But it looks like this may change soon: Google TV owners who visited NBC.com with the connected device have in recent days discovered a new splash screen, promising that “full episodes of this and other shows are now available for free” on Google TV.

The splash screen redirects Google TV users to Google Play, where the app is reportedly already being made available. However, users are reporting that it wasn’t listed as compatible with any of their Google TV devices — likely a precaution to prevent users from installing it on anything by development devices before it is officially announced.

The app also isn’t included in Google Play search results yet. But it seems like such an announcement could be imminent, given that the app and splash screen are already in place.

However, cord cutters in search for an easy way to watch NBC content for free on their TV shouldn’t get their hopes up too soon. It’s likely that NBC’s Google TV app is going to require authentication, meaning that users will have to log in with their pay TV credentials in order to watch. (One should note that Google TV owners have had the option to buy individual episodes of TV shows for some time.)

Google and NBC didn’t immediately respond when asked for comment for this article.

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One consequence: Hulu CEO Jason Kilar could be set to cash out up to $100 million in equity – and that windfall seems to worry News Corp. and Disney, who both own close to 30 percent of the company. The media conglomerates seem to fear that Kilar could jump ship, and the memo obtained by Variety seems to indicate that they’re working on contingency plans (Comcast also owns roughly a third of Hulu, but doesn’t have any direct influence on the company’s future due to conditions for its merger with NBC Universal).

The report also suggests that the Providence buy-out could lead to a number of licensing changes, which could in turn lead to Hulu losing exclusivity for some of its content.

But come September, Hulu’s owners may be confronted with an even bigger question: What will Hulu’s future look like? And that’s where News Corp. and Disney seem to have somewhat different ideas.

New Corp. wants to double down on authentication. Fox shows started showing up with an eight day delay on Hulu a year ago. Only viewers that either subscribe to Hulu Plus or authenticate themselves as pay TV subscribers have next-day access to shows like Glee or Family Guy. So far, Hulu is providing authentication for subscribers of Dish, Verizon and CableOne. News Corp. wants to quickly extend this to other pay TV operators.

Disney, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with this kind of authentication, according to Variety. That’s notable, because many observers have speculated time and again that Hulu will eventually transform to a TV Everywhere service that will only give pay TV subscribers access to its content. That kind of future seems to be a bit more uncertain now.

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That leaves out quite a few viewers. Cord cutters, for example, but also subscribers to low-cost satellite bundles have to follow the games on TV, where coverage is limited and tape-delayed.

Or they have to look elsewhere — and a number of more tech-savvy viewers are turning to VPN providers to access live streams from the BBC or other foreign media organizations. One provider told us that installs of his software tripled since the games started.

From security to free TV

Virtual private networks, or VPNs, have been around for a long time. The corporate world uses this technology to offer remote workers secure access to PCs in their office. Security-conscious web workers have been paying for VPN services to encrypt the traffic they’re sending over public Wi-Fi hotspots. And an increasing number of TV fans have been using VPNs to access foreign streaming services.

The technology behind these different use cases is fundamentally the same: A user connects to a remote server, which then forwards the traffic to other servers. One benefit can be that the connection between the user and the remote VPN server is encrypted. Another is that to other servers, it looks like the user is accessing them from a different IP address.

That second part is what a number of VPN providers have been cashing in on. Video services like Hulu or Netflix regularly block all traffic from countries they’re not officially launched in yet. Users can circumvent this by accessing a VPN provider that offers them an IP number from the same country as the service they’re trying to access.

Suddenly, we all want to be British

The BBC blocks access to its Olympics live streams to anyone who doesn’t have a U.K. IP address.

Usually, this means that users in other countries access VPNs to pretend that they live in the U.S. Hulu is especially popular with foreign VPN users, and some have even figured out how to pay for Netflix with a U.S. credit card and then access it from abroad. But during the London games, this trend was suddenly reversed — and everyone wanted to be British.

Case in point: VPN provider AnchorFree, which targets foreign Hulu fans with a special offering called Expat Shield, usually serves 93 percent of its software downloads to users outside of the U.S. However, during the Olympics, 46 percent of all new users came from the States.

But Americans weren’t the only ones looking for access to the BBC’s streaming offering. Business was up across the board for Expat Shield during the games. A company spokesperson told us that the service usually registers around 3,400 new users per day. During the games, that number went up to almost 10,700.

VPNs are here to stay

Of course, those are small numbers, which might explain why NBC doesn’t care about the money VPN providers are making with the circumvention of its pay TV authentication wall. (AnchorFree’s offering is ad-supported, but many other companies are charging between $5 and $15 for access to their servers.) Even if tens of thousands of viewers were paying for VPN services, it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions NBC makes with retrans fees they’re charging cable providers.

The same is true for foreign rights, which is why territorial restrictions for services like Hulu and Netflix aren’t going to go away anytime soon. Of course, that also means that people who are tech-savvy enough are going to use VPNs to access foreign video providers. And the Olympics likely helped to introduce a whole bunch of new users to this idea.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user mark sebastian.

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On Tuesday, for example, Cablevision announced that its Optimum app will now be available for Kindle Fire users, further proliferating the technology that lets the cable company’s users stream live TV programming from their receivers to notebooks, tablets and smart phones anywhere within their home.

Also read: Few cable users aware of TV Everywhere

Cablevision says that 1 million of its 3.2 million video subscribers are using Optimum.

TV Everywhere, of course, was the broad pay TV initiative introduced by Time Warner Inc. and Comcast back in 2009, intended to let cable and satellite subscribers watch programming on next-generation devices.

TV Everywhere player apps provided by content providers are still profoundly limited based on what deals have been cut with the myriad pay TV operators and device makers.

For example, I can download the Watch ESPN app for my iPad 2, but I can’t use its core functions because Disney hasn’t yet made a TV Everywhere deal with my multichannel company, DirecTV, for ESPN.

Also read: One TV Everywhere deal down (Many more to go!)

At least in my home, however, I can watch a live stream of ESPN — or any channel I subscribe to — on my tablet or iPhone via the DirecTV Everywhere app, provided my DirecTV digital video recorder is connected to my home network.

Currently, the box is not connected. But I called the satellite carrier’s tech support center Tuesday, and a friendly rep agreed to next-day me free of charge the company’s “Cinema Connection Kit,” which he said will connect the receiver to my home network with minimal setup.

A Cablevision rep I spoke to right after said his company offers a similar gear free of charge. However, since Cablevision is also the internet service provider for most of the customers it delivers video too, most of its boxes are already connected to users’ home networks.

For its part, Cablevision also announced its second-quarter earnings Tuesday, reporting a 0.5 percent increase in revenue to $1.7 billion and a 16.7 percent profit decline to $26.3 million. Video subscribers stayed flat at 3.2 million.

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That was the upshot of research presented online Friday by Dallas-based Parks Associates and first reported on by Home Media Retailing. According to the presenter, Parks senior analyst Brett Sappington, only 15 percent of the 20 million homes that subscribe to DirecTV — the No. 2 multichannel service in the U.S. — even know about TV Everywhere, the pay TV industry’s broad initiative to move video content onto digital platforms and preserve its business model in the process.

Also read: How Disney’s TV Everywhere apps complement Netflix

AT&T U-verse is at the high end of the awareness spectrum, but only about a quarter of its nearly 4 million subscribers know about its TV Everywhere services. Charter Communications is last among the major pay TV operators — only about 5 percent of its 4.3 million subscribers know about TV Everywhere.

In his presentation, Sappington quoted an unnamed representative for Dish Network (total awareness: 19 percent), who purportedly told him that the satellite service’s marketing priorities were for its core services, not TV Everywhere.

Also read: Suggested trend – “cord trimming”

Meanwhile, of the nearly 20 percent of pay TV subscribers who know about TV Everywhere offerings, only 53 percent of that group actually used them in the last month, Sappington also noted.

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After thinking about TV in this way, I realize that traditional cable is no longer about choice. It’s about access: We have an abundance of choice but not necessarily what we crave. As an access provider for content, cable has the widest depth of content right now, but it also costs the most. When I thought about what I was actually buying, it shed light on cable’s problems but also led to insights about Netflix, content companies and broadcasters, and it also helped me as a consumer to think about TV in a new way that could help me better spend my money. For example, I don’t have cable, and this reaffirmed that call.

Netflix is for sleeping in

Netflix’s child-friendly interface.

When I buy Netflix, I’m buying the ability to sleep in on weekends. Quite simply, it’s worth it to me to pay $8 per month for a service that contains a bonanza of children’s programming in formats that enable my five-year old to wake up, borrow my iPad and settle in for an extra hour or two of selecting her shows — all without waking me up.

I’m also paying for the shows to be ad-free, although I would say to Netflix that creating some easy way for me to create a kid-safe selection of TV for this use case is important and becomes more so as she grows up.

Buying broadcast

On the other hand, I subscribe to Hulu Plus because that’s my only way to get broadcast TV. I occasionally want to watch broadcast TV but not enough to want to pay $25 for an entire season of a show on Amazon. I can’t receive digital signals inside my home, which frustrates me since those airwaves are considered a public good. Thankfully Hulu and new services such as Aereo are coming to my rescue with my broadcast content.

I even watch ads on Hulu, which is the only place I actually even ever see ads anymore when viewing TV content. Apparently for some programs Web advertising is outstripping its TV counterparts, which may bode well for Hulu and other broadcasters’ Web efforts. March Madness ad spending on Web TV last spring outstripped the advertising spending on live television. Apparently people know where to reach the March Madness demographic, and it’s not on TV. So what does that mean?

Maybe instead of authenticating users for Hulu Plus to make sure they are cable subscribers, the broadcasters should go all-in and embrace the benefits of offering a platform that gives people broadcast TV (and ads) even if they don’t want to buy cable and can’t get broadcast signals. People are willing to pay for it, if Hulu Plus and Aereo are any indication. As for the argument that advertisers currently spend more on “real broadcast TV,” that will change, and fairly quickly is my hunch.

What about sports?

I don’t watch ‘em, but my husband does. It’s the thing he misses most about losing access to cable, but so far he still doesn’t think it’s worth it to switch back to paying $85 per month for the service. Instead he shelled out $120 for an MLB Premium pass, and he uses a website to track games that are blacked out. For other sporting events he wanders over to a local sports bar and buys a beer. So now, instead of buying sports, he’s buying an evening out with friends and a game. Unsurprisingly, even though he doesn’t catch every game, he likes the bar better.

So what do the content and cable guys do?

The cable guys are in a tough position. People are lazy and do like choice, but they are also cheap. And the focus today isn’t about choice; it’s about finding the right content on the right device when you want it. That’s a mindset that screams for services like true on-demand networks powered by IPTV where a cable provider can queue up any content for a watcher on demand and on any device.

But technologically cable companies and some other pay-TV providers aren’t there yet, and they are hazy about when they will get there. One reason for this is because it’s tough to do on the backend, but it also has the potential to destroy the geographical monopolies established by physical access lines into the customer’s home.

While they wait, they are pushing hard to create TV Everywhere services that will let customers watch whatever they want within certain restrictions and on particular devices. And they are also trying to keep their content providers from decamping to Netflix or other over-the-top services.

Some of the content guys are undoubtedly realizing that many consumers will still pay for their content even if it doesn’t come from a pay-TV provider. The question is, How much? And when will it make sense for a content company to jump ship and risk alienating a huge source of revenue?

That’s why the Internet is so eager to see HBO Go’s actions, because many believe HBO Go has the largest and best chance to go over the top, thanks to its distribution deals and its quality content. But that argument continues to be debunked, and HBO isn’t interested. Honestly, the entire future of TV is more compelling than some of last season’s dramas.

