• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, July 5, 2013

 A while back HBO used the slogan, “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO” but generally and generically that which comes out of that big box in the living room is TV, even if it’s video that is being streamed from the Internet.

And it’s not always bad to be called names.

I was reminded of that yesterday when public radio’s “Marketplace” did a five-minute feature piece on a new book by Brett Martin with the colon-heavy title, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From ‘The Sopranos’ and ‘The Wire’ to ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad.’  In it, Martin declares a new golden age of television. In his interview on “Marketplace” he says it happened in part because of places like ad-free HBO, which counts subscribers, not viewers. And he says it happened because DVRs and DVDs made watching serialized dramas a practical ambition.

What that piece on that really smart business news program didn’t mention is streaming video, not Hulu or Netflix, HBO Go  and other places that facilitate watching a stack of episodes. Martin and “Marketplace” didn’t mention that  Netflix’s “House of Cards” and a new batch of “Arrested Development” episodes are the two most talked about big-money video productions around, and someday (like right now) will be folded into what the public considers TV. So are the productions Amazon has done.

It’s significant to watch how we talk about things and how we use things, and that actually defines them. SUVs are not cars, really, or weren’t at first. They were built on truck frames and some still are. But you haven’t called an SUV a truck, well, forever.  I’m sure Ford and Chevy and all the rest couldn’t care less what you call your SUV.

Likewise, the age-old mantra in the broadcasting business is that “People don’t watch channels. People watch TV.”  As OTT and Smart TVs make the lines between TV and non-TV blur, no doubt “TV watching” will hang tough on the list of how you spend your days and nights, even if you’re really not doing it.

None of that would be so interesting if it wasn’t that also over the holiday Samsung hadn’t bought Boxee, whose set-top box can record broadcasts and stream online video. But Boxee makes apps for phones and tablets, including iOS and Android systems, and that should be very helpful to Samsung, whose mobile phones contain well-advertised gizmos that seem to make them smarter than the average smartphone. Samsung also makes a heluva lot of TV sets—more than anybody else in the world-- and getting a built-in Boxee might be a nice way for both companies to make out and could turn Boxee into yet another content provider, or a pretty damn important gatekeeper. On that front, we’ve already seen deals with DreamWorks and Netflix and, says Bloomberg News today, Apple is near a deal with Time Warner.

It’s probably fashionable these days to say you don’t really watch TV—you know that thing with schedules and channels and stuff—but it seems fairly evident that the general public will never think about where they’re watching. As those mainstreamers said a long time ago, “People watch TV.” It’s true, even if it’s not TV.

pj@mediapost.com