This week, when they ring the bell on the television upfronts, the annual orgy of advertising buying, I hope the industry isn’t counting on my house to lift ratings.

So far in the month of May, our household has watched exactly two minutes and one second of live television. NBC’s broadcast of “the most exciting two minutes in sports,” as the Kentucky Derby is described, was epic, unfurling on the big flat panel we finally bought. But I doubt our spasm of live viewing is enough to keep the television business in business.

And it wasn’t an anomaly. In April, our sum total of live viewing — the building block of the upfront — came during CBS’s broadcast of the Masters. Even then, I was more riveted by the iPad app in my lap, selecting players and holes to follow.

It’s an apt metaphor. When it comes to the traditional screen that families gather around, live television is competing against a growing array of self-selected content. Given the amount of high-quality shows idling in my DVR and on-demand queue, channel surfing for live television seems very last century. And our television is Web-enabled, so a vast treasure of other goodies awaits from Netflix, Hulu Plus and Apple TV.