When Mr Lit Kok Hao, 23, wants to watch a Jay Chou music video, he does not wait for it to be shown on a cable TV channel. Instead, he switches on his computer and gets an instant dose of his pop idol on YouTube, the video sharing website, where thousands of videos are viewed by millions each month.

"With TV, you have to endure the advertisements and you watch what is fed to you," said the national serviceman, who estimates that he spends 20 per cent less time on the goggle box now.

He first started tuning in to YouTube two years ago when a friend e-mailed him a link to a funny home video. Since then, he has been hooked on a series of clips where things like iPods and coke cans are put into a blender in quirky lab tests.

Finger on the future: PCs are replacing TVs for a new generation of people who are more 'lean-forward' Internet users than 'sit-back-and-relax" TV watchers.

With millions of such avid users, YouTube has taken only two years to become one of several "disruptive" online services that are called new media. These include blogs, Wikipedia and photo-sharing websites which, together with YouTube, have burst onto the scene in the past few years as alternatives to newspapers and TV.

But "new" is something of a misnomer. The technology we are talking about here is not really "new", say experts.

Technically, blogs are little more than vanity websites that hark back to the early days of the World Wide Web a decade ago. Similarly, watching videos on a PC is something that users could have done five years ago.

Why new media is so popular now, experts say, is that users have changed. They seem more in control now to avoid an information overload.

Reading an SMS message on a small screen used to be a test of one's eyesight. Not so for today's teenagers, who seem to be born with thumbs that can type out text messages faster than one can speak.

And where watching TV used to be a "lean-back-and relax" experience after work, today's Internet surfers are "lean forward" types, using their PCs to download six music videos of Jay Chou at one go on YouTube.

Just five years ago, the broadcast industry was cool towards video-on-demand - the idea that people could watch any TV programme they wanted, whenever they wanted.

Things have changed fast, with the popularity of YouTube threatening to take "eyeballs" away from traditional broadcasters and their money tree - advertisements.

Earlier this month, YouTube's parent, Google, signed its first major deal to measure the impact of TV advertisements on audiences. Its deal with American satellite TV operator EchoStar was aimed at letting advertisers reach fragmented audiences, but it would likely upset long-time broadcasters which have been looking over their shoulders at the new kid on the block.

Mr Simon Davies, chief executive officer of Casbaa, a pay-TV industry group, said broadcasters no longer see a PC user and a TV viewer as separate customers.

"That's old thinking," he told The Straits Times.

In Singapore, the changing habits of viewers is forcing broadcasters to adapt as well.

When SingTel enters the pay-TV market this year, it will likely offer several on-demand TV channels. Subscribers may pick a movie and watch it as and when they like within a period, of say, five days.

They can also record programmes for viewing later, if they are not at home during an episode of Prison Break, for example.

Mr Manoj Menon, partner at research firm Frost and Sullivan, said that broadcasters once sheltered by geographical boundaries are now facing competition from new media firms like Google, YouTube and Yahoo.

In the past, when MediaCorp or StarHub showed a new episode of Lost, it would have been the first time most people in Singapore saw it. Today, many Net-savvy viewers may have gone online to watch the episode on YouTube or even bought the video at Apple's iTunes online store.

To reflect the growing power of the new media consumer, Time magazine gave the award for Person of the Year to "You" last year .

Like the respected magazine, some users believe this is an unprecedented era where big media firms are being challenged by small blogs with active "citizen reporters".

Eyes on the news: A web reporter uses a handset mounted camera to transmit a live video stream to a webpage. But despite the boom in blogging and citizen journalism, many lack the professional skills to analyse and interpret emerging news stories.

Many Singaporeans embraced new media for the first time during last year's General Election. Toting cellphones and video cameras, they recorded election rally speeches and posted them on their blogs and on YouTube.

One video of opposition leader Chiam See Tong addressing a crowd after a rally was viewed more than 10,000 times last year.

Associate Professor Ang Peng Hwa, chair of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, said then that one reason for the popularity of these videos could be a perception among Singaporeans that the mainstream media did not give the opposition parties enough coverage.

But can new media really return the power of information from the few to the many?

Businessman Paddy Tan, 32, who viewed rally videos online last year, said citizen reporting gave people a different take on things from the ground. But some experts downplay this.

The Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu consultancy group recently published a report on telecom and media trends where it said that most citizen journalists would likely remain eye-witnesses and commentators to an emerging news story.

Most do not have the skills of professional journalists to analyse and interpret an unfolding event, it predicted.

"Indeed, in 2007, as in years to come, owning a professional- quality video camera, a PC or a mobile phone is unlikely to magically imbue the majority of people with talent, much as it is improbable that a paintbrush could produce a budding Picasso," it added.

Other user-generated videos of say, a skateboarding stunt, are also seen by some experts as complimentary to - not replacements of - mass-appeal Hollywood productions. Casbaa's Mr Davies said the first things that many people look for at YouTube are pirated drama serials.

As far as content is concerned, new media may still require the old: million-dollar blockbuster movies, professionally taken photos and news articles that are well-written.

It is just that, people now get to choose when they watch a movie and what kind of news they want to read.

Said NSman Lit, who does not mind that grainy, five-minute clips on YouTube are less pretty than regular TV: "Basically, I get to watch what I want."