When I was 18, I moved out of my parents' house and inadvertently broke up with cable.

Rest assured it wasn't a manifestation of any special enlightenment on my part. Living the typical existence of a student in St. John's, it was just not practical to have cable. So I got used to it.

Years later, I still watch TV, but now I view Roseanne reruns on my own terms.

The benefits are manifold. There are no commercials on DVD boxed sets. I can skim, pause, run to the bathroom at leisure, or gorge on an entire season of the X-Files in a day.

Queen of the re-runs and now the boxed DVD sets, Roseanne Barr arrives at a TV Land Awards ceremony in Santa Monica in June 2008. (Mark Mainz/Associated Press)

Because of the internet, what was once confined to the TV screen is now everywhere at once. Last month, almost two million people downloaded the unaired finale of Prison Break, which had been leaked to a torrent website.

Downloading and streaming have become second nature to many of us. But it is not just mainstream fare that we crave.

The internet has propagated its own brood of smart, funny TV shows worth noticing. And sooner of later, the TV networks are going to have to adjust their sets to account for these changing tastes.

The fact is, my generation still likes watching TV shows, we just aren't so keen about watching them on TV.

What is prime time?

There is another motivation, of course, behind the desire to access TV whenever we want.

It is not a product of idleness, ungratefulness, or whatever flaw du jour we're being accused of by our parental units.

It's the relationship between how the workforce is consuming young people and how we're consuming TV.

For those of us just starting out, the job market today is pretty inflexible.

We are a generation of toiling freelancers and part-timers. We are lucky to get shift work, temp work and piecework, especially in this economy.

It is well documented that young people are the biggest losers in a worldwide casualization of labour. All of a sudden, the mundane, "exploitative" nine-to-five working world that Dolly Parton sang about in 1980 doesn't seem so ghastly.

Steady jobs with stable hours — once rejected outright by young people — carry a new, almost positive connotation. (I said almost.)

Jumping hoops

Older people who presumably are more established in their careers get the benefit of working regular hours and setting up the kind of patterned lifestyle that regular TV watching was built on back in the glory days of the slinky and the hula-hoop, when Roseanne was young.

Fewer people are living like this. But this shift in lifestyle is not beating the form out of existence.

TV, where and however it's viewed, is still TV. In general, people still seem to enjoy that ephemeral, perfunctory release it brings to their lives.

My generation is no different, from what I can see. Our cultural commitment to TV, however insipid the programming can be, is more hardy and vital than those predicting its demise suggest.

But that doesn't mean we are watching the old box.

In 2001, Canadians between the ages of 18 and 24 watched the least amount of TV of any age group, with males watching 12.9 hours per week and females 16.5.

In 2004, those numbers decreased. And if the same study were done today, you would have to bet the amount would be even smaller as more and more young people are supplementing their TV diets with non-TV TV.

Form fitting

At the moment, TV stations seem to be in the same pickle as newspapers. They're hungry to make their product and business model jive in a new-fangled, interactive, almost lawless atmosphere.

But at the same time, they know that Canadians still trust the old media advertisements on TV much more than web ads, as recent Nielsen studies show.

So there is a blockage there and rigid competition means there's no time for the networks to figure out whether online content or releasing shows on DVDs is cannibalistic or complementary to the old form.

But while that debate is waging, some TV "dinosaurs" are actually trying to stave off extinction by setting up camp in closer proximity to their fans.

During last year's TV writers' strike, for example, Joss Whedon, the Buffy writer with the cult following, let his creative competence loose onto the internet.

The critically acclaimed result was Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, a three-part musical about an insecure nerd and wannabe super-villain trying to make it to the big leagues to impress the girl.

It was produced independently of Hollywood studios and funded from Whedon's pocket. Though clearly a special case in the online TV world, it was released to a keen following willing to buy the DVD with real Earth money.

In fact, it has spent the better part of a year on Amazon's list of top-100 selling movies and TV shows. Interestingly enough, when you click the page, you see an ad for The Guild, another totally online TV success story.

These cases are rare, but they won't always be. TV will live long and prosper because we want it to. The format, though a thorny issue for the networks, is just a formality on our end.