We knew the day would come.

The day when cable and satellite TV were not our only choices.

Netflix started it’s digital distribution of video content in 1999, growing steadily for many years. Recently consumers grew cold with price hikes and poor selection. I’m still digging it… for the most part.

While Hulu and Hulu Plus compete fiercely with Netflix, the amazingly priced Amazon Prime account (shakes out to less than $7/month plus a lot of free as a bonus).

And over the past year, YouTube’s presence has steadily gained traction as a serious contender to play (and often produce) high-quality video content.

Until recently, YouTube had only a handful of webisode offerings, but just this past week Forbes reported a new series by Warner Brothers titled “H+ The Digital Series” run exclusively on the YouTube platform.

By Mark Nye

So why on YouTube and why now?

From Forbes:

What’s always been missing is a genre of movie that is good enough, well enough produced, smart enough and of the times to make Web TV more than a distraction, to create an artistic base so that it can grow.

Creator John Cabrera tries to put it in context. When I asked him had Web TV as an original content format begun to take off, he responded:

“We haven’t gotten there yet but we’re closer than we’ve ever been. Where we are now has little to do with the content. It’s the hardware that’s holding it back. If you had YouTube or Hulu on the remote control, letting you find the content from your couch then you’d see it really take off. As this happens we will see the massive shift we’ve been talking about for ten years.”

In other words, as soon as regular flatscreens and outdated console TV’s are replaced by the ever growing web-based streaming capable TV, the studios will begin producing programs geared for online consumption.

Time for an upgrade?