“TV is dying” is a tired cliche at this point but i think it’s also true. Just look at the numbers in this report published by the BBC yesterday. It suggests that 43% of people in the UK who use online video are watching less TV than they used to as a direct result. And of those, nearly half say they are watching ‘a lot less’ TV than they used to. How many people are using online video? We can assume that everyone who has broadband does so, and while I don’t have the UK numbers handy, penetration rates are running at 45% of all households in the USA and 55% in Canada. And that doesn’t even take into account people who check out videos at work. So we’re talking about a substantial minority of the population switching from video-via-tv to video-via-web.

That really is big news. Will it be a surprise to anyone if in a year or two those numbers are twice as high as they are today? I know that when I moved to Ottawa a few months ago I left my two TVs behind and I haven’t missed them. I keep up to date on news events via the web and RSS feeds, I watch sports highlights on NFL.com and NBA.com, and I get plenty of comedy (including some of my favourite old shows like Absolutely Fabulous) on YouTube and elsewhere. When I need a video fix I get all I need online, or I rent a movie, and obviously I’m not alone.

What I’m really waiting for, though, is for marketing budgets to start to reflect this increasingly important trend. Currently media buys of many millions of dollars are normal for businesses that invest only marginally in online marketing. One day, and hopefully soon, Directors of Marketing will start to understand that they can get a far greater bang for their buck online, and that for the price of a small TV campaign (producing an ad and buying eyeballs via TV), they can run earth-shaking online campaigns that will reach far more people and accomplish far more from a customer-development and retention perspective than been-there-done-that TV ads.