Recently Sarah Houghton-Jan high­lighted an issue that I’ve been think­ing a lot about myself lately as I’ve noticed changes in my own tv-watching behav­ior. She high­lighted a soft­ware pro­gram called AnyTV for watch­ing tele­vi­sion shows (and other mul­ti­me­dia) on your com­puter and won­dered what oppor­tu­ni­ties pro­grams like these might pro­vide for libraries. While it’s not the first such appli­ca­tion, this type of ser­vice has really taken off dur­ing the last year, and there are now more ways and places to watch tele­vi­sion than ever before. On web­sites, on cell phones, on portable play­ers — they’re mul­ti­ply­ing like rab­bits. Watch­ing tv shows in real-time on an actual tele­vi­sion may be down, but my sense is that it has shifted to other medi­ums and become a niche mar­ket. To name just a few ways I watch tv:

• Fan­cast (sum­mary from Infodoo­dads, but this is essen­tially a Hulu clone for Com­cast subscribers)
• Hulu
• Joost
• Each of the major net­works streams recent episodes of their shows on their websites

All of these ser­vices require you to be con­nected to the inter­net in order to stream the video, but there’s also Bit­Tor­rent, Net­Flix, iTunes, Tivo to Go, and libraries for tak­ing shows with you on the go. I worry a lot less these days about record­ing shows I’m inter­ested in since I can usu­ally catch up with them at some point, often on the web. Some of these sites require a down­load (Joost), oth­ers don’t (Fan­cast). Ama­zon, iTunes, Net­Flix, and MovieLink all offer movies-on-demand ser­vices that let you pur­chase and watch a film imme­di­ately on your com­puter. They gen­er­ally require a sep­a­rate soft­ware pro­gram to view them, but how long will it really be before there’s a Hulu-like movie site that plays in your browser?

All of which is to point out that view­ing habits are chang­ing, and that the cur­rent debate about band­width issues and fil­ter­ing of social net­work­ing sites is just a pre­lude to the com­ing con­tro­versy about watch­ing longer-form video on library com­put­ers. Expect to see this soon, as more and more peo­ple start using our com­put­ers to watch whole shows, movies (Hulu offers sev­eral free ones), and live events.

It’s also going to re-ignite the debate about judg­ing con­tent con­sumed by our patrons. It’s easy enough to say we don’t have the band­width (sadly, that’s usu­ally true in the U.S.), but it’s more dif­fi­cult when you base pol­icy on judg­ment calls that some uses of a for­mat are okay while oth­ers are not. Kind of like when we impose our per­sonal pref­er­ences that Lit­er­a­ture is bet­ter than trashy romance nov­els. Is it really the librarian’s call that I should not be using my library’s com­put­ers to watch that episode of “Lost” I missed last week? What if I’m watch­ing PBS’ “The War” — is it okay then?

And what about some­one like me who is a huge Kansas Jay­hawks fan, who just wants to watch her team in the big dance? CBS didn’t show my game last week­end, but I was able to log in to the free NCAA Sports site on my lap­top, hook it up to the TV, and still watch it. I usu­ally miss Big 12 games because I live in Big 10 coun­try, but now the inter­net is finally lev­el­ing that play­ing field. I still had to watch the ads, but I’m more will­ing to do that dur­ing a live event online. If I didn’t have broad­band inter­net at home, though, would it have been accept­able for me to bring my own head­phones and watch it at my library? Head­ing into a pos­si­ble reces­sion when it’s quite pos­si­ble that peo­ple will be cut­ting costs by can­cel­ing cable sub­scrip­tions, it’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion to ponder.

If you think the YouTube, social net­work­ing, and web-based gam­ing debate is grow­ing now, just wait until the gen­eral pub­lic real­izes they can watch tele­vi­sion online, too. As Sarah says at the end of her post, “I know I am open­ing a can of huge worms…[but] this seems like a very cool addi­tion to me.” I’ll agree with her and hope this coun­try gets its act together and starts installing fiber con­nec­tions the way it should be. In the mean­time, though, it’s help­ful to rec­og­nize that this is some­thing that is going to start hap­pen­ing at your library, and your staff should prob­a­bly talk about it in a “here’s a heads-up” kind of way so that you’re prepared.