[Bob Donlon] If you need evidence that TV as we know it is about to go completely out the window, check this out: I’ve been watching baseball on my laptop every morning during breakfast here on my business trip in Asia, streaming live over the web on MLB.TV (the subscription is worth every penny to a baseball addict like me). Watch what you want, when you want, where you want. That’s where it’s all going.

Back in January, I mused a bit about how “Television, As You Know It, Is Dead” (so it goes). Following the recent “everything is dead” theme, I thought I’d look at my media usage over the last few months:

• I’ve upgraded the home theater and ‘distributed’ content to pull video from a HDHomeRun. This little guy allows me to have dual tuners that can also decode QAM hidef signals and pipe it to any computer in the house. This include the new Mac Mini Media Center (more on that in another post) that I’ve replaced the beige tower of death with, and streams beautifully to the 360 in the theater.
• My weekly television ‘viewing’ has actually gone down to really only watching Heroes on a regular basis. My wife still watches 24, Prison Break, Desperate Housewives and American Idol.
• I buy each episode of Heroes the next morning on iTunes, just because.
• Now that I’ve been traveling more for work, I’ve found that having NBC Nightly News and now Anderson Cooper updated daily on the iPod incredibly useful. I sit down on the plane, watch the news, then a movie or TV show. (Travel tip: buy some Shure EC3 sound isolating earphones - not only do they sounds great, they block out everything).
• I’m debating on wether or not I need a Slingbox that I’ll put in the closet. Looks cool, everyone I know that has one loves it, and it could be really useful to just shoot TV to wherever I’m at.
• I still haven’t picked up an AppleTV. I’m waiting to see what the H.264 support is like on the next xBox update to see if I can finally ’standardize’ on H.264 for movie encoding through the house.
• While the Tivo records stuff, I find that I rarely use Tivo-To-Go to pull content on or off it. Although, I did recently purchase Toast Titanium 8, which can pull content off and convert it into iPod format. I’ve found that I’d rather just pay the $1.99 on iTunes and download the content without commercials and higher quality.
• It also appears that iTunes is offering some Sesame Street episodes as free downloads, has Little Einsteins for download, but no Thomas the Tank Engine or Bob The Builder, which makes putting an AppleTV into the kids playroom to replace the DVD player somewhat of an option as well.

Anyways - not sure where all this rambling is going. While I still believe having the ability to channel surf is a part of our culture and is carved into our remote-using DNA, it’s clear to me that the way people watch TV is fundamentally changing. “Channel Surfing” will become more of a YouTube type experience (hopefully with better UI) - you just search for what you want to watch, hit a button, and it’s on.

I think Bob said it best: “Watch what you want, when you want, where you want.”