can be accelerated and sent as fast as the link can take it, or it can be slowed down and pushed out as background noise. Either way, a set-top box could cache the result and make it available for viewing if you’ve subscribed to it.

That leads me to one other point. I would suggest we start subscribing to shows, rather than channels. To use my previous example, Doctor Who looks just as good on the Sci-Fi channel as it does on BBC America, and would look just as well on-demand. By subscribing to the show, the networks have to admit their actual role: they are shippers.

Back to the three models. The second and third models are also already in place, but what is going on here is that they have limited selection or other problems. I think this can be fixed. I think this is especially true for the third model, where the fix is for the cable and satellite TV providers to make more bandwidth available for on-demand programming by not carrying so many of these channels which, I hope you can now see, are hopelessly obsolete.