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First it was music, then it was porn. Now it's television's turn to feel the wrath of the web. Is anything safe from the burgeoning attraction of amateur-hour doodlings? It doesn't look that way.
Only 10 years ago, if you'd suggested that Joe Blow's home-made efforts would one day bring corporates to their knees, you'd have been labelled a madman - but it's happening.
Music downloads have once omni-powerful labels squealing like stuck pigs, porn-makers predict DVD sales will drop to zero within five years as people turn to free stuff on the net, and TV networks are fretting over their slide towards irrelevant middleman status.
Just last month, TV3 launched a season featuring new shows to run over summer. In their terms such a suggestion is almost heretical - summer is the time of barbecues and long, hot holidays, as remote controls are left to collect dust.
If there are fewer viewers, then you have fewer advertisers willing to pay premium rates, so running new shows now is like flushing potential revenue down the dunny.
But everything is changing. Instead of hoary old reruns, we have new stuff like Heroes, Burn Notice and Californication. Why? Because by around next March, a significant portion of the audience may have already seen them.
Up to now, BitTorrent has been the way to go. Essentially, it's an illegal system where whole television series or movies are chopped up into small sections and spread around any number of computers. When a customer requests that series or movie from a site, all of those computers send their hoarded bits to you in a, well, torrent. If you start downloading when you go to bed, by breakfast you'll have about two gigabytes of viewing pleasure waiting.
If that sounds like too much bother to the 40-plus generation, it's the swift swing among youth to all things internet that has networks fretting.
Consider the trend in music downloading. In the US, store-bought album sales between November 11-17 might have been up 17 per cent on the preceding week, but they were down 6 per cent on the same week the previous year.
In contrast, online sales held steady from the previous week, but rose 46 per cent on the previous year. As always, it's the younger generation who are adapting early, so it should be of little surprise to see the most-downloaded TV shows include Lost, Prison Break, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica, South Park and Smallville. And it's all down to the young playing with computers in their rooms.
While such downloads are illegal, they are only becoming more popular. Technology commentator Peter Griffin was offered the latest season of Prison Break during a recent trip to the US.
"This guy said they'd be putting them online one hour after they were screened there. That series won't arrive here until next year sometime. I haven't taken him up on the offer yet, but if it doesn't come here soon I'll probably download it.
"And I know a lot of people who watch very little local television any more. In a lot of cases, you even get to see stuff, like documentaries, that will never be shown here outside of festivals."
Some US networks are putting their hopes in their ability to ride the trend. Hulu.com is a legal download site offering current programming from NBC and associated networks such as E! Entertainment, Fuel TV, SciFi Network and USA Networks. Then there's others like joost.com, which runs along similar lines to the telephone network Skype and offers 15,000+ shows from 250+ channels, and TVNZ's ondemand.
The problem with these concepts, much like the free-for-all sites such as YouTube and even YouPorn, is the difficulty operators have deriving income from their viewership. Common remedies to date are member subscriptions, or forcing visitors to sit through a minute of advertising before entering the site. For their part, TV3 chief operating officer Rick Friesen says there may come a time when they will be offering downloads of international programmes, but so far he has not seen any enthusiasm for the customer having to pay for content: "There's just too much free stuff available, so people don't expect to pay for it."
But why do viewers need these middlemen anyway? If the download options aren't bewildering enough, there is a growing array of internet-only content. "Lonely Girl 15" created a fuss when the apparent YouTube video-blogs of a young girl were found to be scripted, but it spawned a whole new homespun industry, and not all of it of rough-and-ready quality. One such show, Quarterlife, was bought by NBC for screening as is, suggesting networks may be turning to the net themselves for a way around the screenwriters' strike.
Still, the networks are backing themselves as the viewer's best source of high-quality entertainment, if not necessarily on script quality then on picture quality, as high-definition television becomes more widespread. But even that conceit may be an illusion, with new technology allowing computers or Xbox consoles to be plugged directly into a plasma screen or standard television. Such improvements are inevitable given potential demand, so it's likely that, as with musicians who shun record labels in favour of direct internet access to their fans, production companies may soon no longer need networks to get their programmes in front of viewers.
The network's days are numbered says Robin Fenn, director of Aotea Interactive. "It's clear that the audience is shifting to the online world," he says, "and it's a trend that potentially brings added value for advertisers once the technology and supply become more widespread. Even with television ratings, advertisers have no idea how many people are actually watching a show at any time or how many of them would even be interested in their product.
"But on-line, shows can be targeted precisely and the information can be very accurate. Viewers also benefit because everything is highly personalised to your own taste. You get home, log in and watch whatever you want to watch, not something horrible just because you get in at the wrong time."
It was only a short lifetime ago that everyone would go to work or school and talk about the same show they'd been watching the night before. In another short lifetime, it's likely that the only conversation starter will be that grand old faithful, the weather.
