How much television do you watch each day? How much time do you spend using computers, mobile phones, and all the other devices which allow you to be in control?

The traditional broadcast TV business is in decline, even if the TV companies like to pretend that it is not. The passive, one-way, synchronous nature of television is being usurped both by active involvement and communication on one hand, and asynchronous time-shifting on the other.

If I want to feel involved with other people, I don’t need to talk about last night’s TV – I can join in with active interaction on everything from facebook and twitter to simple SMS. If I want to watch a particular program or movie I don’t wait for it to come around on a local channel and re-arrange my life to fit the TV schedules – I get a DVD, grab it from bittorrent, or watch it on youtube.

Paul Graham writes

Now would be a good time to start any company that competes with TV networks. That’s what a lot of Internet startups are, though they may not have had this as an explicit goal. People only have so many leisure hours a day, and TV is premised on such long sessions (unlike Google, which prides itself on sending users on their way quickly) that anything that takes up their time is competing with it. But in addition to such indirect competitors, I think TV companies will increasingly face direct ones.

and

opyright owners tend to focus on the aspect they see of piracy, which is the lost revenue. They therefore think what drives users to do it is the desire to get something for free. But iTunes shows that people will pay for stuff online, if you make it easy. A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience.