Breaking Up with Cable for the New Hottie: The Internet

I love The Daily Show with Jon Stewart -- but I can't stay up past 10 or 10:30 p.m. if I have to get up and go to work in the morning. That's just my internal clock.

So I've compensated for the past couple years by watching the Comedy Central reruns of the previous night's show at 8 p.m. (Pac Time). Until Comedy Central moved the rerun time to 7 p.m. (Pac Time) which killed my viewership.

There is now no way for me to get home from work, go to the gym, clean up, and consume dinner for two by 7 p.m.

As much as I'd love an excuse to skip the gym three nights a week, my waistline won't. So I'm trying something new: watching the Daily Show online (http://www.thedailyshow.com/). You can watch whole episodes (with commercials inserted) or search for clips.

It's kind of a pain for me -- I work on a computer all day long, and I'm not sure I want to watch TV on my husband's laptop.

But our kids can't believe we still watch TV on TV. When they want to watch something, they pull out their laptops and watch it online.

Ditto for my just-graduated-from-college niece. She told me about Hulu (http://www.hulu.com/) last  year - free TV episodes for a ton of shows on the Web. (Still free at this writing, though that may change.)

As usual, the children are our future. David Colker wrote a great story for the LA Times (Oct. 26) about the growing number of people ditching TV and watching shows on the Internet. Read "Pulling the TV cord, yet staying plugged in."

Fascinating, captain! (Thanks, YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/).




The big TV networks (and cable companies and cable networks) are now losing viewers to the Internet. While the cable companies are making up some of the loss by bundling Internet with Cable TV service, the networks are figuring out how to recoup their TV show production costs from online viewers.

Anyone who's been watching the print newspaper industry saga knows where this is going. To the Internet, of course.

So what does this have to do with social networking? Well, the young and the restless are using social networking to sending their friends links on their fave Internet TV web sites, and Internet TV episodes. More evidence on how authentic word-of-mouth/unintentional marketing is happening on social networks. Hulu is capitalizing on social networking (see the Dennis Leary Hulu commercial, below), urging hipsters to post links. (Great writing on that commercial...)

And, best of all, the kids and hipsters are teaching their not-so-hip friends (and parents) how to do it too. On Facebook (Thanks, Mike) and in person.

They're even patient about it. When my daughters were talking about watching movies on demand, piped through their laptops to their TVs, I had a middle-aged question.

"How do you get the Internet into your TV?" I asked. (We have DSL through the phone company at my house. And you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers, thank you. I don't WANT to switch to cable bundling. At this point.)

You'd think I asked them how to turn on a computer. That's the look I got.

"We get our Internet with our cable," the youngest gently reminded me. And the Internet is what they're using -- not cable's scheduled TV programming (and commercials).

"But you can run a cable from your laptop to your TV, and do it that way," the oldest said gently.

Thank God I have kids. Now I need to catch up on The Daily Show.

PS: want to see Hulu and Internet TV explained? (And, maybe, everything electronic explained? Shudder.) Check out these great Hulu commercials:

Hulu (and Internet TV), explained by Alec Baldwin.


Hulu (and Internet TV) explained by Dennis Leary.


Enjoy.

Grandma & Grandpa Get on Facebook

Last Christmas (2008), I helped my parents set up their own Facebook pages. Both of them will turn 70 within the next few months. Though both of them can use a Mac and have done e-mail for the past decade, neither one of them are particularly technical. Mom's a just-retired hospital R.N. and dad's a just-retired, still-subbing, public school administrator.

Their motivation for getting on Facebook? My sister and her husband's move from L.A. to Austin -- and all the Facebook photos they regularly post of their daughter Ari on Facebook. (She is adorable...)

Turns out, photos of a two-year-old granddaughter are lure enough to get most grandparents on Facebook and get them to learn how to navigate it.

Within a week, my parents were "friended" by all of their old high school friends on Facebook. There were a ton of them already there.

It turns out they were ahead of the curve. Or part of the curve. According to the Pew Internet & American Life project (http://www.pewinternet.org/), the fastest-growing demographic on the Internet is the 70-75-year-old group.

And they're joining Facebook. And even Twitter. Apparently, retirement communities around the country are setting up their own social networking groups, private social networks, and Internet and social networking classes. Bob Moos at the Dallas Morning News wrote a great story about the trend Oct. 12.

So if you need to write a white paper on who you can find using social networks, check out the Pew Internet & American Life Project web. (Who has money to donate? People old enough to have made some. And they're increasingly in....social networks.)

So things are changing at the Daisy Dell senior living communities around the country. Thank God they'll have high speed Internet access by the time I need to move to one! At this point, I'd much rather give up cable TV than the Internet.

Apparently, I am not alone. More on that in the next post. My mom wants to live chat on Facebook.