About a year ago, I wrote about our decision to end our subscription to cable after 20 years, and rely on off-air DTV and online sources for our viewing. (It was the subject of a piece that ran on CNN Money in February, 2009)

This decision was driven by a couple factors. First, I got tired of paying around $70 a month for access to video content I never watched. I can afford it; I make a lot of money. But what’s the “Pleasure ROI” on about $850/year spent on cable? Well, it’s unbelievably low, even when compared to something as fleeting as two $200 a plate meals. So, what’s the point?

Second, our decision was driven by the vast amount of content now available online, legally: iTunes, Hulu, etc.

In May 2008, we ended our cable TV subscription. We kept the cable Internet service because, at 20 MBps, it’s the fastest service available in our area. (Unbundling cable from Internet costs an extra $10 a month where we live.)

We connected an Eye TV USB HD receiver to an unused Mac G5, connected a small antenna to it, and connected the computer to our 32-inch Samsung HD set.

The end result: the EyeTV’s included software turned the computer into a DVR for viewing/recording/timeshifting over-the-air (OTA) content. The computer’s internet connection delivered all Internet video. Our DVD player connected us to our Netflix habit.

An important caveat, which I noted a year ago: we’re not big fans of live sports, and we don’t watch a lot of live news on TV. If you fall into either category, you probably won’t be happy with the results.

So, in the past year, what have we watched? Nearly everything we wanted to, with a few exceptions, which I’ll note below.

Over-the-air: Despite having all the local channels available to us through our little antenna, we’ve watched only public TV, and our OTA consumption is has been almost exclusively how-to shows: Lidia Bastianich, Rick Steves. The computer records them, and we watch them later.

DVD player: we watched our weird assortment of Netflix videos – travel shows, documentaries, horror movies.

Online: everything else. We watched some episodes of 30 Rock, Family Guy, and a couple vintage shows on Hulu. We subscribed to Top Chef and Project Runway on iTunes (after NBC Universal returned). We bought single episodes of cable series like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. We subscribed to video podcasts and watched them full-screen on the TV, from Deutsche Welle to TVO to WineLibraryTV to TED to The Cook and The Chef on Australia’s ABC. We watched tons of streaming video full-screen, ranging from Frontline and NOVA at PBS.org, to live CBC News from Toronto, Montreal, and PEI, BBC World News, Radio-Canada’s 24 hour news network RDI, to live coverage of the Mumbai attacks on Indian TV. And specialty sites delivered a lot of good stuff to us – from the aforementioned TED to Fora.tv, among others.

What have we missed? On election night, I wanted to watch live returns from every possible source all at the same time. With cable, this absurd desire is basically achievable. Without it, you’re left with ABC/NBC/CBS/PBS and a few online sources. We listened to NPR and watched a variety of video with the sound down.

That’s the only time, thus far, where I truly wanted cable. That said, I miss indulging my Barefoot Contessa habit on Food Network, but I had already grown bored of channel-flipping so I was weaned off it long before we got rid of cable.

Now, long-term? This is where it gets interesting. I’m not a big believer that all video is going to go online for free, or even in some advertiser-supported manner. I think a fair amount of stuff will stream free with ads, and I think the iTunes subscription model for series is reasonably viable.

What about the rest? I think cable companies will swallow the online distribution model through new set-top boxes that make watching TV and the Internet a near-seamless experience; and second, they’ll develop content deals with networks and producers to offer a huge array of stuff either through their own on-demand libraries (disastrous) or perhaps more likely, through Internet delivery platforms that are available only to cable subscribers.

This will add the magic element of Actual Revenue You Can See On A Balance Sheet to the online video equation, and most content of consequence will shift here. And again, the new set-tops will make the transition between traditional cable channels and Hulu-style internet delivery basically seamless.

Which means in 5 years, maybe I’ll be back on cable again. This has been my theory for the past two months. Two months from now, I might have a different theory. But that’s why this is fun, right?

Between now and then, we’ll be transitioning to a Mac Mini to reduce the electronic footprint in the living room.

Sullivan writes that blogging is jazz to established journalism’s classical music. One doesn’t replace the other, but each requires a different way of performing, a different way of listening and interacting. Each complement and enhance appreciation of the other.

In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.

Sullivan says that the platform defines the style and interaction.

Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.

This drags us to a bigger question, one that goes beyond the rather petty distraction of bloggers vs journalism:

Why are we publishing our public radio journalism on a computer screen in almost the exact same way as we publish it to an electrical signal transmitted through the air?

Television requires a different kind of journalism than does radio. So what is the appropriate, legitimate and journalistically sound way for public radio and TV to translate its reporting to the web?

By copying and pasting reporter’s scripts to the site? Probably not. This is a big challenge. What are we dreaming up? What experiments are we conducting? Are we being too prissy and unimaginative about the platform?

“… of all major consumer media, radio is the least suited to an online transition. … Radio is built to a large degree on music it doesn’t own and syndicated talk shows. Both are available in countless venues online, which means radio Web sites have less unique stuff to attract audiences. And stations aren’t structured like newspapers. While their profit margins are much higher—try 40% and up—they also have much smaller news organizations and fewer bodies to create new content that can be slapped up online. … It says something about radio that a commonly cited star example of its online efforts is the not-for-profit npr.org, which has Web traffic growth most companies would envy. “

More here.