A recent visit to Houston, though, convinced me that I just hadn’t been getting it. My friend Mike and his wife had done away with their TV entirely and instead had set up their 20-inch iMac wide-screen as the focal point of a kind of jerry-rigged home theater; with no grievous loss in quality, they were feeding it with content from iTunes, various other Web-based media services, and DVDs. In doing so, they had dispensed with those hefty cable bills and had asserted an icono­clastic form of control over their media lives. It turns out, anecdotally at least, that lots of other people are doing the same. And that was my Homer Simpson “D’oh!” moment. Video without a TV console was not only possible, it was likely.

The traditional TV-viewing experience doesn’t have to die (for reasons I’ll get into later), but to save it, the media-industrial complex will have to act in nontraditional and uncomfortable ways—and will also have to rethink what “TV” is. Currently, it means watching a professionally produced video program—passively—on a television console that is fed with content delivered as part of a subscription to a cable or digital service. In the future, TV will mean a cacophony of professional and amateur short- and long-form content shipped via a variety of platforms to a variety of devices, only one of which is the Sony Bravia taking up too much space in your living room. Then, that content will be edited, poked at, commented on, parodied, and rebroadcast by you the former viewer—now “user”—to whomever you choose. Who gets paid by whom to deliver what to whom in this new dispensation is, as in every moment of grand tectonic digital shift, the $60 billion question.

And it’s far from obvious that the people being paid now will be the people being paid a few years from now. The post–World War II model of expensive video driving a massively profitable content-production industry (that now-legendary $10 million pilot for Lost, those $200 million movies) is in some peril—much as, for the first time, it is conceivable that one or more of the major record labels could go out of business entirely. Among many other matters, the writers’ strike (still ongoing at press time, possibly to be followed by an actors’ strike this summer) is a final, great battle royal over content profits at what might be the last moment when such profits are worth fighting over—like steel workers’ strikes in the ’80s.

The story of digital video is not necessarily going to be the same as that of digital music, though the parallels between Napster and YouTube are fairly uncanny. It’s not self-evident that watching long-running movies or TV shows on very small devices will become a mass behavior. According to a recent study, the majority of Internet users watch roughly 3 hours of video on the Web each month, compared to the average person’s 4.5 hours of TV each day. For all the hype surrounding Web video, it was not surprising that NBC, responsible for 40 percent of iTunes’s video sales, had earned only $15 million last year on those sales, a point NBC Universal’s chief, Jeff Zucker, made (uncontested) in announcing he would pull NBCU shows off iTunes at the end of last year. (This content is mostly going to Hulu.com, NBC’s joint venture with Fox, where NBC hopes to sell advertising time much as it does on the air. How this will work better, given the still-unproven Web-video advertising market, remains undetermined.)