Jon: Welcome to Episode 111 of The Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host, Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Hey, Jon, what's on your mind this week?

Jon: I thought this week we could chat a little bit about the juggernaut that is streaming television, the accompanying consumer behavior accompanying that in some instances, which is cord cutting, and then the future of the television medium, which is being shaped by both of those things.

I wanted to start off just by noting that in a few days, actually on the 14th of July, our friends at Netflix will be splitting their stock seven way ... It's a seven-way split, so they're going from one share ... If you own one today, you'll own seven on the 14th of July. They're trading close to $700, not quite there, so all of sudden that stock will be supposedly more accessible to your mom-and-pop-type investors. I think that is a notable event in streaming television just because Netflix is one of the most popular, if not the most popular, streaming service and just really shows how both Wall Street and the consumer have really gravitated toward this model as being the way that we're going to consume television in the future. Dirk, what was your impression of this major happening for our friends at Netflix?

Dirk: It really caps a remarkable return to grace. I can remember our talking on the show when Quickster came out, and the Netflix stock dropped and plummeted to its nadir. Now it's ten times what it was just a few years ago now, so it's been pretty incredible from a business perspective.

In terms of the more macro stuff, cord cutting has been happening for a long time as a new generation emerges. It's not even cord cutting. It's sort of cordless, which is to say they never had the cord and wouldn't dream of getting it. There's not a lot of virtue in the corded models, and by that I'm including satellite models as well. Maybe cordless isn't the right term, frankly, anymore. It's more these large scale subscriptions where you're getting hundreds or thousands of channels in this giant bushel for a whole bunch of money. Those are just outdated; they're silly. They don't match with current technology. They don't match with current consumer tastes. They don't match with current viewing habits and ways of consuming content, so yeah, it's no big surprise. It's been happening and accelerating for a long time. The big question is, what's next?

You kept using the word television when you were talking about it. If I were consulting one of my clients on how to breach new markets and how to rethink about how to go to market, I think you need to look at it a couple levels up. I think of it today as video content. The notions that we have of movie, television show, network television show, cable television show, premium television show, all of which are different. YouTube-type videos which we might ... This is probably not a relevant term anymore, but sort of in the user-generated content sphere, we've just got video. The question is, what are the best services? What are the best methods of getting you to the video that you want to consume? To me, television, that's all just noise.

At the end of the day, it's that video is in interesting ways consolidating and fragmenting. It's consolidating from the standpoint of service offerings, like what's making cordless a more viable path is a narrowing of potential providers, of whether it be software service providers, like a Netflix or an Amazon, or hardware providers, like an Apple TV or a Roku, which are just coming at it from overlapping but different ways. I don't know. I think there's a lot of interesting grist here, but the one thing for sure is the way that we consume our video content is really evolving at the moment, and how we're consuming it now is going to look very different from how we are buying, paying for it,