MATTHEW BOWERS has been paying to have HBO piped into his home every month for nearly two decades. He tunes in for the occasional episode of “Entourage” and every couple of months orders a movie on demand. Recently, the whole family watched “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.”

But when his company laid him off in September, he started to think about the value he was getting out of the premium cable channel. “It’s ridiculous to pay for this service I rarely use when I can get the same stuff online and save a lot of money,” he said. The result? HBO is losing a customer.

DVD Sales are dropping, and crucial car advertising on TV is drying up. And most importantly, TV watchers now have cheaper ways of watching programming, including Netflix, Hulu, and others we’ve mentioned.

Warner Brothers Television, which supplies “The Mentalist” and “Eleventh Hour” to CBS, recently asked the network to pull full-length episodes from its Web site, along with the comedy “Big Bang Theory.” The thinking is that they were potentially too hurtful to old-fashioned syndication sales to television stations down the road.

MGM signed a deal recently with YouTube to provide content, but it doesn’t include any of its most valuable content. They have chosen less popular movies such as Bulletproof Monk and reruns of the original American Gladiators series.

There is certainly potential profit in digital streaming, as seen, but it hardly compares to the profit studios make in television and DVD syndication. None of these sites, however popular, offer a full catalog of options, thus buying or renting physical media is still viable option. You never know when something might be pulled from Hulu or Youtube, thus making it unavailable for impulse viewing.

So, while DVDs might be replaced by Blu-Ray, or other media…while more and more people may choose to stream their videos directly to their televisions, or take advantage of new download and burn yourself services, there will always be a market for owning a copy of a video free and clear, and without entanglements.

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