Who watches TV on TV anymore?

How’s this for layers of irony: my teenage daughter was in her room recently watching the TV show Gossip Girl on her laptop — let’s not get into exactly how — when I overheard the following line from the show: “Who watches TV on TV anymore?” (A quick Google search reveals I didn’t mishear it).

That’s indeed the billion-dollar question as telecom service providers enter today’s video arena — a market that spans cable, satellite, the Internet and mobile devices. At the TelcoTV show this week, Parks Associates released some video-viewing data showing just how confusing — yet full of opportunity — today’s video market really is.

According to Parks, Internet video viewing is indeed on the rise, but so is the viewing of prime-time TV shows. The research shows that 80% of adults in broadband homes do some form of Internet video viewing. Twenty-six million adult home broadband users are watching streaming TV episodes at least once a month, and about 6 million adults in broadband homes pay for premium Web video content on a monthly basis. At the same time, many of those are catching up on TV viewing they missed — with just over half (52%) watching missed episodes, while 37% liked watching shows for free, and 29% appreciated having fewer ads in Web replays.

Those are interesting numbers, and they point to a clear trend that finds viewers attracted to — and searching out — content across a variety of networks and devices. It’s a blurring of the lines that only will continue.

Just this week, AT&T debuted its VideoCrawler video Web search engine, staking a claim in the growing Web video market. It’s not a stretch to imagine VideoCrawler pulled onto AT&T’s U-verse service; Verizon already is beta-testing just such a service, which it demoed at the Telephony LIVE event last month. Comcast, meanwhile, has been crossing the TV and Web worlds with its Fancast site.