It’s worth noting that Boxee also offers a dedicated TED app that brings the conference’s content to the Boxee box and software.

As the various online video providers like Hulu, Amazon and Netflix push to bring more content to their subscribers, the winners here so far are clearly the consumers. Amazon Prime subscribers can now get free streaming video for over 5,000 movies, Netflix just signed a deal with CBS (though it only includes catalog material and no new shows) and Roku is starting to offer more access to live sports, an area that has kept many consumers from making the move from cable to on-demand streaming video in the living room.

One area that definitely needs improvement, though, is discovery. While few of these deals are exclusive, it’s still hard to know whether a certain show is available on Hulu, iTunes or Netflix, for example, or whether Boxee or Roku offer dedicated channels for videos from a specific provider. Tools like Clicker aim to make this easier, but they are still not integrated well with the most popular set-top boxes.

At this point, however, only about 2% of households with Internet-connected TVs have “cut the cord” and use the Internet exclusively to watch “professionally produced programming.”

There has been a lot of discussion in the tech and TV industry about whether “cord cutting” – that is dropping your cable or satellite service in favor of going Internet-only – is a real phenomenon or just a figment of some early adopters’ and tech journalists’ imagination. According to SNL Kagan’s predictions, though, the next few years will see a steady growth in Internet-only households (7% in 2014).

Even cable industry insiders – who long thought that this was just a fringe movement – now think that cord-cutting is real and a potential threat to their industry. In an interview with USA Today, Verizon’s vice president for consumer strategy and planning told the paper that his company has “been looking at this issue for the better part of a year, and our perspective has pretty much done a 180 to a belief now that pay-TV  ’cord cutting’ will happen.”

It’s Real – But not for Everyone (Yet)

Clearly, though, cord cutting – even though it is a very real phenomenon – is still not for everyone. Not having access to most live sports events makes it a non-starter for a lot of people right now – though this is slowly changing as the major sports franchises in the U.S. catch up to this trend and see it as a potential new revenue stream. It’s also current nearly impossible to get access to live news and local news through devices like the Roku box or your Xbox. Chances are, though, that this will change in the near future. There are no technical reasons for keeping this content off these devices – just the politics of TV networks and cable operators and sooner or later, even these companies will realize that they can’t stop this trend anymore.

Image Credit: William Hook