And so it is now with so much of the analysis of the revolution that is about to happen with video, and the television (a subject of a post last week). Much – no, most – of that discussion focused on how these new devices and platforms (Apple TV, Google TV, the iPad and the Kindle) will give us access to the existing world of programming we understand and know. Once again, most people may be missing the bigger revolution that is about to occur.

For me, that revolution is about bringing the world of internet video to the television (or the devices that eventually replace the television). That is, the new programming. The forty-eight hours of video uploaded this minute to YouTube. The thousands of sites that offer new types and kinds of programming — stuff we watch and enjoy every day from TED, College Humor, The Onion, and Pitchfork, not to mention Vimeo and blip.tv and even new types of programming from traditional print giants like the New York Times or Time or the Guardian. And all the new programming that is to come, and that we can’t even envision yet.

And because of the fact there is so much of this new programming, we need new ways to discover it and to watch it. At Showyou, we think this coming world looks like this:

Most of the recent talk has been about the new ways to find traditional programming (the upper left quadrant). But we think the real excitement lays in that upper right quadrant –  new ways to find new programming. That’s where the revolution will happen.

Some of this talk is about the rumored AppleTV; some of it’s about other connected television devices (like the XBox service launching this week); and some is about how platforms like YouTube are changing the economics of production and distribution.

But the thing that is currently, actually starting to disrupt television arrived 20 months ago. As soon as we got our hands on the iPad in April 2010, it was clear that it was the future of entertainment.

The tablet is doing for video what the iPod did for music, giving us more control than any other device over what we watch, and where and when we watch it.

There are, of course, other digital devices that allow us to watch video, lots of them. Various connected TV devices (Boxee, Roku, AppleTV, the XBox and more) as well as computers and laptops all give us a wide range of choice between the Traditional (the film and television programming we get on Hulu, Netflix, iTunes Store, etc) and the New (the huge tsunami of video programming of all shapes and sizes available on the Internet).

But the iPad does the best job of any device to date providing seamless, easy access to the full breadth of what’s available, from the Traditional via apps like Hulu, Netflix, or HBO Go and the New via apps like ours.

And unlike laptops and connected TV devices, the tablet frees us up to watch video wherever and whenever we want. This is more than just a bullet point on a slide, or check-box on a marketing matrix — it’s enabling a whole new psychological and sociological framework for how we watch, just as the iPod changed how we listen to music.

Ask iPad users about when and where they watch videos on their tablet and you’ll start to see interesting trends. It’s a quieter, more intimate device than a laptop or TV — it’s at home in your bed, on the couch, a big stuffed chair, or on the train or plane. I talked to one cable network president this summer, and he waxed on about how he and his wife just used the iPad to watch Netflix and Hulu in bed on their iPad at night (and used the TV less as a result).

No surprise, really. In so many ways, watching video on the iPad is just better. Better than TV, even.

Unlike the laptop, we relax a bit more when we use the tablet; we lean back, not forward. No  keyboard beckons us to do something. So we watch, read, browse, play. Video, on a nice screen at arms length, looks great — crisp, clear, personal.

But unlike the TV, we’re not just passive consumers when we use the tablet. The tap of a finger summons a keyboard, or enables us to share or like something, or to tell our friends about it. So we interact, but in just the right amounts mostly.

Anecdotes from families with both kids and iPads in the house are particularly telling. We have a 15-year-old and 13-year-old in our house, and five laptops, one iMac, and two iPads among us. Yes, we’re at one extreme (a bi-product of my work, mainly). Most video-watching in our house now takes place on the laptops and iPads. The TV is rarely on, or used — this is especially true for our kids, who do all their watching now on smaller, more portable screens.

This is particularly striking given we have two Apple TVs, connected to two televisions. The only time these get used are when we all want to watch the same movie. I think this pattern will increasingly be true for most homes as they acquire a tablet or two.

I had thought that Airplay and the AppleTV might have a bigger impact on our habits, that we might use the iPad more as a remote control. That happens, but infrequently. We use Airplay in our house far more often for music, and much less often for video. But still, even with music, using Airplay to reach the stereo is an occasional thing. The iPod, and now the iPhone, is what I use to listen to music most of the time.

So I suspect it will be with video and the iPad and Airplay connecting to the TV. A nice thing to have on occasion, but a sideshow mostly. Watching on the iPad is so much better, so much of the time.

If it were just the anecdotes, you’d be right to treat this all with skepticism. But there is data, too.

With our iPad app, and others, usage peaks during weekends and evenings — just when people typically turn on their TVs. People use their iPads during prime time. This is a big deal –  the web has historically had a tough time breaking into that time slot.

Session lengths with our app are an order of magnitude longer than your average web visit, and are more akin to the time we might spend watching television. Another huge change.

So this new type of device is already changing our habits. It’s liberated video, and us, allowing us to watch what we want, when we want, where we want. That’s a big, fundamental, and disruptive change.

Maybe the AppleTV that is supposedly coming will be so great, so magical, so awesome that I’ll feel compelled to revise this in just a few months. It’s happened before; technology surprises sometimes. I’ll undoubtedly buy one. But unless I can put that TV under my arm, and take it onto the couch in the other room, I kinda doubt it will be as big as folks expect.

*Mark Suster wrote up this nice post recapping a talk he gave on the Future of Television; he argues that cheap(er) production and distribution of video (primarily through YouTube) is now poised to disrupt the television business. Fred Wilson has been blogging about handheld devices as remote controls (something we’ve thought a lot about with Showyou) and how that is changing our consumption patterns.  And of course people have gone crazy trying to decipher Steve Jobs’ remark about the rumored AppleTV (“I finally cracked it”) and what it portends.

Are people cutting the cord (i.e., getting rid of their cable or satellite TV)?

With Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee (the Boxee box is launching this week) and Netflix streaming coming to a huge array of devices, including most importantly the Wii and Xbox and PS3,  the challenge to the traditional television business is now present and very real.

But that threat isn’t about people cutting the cord. Instead, we’re adding a cord  — to the Internet.

The television business in the U.S. has been one of the one of the most profitable walled gardens, and one with the highest walls. Historically, it’s been difficult to get video programming on to your TV that wasn’t supplied by a cable network or television broadcaster or movie studio.

With our new Internet cord, though, we can get instant, on-demand access to programming on our TVs from places like YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv and 1000s of other sites. The popularity of Netflix streaming — which, by some now figure accounts for 20% of all downstream traffic during the 8-10PM prime time window despite the massive limitations of their library — gives us a taste of what’s to come. On the Internet, we have 10,000,000s of clips to choose from. And that’s coming to a TV near you.

The history of cable television shows how this is likely to play out. As new programming sources are added, the amount of time we spent watching television goes up but the share owned by incumbents goes down. The amount of time we spent watching the traditional broadcast networks plunged as hundreds of new channels were added to cable networks. As we begin to watch more programming from the Internet, with it’s almost infinite supply of programming, cable and broadcast television companies have much to fear. (Graphic Source: tvbythenumbers).

For most American households, the television provides a hard-to-resist gravitational pull once we get home from work (source: Nielsen Webinar). Television viewership surges during the “prime time” hours (whereas usage of the web typically peaks in the afternoon, when people are still at work).

As it becomes as easy to watch YouTube as ABC on our televisions, what we watch during prime time will change. And this presents a huge threat to traditional broadcast and cable television, given prime time viewing accounts for 50% or more of total revenues from advertising for many cable and broadcast networks.

Arguing about “cutting the cord” misses point. That may, or may not, happen. But we’re definitely going to be adding a cord as we plug in our Apple TVs and Google TVs. And that will change things forever.

In Kilar’s post, he makes a big stink about rights owners demanding a per user per month fee for their content (something that is standard in cable deals between folks like Comcast and channels like ESPN). I speculated that Kilar was pushing this out of fear — that he was worried about this big pot of money Netflix could spend on simple fixed-fee deals (instead of per-month, per-user fees), an area where Hulu doesn’t have the cash to compete.

Reading Megan McCarthy’s piece tonight on The Atlantic (hat tip @persingerscott) makes me think it was a more nuanced, and much bolder, move — indeed, a smart bit of chess playing by Kilar. As McCardle points out, when media companies push for traditional cable-style per-subscriber per-month license fees (accompanied by hefty guarantees of course) it puts enormous pressure on Netflix’s margins. Kilar (and Hulu) know that.

Whereas similar demands (which most certainly are being made) to Hulu are less painful for them. Hulu’s subscription offering is, at least at this point, non-strategic. It’s a nice to have. The main game for them is advertising. So they can better afford to advocate these stye deals, which in turn are painful for Netflix to digest.

I don’t know, of course. what Kilar was thinking, but it’s all a good reminder that there is a fascinating battle being waged right now for digital media rights, and that even an entrenched digital incumbent like Netflix is struggling to keep pace with the rapidly changing terrain.

There was a delicious irony in that, of course, but it also provoked an underlying and important question: why do we take to Twitter to talk about Facebook and Google+ and everything else? Why not use those platforms for that discussion?

Twitter’s appeal is hard to pin down, and most often we resort to these answers: that it’s real-time, simple, asymmetrical (with following/follower relationships), or that it’s perfectly tailored to mobile usage.

I think there is an even more fundamental explanation, one that lies at the very core of the service  — Twitter is egalitarian (hat tip to my pal Om for providing that perfect word in discussing this point this morning). We stand on equal footing on Twitter; each tweet looks the same, is of similar length, occupies the same number of pixels. The literal design and UI of Twitter creates the appearance of  talking to each other and with one another as equals.

Compare that to Facebook and Google+, which compel us to use nested comments to have a discussion. If Om posts something on Facebook or Google+, I can comment on his post — but my thoughts are portrayed to the world as subordinate to Om’s. The layout echoes the more hierarchical relationship between a publisher and its readers ; my comment is not presented as an equal to Om’s original post, it’s presented as an homage.*

So we all take to Twitter to talk about Facebook because it’s the one place where we feel like our voice is equal to everyone else’s.

Twitter has been counted out by a lot of folks in the past month or so (with the launch of Google+ and the updates for Facebook). Many have complained that Twitter has failed to innovate. I don’t know how or why it has remained so fundamentally unchanged these past five years, but I like to think that obstinate insistence on keeping the service pure, simple — indeed, egalitarian — is the genius of Twitter.

* The nested comment format is, however, perfect for a response to a friend. Indeed, an homage is exactly what we intend in that instance.

That would be “Turn of the Century” by Kurt Andersen, released in the midst of our First Big Tech Bubble of 1999, and in particular the protagonist George Mactier’s always-inventing brother-in-law who “proposes a chain of franchised, “mall-adjacent” cemeteries with video markers instead of headstones.”

Just like OnionSkin jeans in Super Sad True Love Story, Facebook Timeline-powered digital headstones are bound to happen. Bank on it.

And now “Inside Steve’s Brain.”

This passage – about Jobs’ doubts about returning to Apple in 1996 – has stayed with me the past few days:

He sometimes wondered if he was doing the right thing… He knew that returning to Apple would put pressure on Pixar, his family and his reputation. ‘I wouldn’t be honest if some days I didn’t question whether I made the right decision in getting involved. But I believe that life is an intelligent thing — that things aren’t random.’

Some movies you watch, enjoy, have a few laughs, are diverted from life for an hour or two. Others stay with you for days, weeks, months. The best, like the best novels, make you think about the Big Questions — the meaning of life, what is love, what is it to to do good, to live a good life. “The Thin Red Line” is like that.

It debuted in late 1998 — the height of Monicagate, when the American economy was booming and so many of us were seduced by the narcotic of easy money in the Dot Com boom. The film was an affront in so many ways to that era, and even though it was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture, it of course lost out to a movie that more accurately captured the zeitgeist of the day, the amusing trifle “Shakespeare in Love.”

But that doesn’t matter. We’ve forgotten about “Shakespeare in Love” – it had all the staying power of an amuse-bouche – but great works of art endure, and indeed grow in their importance and impact. They change lives. But it takes abundant courage to make them.

That’s a lesson to keep in mind in our world here in the Valley, particularly in the era of increased froth, where the siren song of greed rings louder than ever.

Are you going to make something great, and enduring, that makes peoples lives better? Like Apple, Google, Wikipedia, WordPress, flickr, Square, Twitter, Kickstarter, Bandcamp, the Khan Academy (and, I hope, Showyou)?

Or, do you just look at business as a way to make a quick buck? Do you just want to start a grilled cheese franchise?

You are what you do.

I love our new Showyou app most of all because it’s a joy to use. But I’m also excited about Showyou because it and other similar apps that are sure to follow have the potential to change how we watch TV — and what we watch.

We spend more time watching television than consuming any other form of media. Kids 8-18 years old watch television nearly 4 and a half hours a day — far more than they spend with any other kind of media.

And yet television has remained the most shackled platform, with the least range of choice.  With books, music, magazines and more recently the internet we’ve become accustomed to an abundance of choice. The television, on the other hand, has been locked down for most of the last 50 years, limited (for most people) to a set of channels chosen and delivered by their cable companies, and with programming on those channels determined by a small, select group. Maybe 1000 people, total, determine what most of us watch — or can watch. They’ve offered up some great stuff, to be sure — The Wire, Mad Men, The Daily Show and Colbert Report. But we’ve also gotten a lot of this.  And this. And this.

Despite the growing power of the Internet and social media, television has continued to reign supreme from 8-11PM in most homes. But cracks are starting to show. Data just released this week from the makers of the ReadItLater app shows that the heaviest usage of the iPad during the prime time hours. And we know that streaming from Netflix now accounts for a huge percentage of bandwidth consumed in the evenings.

And now, with Apple TV and  Airplay, your iPad or iPhone or iPod Touch just turned into a new remote control for your TV. New apps like Showyou have the potential to change where we get programming for our televisions, and indeed what we watch.  Now available: tens of millions of hours of programming from the internet, chosen by our friends, or people we follow on social networks like Twitter or Vodpod who have tastes or interests similar to ours. Other platforms from other companies  — Android, Windows, and more — will surely give us more options and more choice still over time.

History shows us what happens when these kinds of disruptions occur. In 1985, when cable TV was still in its infancy, the viewers watched broadcast networks 45% of the time. By 2009, that had dropped to 25%, and basic cable has risen 10-fold, from  a 3.5% share to a 36% share.

Even though online video has had explosive growth the past five years, it accounts for just a small fraction of the time we spending watching television or video. Just like cable in 1984. There is a now an opportunity for entrepreneurs to change all that.

And so a pitched battle is going to be waged for how we get programming for our televisions — and that will be a good thing for consumers.