My new apartment will not contain a television. My TV viewing habits have dwindled to nearly nothing over the past few years as I find more and more active pursuits to add to a typical day. When I do watch TV, it’s been in response to a newsworthy event, such as last year’s tsunami. I regard watching movies as an active pursuit, but I do that via my computer, aided by a 20 inch LCD monitor that is every bit as a good as the latest generation television.

Lately, news video has been increasingly accessible online and on demand. CNN’s video is now free. BBC content is also increasingly accessible. Swedish news is especially easy to view. The reason I kept a television has thus been preëmpted by the onward march of broadband internet.

For many, an additional reason to keep a TV might be regular sitcom shows, some of which are rather quite good. But Apple is now leading the charge in making these available on demand as well, with yesterday’s launch of iTunes 6. Just as the internet has spelled the end of telephony as we know it, it will do the same to network television and how video is consumed in the home. Give it a few years more.

In Sweden and elsewhere, iTunes’ video offerings will have an additional, as yet unheralded effect: Swedish television buys America’s best TV shows, but broadcasts them with a delay of a season or more. This has meant that many Swedes already download pirated versions of shows in the current US season for viewing on their computer. Now these shows will be downloadable legally and affordably, en masse, by people for whom bit-torrents are one technological hurdle too far. The upshot is that these shows will either have to be shown simultaneously on Swedish and US networks, or not at all on Swedish TV, as otherwise too few people will bother to tune in to justify their price. The effect is similar to how DVD sales of US film releases have compressed the release schedule of US films in European cinemas — if a movie is released on DVD in the US before it hits European cinemas, market mechanics ensure that Europeans have slaked their desire to see it by the time it arrives in their local cinema.

Apple’s new software offering, Front Row, coupled to the new Apple remote, together preëmpt the criticism that finding video via a computer is too active a pursuit for it to ever be attractive to a couch potato. Using one-click shopping in iTunes, you will soon be able to breeze through iTunes’ offerings from afar and choose and consume episodes (and later films) with a better user experience than current cable or satellite menus, on demand, with a copy saved to your hard drive, much like how Tivo does it.

I fully expect Sweden to be the early adopter par exellence when it comes to dumping broadcast-based TV viewing, though not just because Swedes tend to embrace new technology: In this particular case, a stupid and senseless tax on the ownership of television tuner mechanisms will nudge Swedes in the right direction, as the tax does not apply to computers. Soon, I and plenty of Swedes will be able to look a Radiotjänst taxman in the eye and say, in all honesty and with a badly concealed smirk, that there is no TV in the house.