Streaming revolution: changing viewer expectations mean big changes for the TV business.

• Author: Felix, Devin
• Position: Business Trends

On the website of XMission, a Salt Lake-based interne service provider, you can find a graph showing the amount of data being transferred to the company's roughly 10,000 home subscribers throughout a day. It shows a steady climb in internet use, beginning around 5 p.m. each day and peaking around 8 or 9 p.m. XMission owner Pete Ashdown says that climb is mostly due to one thing--people coming home from work or school, opening a browser or an app, and streaming movies or TV shows on Netflix. During those peak evening hours, video streaming can account for as much as two-thirds of XMission's total internet traffic, Ashdown says.

Until recently, consumers looking to unwind with a show had little choice but to turn to whatever was being broadcast at that moment on network or cable channels. But technological developments in the past few years have resulted in a proliferation of ways to access video and made an unfathomable amount of content instantly accessible.

These changes are causing a shakeup in the business models that have delivered video for years. Many consumers have grown accustomed to the internet's ability to deliver what they want, when they want it, at little or no cost. Now they're gravitating toward services that allow them to view video content with that same level of choice and flexibility and abandoning those that require higher prices but offer less flexibility.

"Consumers today are dramatically different from the consumers of five or 10 years ago," says Virginia Lam, a representative of TV streaming company Aereo. "People are craving alternatives. The reality is media consumption habits are changing."

State-specific data are hard to come by, but Utah is definitely part of the trend.

Changing Habits

For several years, national media analysts and reporters have reported slowing or even negative growth among new cable subscribers. Last November, Wall Street media analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson called the previous 12 months "the worst 12-month period ever" for paid TV providers (which includes cable, satellite TV and phone companies that offer video). In the third quarter of 2013, those companies lost a total of about 113,000 subscribers nationally. Ray Child, senior director of public relations for Comcast in Utah and Arizona, declined to give subscribership numbers.

Much of the decline in paid TV subscribership is due to so-called "cord-cutters"--people who have stopped subscribing to paid TV services including...