TV Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Angela Waye

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And it was just one more incremental move for HBO, as the premium cable company — the leading edge of parent Time Warner’s effort to move the traditional pay TV model into the IP-device world — re-establishes itself as television’s most relevant programming brand.

Also read: Preview – How HBO Go on Kindle Fire could boost Amazon’s revenue 

Yes, HBO is just as important to the evolution of the television business as it was a decade ago, just for different reasons. Instead of bucking the TV establishment with groundbreaking shows, the subscriber-supported service, which still touts an industry-leading 29 million customers, is now carrying the establishment on its back.

As traditional TV’s most proliferate brand — available on Xbox 360 game consoles, iPads, Roku set-tops and now Android tablets like Kindle Fire, through a consensus roster of pay TV operators — the fate of HBO Go is the fate of TV Everywhere.

Netflix is out there teaching consumers that they can stream all they want for $7.99 a month; HBO is trying un-teach the concept that eight bucks a month will really sustain the kind of truly premium television content you’ve grown accustomed to.

And until Netflix proves that it can reliably create a full slate of original hits, no other programmer is as boldly venturing into the multi-device world on the strength of its own content.

My zeitgeistiness is gone. Has anyone seen my zeitgeistiness?

Certainly, a number of media industry pundits have pondered what HBO isn’t anymore. In April, media writer Michael Wolff explained in The Guardian that in the post-Sopranos era, the network is no longer the “sine qua non of the modern television generation,” i.e. those who are “upwardly mobile, zeitgeisty with-it, and media savvy.”

Wolff’s essay followed a March New York Observer story headlined, Is HBO’s Luck Starting to Run Out? The Observer also pondered just how special HBO is anymore, competing in a business in which other cable programmers, from AMC to Showtime, have developed their own Emmy-winning, cinematic-quality adult programs, driven by sharp, independent creative voices.

I’ll concede that HBO has lost something in terms of cultural weight and artistic merit — it’ll never be 2004 again, a year in which critically beloved achievements like David Milch’s Deadwood, David Simon’s The Wire and Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm all filled out HBO Sunday night schedules already anchored by still-running hits The Sopranos and Sex and the City.

That year was the middle of what Grantland writer Andy Greenwald called television’s “golden age” — an era, kicked off by the introduction of The Sopranos, when a former newspaperman like Simon could get a green light to explore, in the densest of all possible narratives, the interwoven institutional dysfunction of Baltimore (The Wire); or Matthew Weiner, a writer’s-room underling to David Chase on The Sopranos, could get license to make a period drama set in the white-collar world of an ad agency (AMC’s Mad Men).

These shows, Greenwald effectively argues, were developed when HBO and AMC were in their younger brand-building stages, able to take chances on acclaimed producers willing to work cheaply in order to freely explore out-there series concepts.

The business models — and the ratings expectations — have changed. Top level producers still enjoy ample creative freedom, but they need to be working off of source material with solid commercial foundations.

A producer like Alan Ball can make a show like HBO’s True Blood because it’s themed around a popular genre concept (vampires); Frank Darabont can create AMC’s Walking Dead because zombies have also proven to be box-office winners; HBO’s Girls (pictured above) can exist because Sex and the City already showed that female friends living in Manhattan works.

HBO’s hit period drama Game of Thrones? Lets just put it this way: the producers of that show came in with an eponymous adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s best-selling novels; when he was pitching The Sopranos in the late-1990s, David Chase was well-regarded as a top show-runner, but all he had was a resume that had Northern Exposure on it.

And, of course, it’s always tough to re-create the magic: After Deadwood (right), for example, HBO let Milch develop John From Cincinnati, a strange, etherial drama about a family of Southern California surfers that left viewers and critics trying to get water out of their ears. And last year, Milch and HBO missed again with Luck, a period drama themed around horse-racing that ended up losing the network about $35 million.

