ReadWriteWeb

The disruption of cable television at the hands of the Internet and its premium video streaming services has been predicted for some time now. Perhaps there's something about the size and demeanor of the cable industry that makes some people long for it to be conquered by the free and open Web. Maybe that skews the imminence of the predictions. Either way, to many, cable's disruption just feels inevitable.

Cable is indeed losing subscribers, but it's happening very slowly. According to the latest data from Nielsen, the number of U.S. homes with cable subscriptions has declined 4.1% in the last year. Meanwhile, TV service provided by telephone companies like Verizon increased 21.1%.

Amazon's on-demand streaming video offering just got a whole lot more attractive. The company announced today that they signed a deal with Viacom, allowing them to offer thousands of new videos from sources like MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, BET and Nickelodeon, among others.

In total, Amazon Prime will have over 15,000 videos available for streaming, including some very popular television shows. Amazon launched its video streaming service about a year ago with 5,000 videos. With today's announcement, that number is now tripled.

Well, it's official. Netflix has entered the original programming game and is no longer just a distributor of other companies' content. "Lilyhammer," a dramatic comedy starring "Sopranos" actor Steven Van Zandt, went live on Sunday. For the first time, the following words have appeared on the opening credits to a television-style show: "A Netflix original series."

Rather than being broadcast on HBO, a standard cable channel or even network TV, "Lilyhammer" is going straight to audiences via the Web. Netflix hopes that by making some content available exclusively through its service, it will attract new users and potentially even gain some additional leverage with other content providers.

In a live poll published by CNBC.com yesterday, readers were asked whether the tightening of technology product cycles is rendering the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas passé. After some 1,471 votes were cast, some 62% of respondents voted yes.

When my colleague David Strom pointed it out to us here at ReadWriteWeb, I made one of my artificially erudite remarks: I wonder how many RWW readers, I said, would consider CNBC passé?

This year's Consumer Electronics Show is getting ready to wrap up in Las Vegas tomorrow. There may not have been a single blockbuster product announcement, but when it comes to the future of television, CES is always good for a few hints about what to expect. By piecing together some of those clues, we can begin to see a picture of what the future holds.

There are a number of trends toward the future of television that are already well underway, some of which will be built upon in 2012. Web connectivity is increasingly standard on new TV sets, time-shifting content is becoming the norm and viewers are supplementing the TV experience using the "second screens" of smartphones and tablets. Nobody knows what Apple has in mind for the TV hardware industry, but consumers and industry incumbents alike have been conditioned to expect it to make a big impact.

We've been hearing it for a few years now. With the proliferation of Web video and the continued improvement of its quality, the cable business is totally screwed. Many of the most popular shows are streamed on Hulu or the network's website the next day and if you never get around to checking out a buzzed-about series, it's okay. The entire thing will be on Netflix before you know it. There's a small but growing contingent of cord-cutters, as well as a new generation of those who just won't ever subscribe to cable in the first place.

They may not like to publicly admit it, but cable company executives realize that this looming threat is real, even if it's not overwhelming just yet. That's why they've taken a series of defensive measures to ensure they they don't get left in the dust. Lately, it's the iPad and tablets in general that are serving as big cable's next battleground for the attention of consumers.

Did you know that almost half of the TV shows that are recorded are played back on the same day? How about that the average Netflix customer watches five TV shows and four movies a week? Or that (no real surprise here) visits to video streaming and sharing sites continue to climb?

A new infographic from G+/Gerson Lehrman Group shows these and a few other interesting trends too. For example, Dell was able to cut service calls by posting video how-tos on its support site. This and other TV oddities can be found below.

For an Apple device, the company's TV set-top box has had a surprisingly small impact thus far. Perhaps that's because the product is considered by Apple to be, as Steve Jobs once said, merely a "hobby." One of the reasons Apple TV hasn't set the world on fire the way the iPad and iPhone have might be because unlike those devices, it lacks access to third party apps in the iTunes Store. Imagine all the things you could do on your TV if this weren't the case.

Well, that's what exactly two hackers were envisioning when they came up with MobileX, a modification that jailbreaks the Apple TV via the Seas0nPass hack and lets users run full-screen iOS apps on the set-top box. The hack involves rewriting the Springboard iOS app launcher.

This year wasn't the first time any of us heard about the impact of social media on television. People have talked about TV shows on Facebook and Twitter for about as long as those social networks have existed, and the trend has only accelerated as social media usage in general has exploded.

Last year, chatter on Twitter helped the MTV Video Music Awards boost its audience to the biggest it had been in eight years. In 2011, services like Twitter and Facebook served as the virtual water cooler for just about every major news story and broadcast media event. It may not have been invented this year, but 2011 was pivotal for social TV.

Fans of HBO's unique selection of premium content will be thrilled to learn that the channel's mobile app, HBO GO, will now be available to even more subscribers. Well, they'll be thrilled as long as they already subscribe to HBO via their cable or satellite provider.

Customers of Time Warner Cable and Cablevision will soon join most other cable subscribers in being able to view HBO's massive library of original content from their smartphones and tablets. So far, the response among those subscribers to the year-old HBO Go app has been rather positive. For many of those who don't pay for a cable subscription, the response has been, "Hey, can I get your HBO Go login info?"