Apptitude

Now that we never need to dismount from the barstool to drop quarters in the jukebox, it just seems wrong to call TouchTunes a mobile app. Pushing through a crowd to reach an illuminated cabinet required actual mobility, also called walking. But that was then. Today no one with a smartphone is budging. In the battle of the bulge, beer wins, waistline loses.

Arguably the leading premium channel for movies and original series, HBO adds $23.24 to my monthly cable bill. I get six HBO channels, though they mostly repeat the same shows ad nauseam. Linear redundancy has been a waste of cable bandwidth since the DVR landed, but it’s become even more outmoded in the age of high-def broadband and on-demand viewing.

Refusing to pony up for unbreakable packages to get the few programs they’d watch, younger viewers have been cutting the cord on cable TV...