The cultural touchstones might be gone — not just from HBO, but from TV … everywhere. Has AMC come up with anything as fresh, profound and poignant as Mad Men or Breaking Bad? (I mean, come on, Walking Dead is fun, solid TV, but it is, in the end, just good genre television). And for however many comedic-dramas Showtime creates around female anti-heroes, will it ever top Weeds?

Yeah, I think Greenwald might be right — that magic hour, when desperate forces collided in the cable programming business and innovated the narrative story-telling capability of television, is gone. It probably ended in 2007, when Chris Albrecht, the brilliant architect of the programming renaissance HBO foisted upon the industry, was forced out following a very public Las Vegas arrest; or when Rob Sorcher and Christina Wayne, the creative executives who introduced Mad Men and Breaking Bad, left AMC in a huff.

I wonder if, in the ultra-fragmented video age we operate in, where DVR/VOD appointments are always pending and the spoiler-alert status is always on orange, if we could even coalesce a water-cooler hit anymore. What would happen if you told your office mates about a new show you saw the night before set in 1960s-era Madison Avenue? If you weren’t told, “Don’t tell me about it — I have it recorded,” you might hear “I watched Downton Abbey on PBS” instead.

Maybe, as they try to get attention to their emerging original series accumens, Netflix or Hulu will achieve an old-fashioned HBO level of alchemy, but so far initial efforts like Lilyhammer and Battleground have fallen far short of the mark.

The brand plays on

For its part, HBO has moved on to its next phase of product innovation — proliferating across platforms. And the programming mandate is different.

Its hits may not command the national conversation as say, The Sopranos once did, or Mad Men and Breaking Bad still do. But measuring its audience across platforms — something HBO started doing several years ago, way ahead of most other traditional programmers — the audience for Game of Thrones this season has averaged over 10 million viewers. That’s twice the size of Mad Men‘s audience.

There was a time when shows like The Wire, Deadwood and the creepy, Depression-themed Carnival helped HBO stand out and distinguish its brand. The attention from TV critics was nice.

But when you’re fighting with Netflix, Hulu and other original-series aspirants, seeking to make potential cord cutters not just cable subscribers, but cable subscribers who pay an additional 12 bucks a month for premium channels, merely appealing to well-educated media consumers in Manhattan and L.A. may not be enough.

The Wire gets you the “zeitgeisty with-it.” Game of Thrones gets you authenticated.

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On Wednesday, Viacom finally reached an agreement with Time Warner Cable, enabling the pay TV service provider to stream the media conglomerate’s shows on iPads, notebook computers, smart phones and other digital devices.

The agreement ends a 13-month court dispute between the two companies, which started after Time Warner Cable began streaming Viacom cable channels including Nickelodeon, MTV, Spike TV and Comedy Central to its nearly 12 million customers.

In suing the No. 2 cable provider in the U.S., Viacom claimed that Time Warner needed to pay for the right to stream its content. The cable company claimed that its ongoing carriage deal with the conglomerate gave it those rights.

Separately, Time Warner fought Cablevision over the same issue last year. These disputes have caused many to wonder if TV Everywhere — the broad-reaching pay-TV industry initiative that seeks to broaden the reach of bundled subscription television into the digital realm — will ever get done.

With consumers expanding their video usage well beyond the living-room TV screen, the multi-channel industry sees TV Everywhere as the weapon needed to ward off new, so-called “over-the-top” competition from on-demand program distributors like Netflix.

TV Everywhere requires each program supplier to make individual deals with each multi-channel operator. At the time Viacom and Time Warner Cable entered the courtroom, there was a lack of clarity on some very basic and necessary dealmaking infrastructure — i.e. what should the ability to stream video be worth on top of already agreed-upon carriage fees?

So with a streaming deal in place between a top cable programmer and leading cable provider, are we closer to having established those basic terms?

Tough to say yes on that one.

Notably, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision settled their dispute all the way back in August, but that doesn’t seem to have created the kind of template that would spur a sudden flurry of TV Everywhere dealmaking And in the joint statement announcing their agreement Wednesday, Viacom and Time Warner included the following coda: “Neither side is conceding its original legal position or will have further comment.”

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