Time To Ditch Cable For Internet TV? 321
itwbennett writes "A flurry of announcements from YouTube, Boxee, Dell and Clicker on Thursday brought good news for anyone considering canceling their cable service in favor of internet TV. First, YouTube announced that within the next few days it will start offering full 1080P HD streams; better than your cable company can offer. Next, Boxee announced a 'Boxee Box' that promises to make it easier to get the content off your computer and onto your TV. Or you could hook up Dell's Inspiron Zino HD instead. 'This is an 8" x 8" PC running Windows 7 (with an option for Ubuntu) that you certainly could use as a desktop machine, but the form factor just screams 'Hook me up to your TV!' via its HDMI port,' says Peter Smith. And, last but not least in this roundup of announcements is the launch of Clicker, a programming guide for internet TV that aims to help you find what you want, when you want it."
Is it live, or is it Memorex (Score:4, Interesting)
But can I keep what I download?
Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine a world where anything you could possibly want to watch is available from the internet instantly for a flat rate all you can eat cheap price. That's where we are headed. In that world, why bother maintaining enough expensive disk space (with backups) for a video format that will be obsolete 6 months after you download it?
wishing for (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex (Score:5, Interesting)
Two reasons:
One, I can transcode it to eliminate the commercials.
Two, I never have to worry about my service provider (at the behest of the Content Cabal) revoking my ability to watch something I've saved.
Was the internet meant for this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Has the tech caught up to provide us with shows When we want them, Where we want them? Or will (example only) iphone users or wireless users start feeling the crunch as the bandwidth is being hogged by ex-TV viewers? Will it be less information interchange and more of movie watching?
I don't want the creators of the internet to be rolling in their graves. Oh, wait...
I still pass (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not feeding the copyright cartel until they quit treating me like a criminal and going to insane lengths to monetize every last drop of creative talent. (And that's giving them credit and assuming that they have any.)
Already canceled mine... (Score:2, Interesting)
I cancelled mine not too long ago. We just weren't using it all that much (me and the gf). We have a home server with Mediatomb, and she's got abc.com, and our homemade antenna [youtube.com].
I spent just over 30 minutes "cancelling" the cable service. I was on hold for about 28 of those minutes. Don't tell me they don't do that on purpose... grrrr
Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex (Score:5, Interesting)
Because this can, very easily, turn into one, giant, bait-and-switch. Once the big content companies companies get the entire market to abandon physical media and adopt online, on-demand, delivery it won't take long for them to end the "all you can eat" pricing system and adopt a "pay per view" system. Once that's done, they'll just keep jacking up the rates arbitrarily. We've already seen this kind of behavior from the broadband ISPs and cell phone companies in the US.
Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex (Score:3, Interesting)
One, I can transcode it to eliminate the commercials.
I watch Netflix downloads almost daily and I haven't been plagued by commercials.
Who has the time to do a clean - professional-looking - edit of every episode of Law & Order?
I never have to worry about my service provider (at the behest of the Content Cabal) revoking my ability to watch something I've saved.
Like revoking the online key that unlocks the encryption? Or embedding a time stamp in the file?
Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I don't understand the attitude that things are always a click away.
OK. For me, they are.
It takes a long time to download, and the internet is not always stable or available.
It takes me something less than 1 hour to download a 1 hour show. This is called "streaming"....
If you're streaming you'll still want to back up or skip forward.
And I commonly do. It takes about 10 seconds for the stream to resume when I do.
If you've paid for something, even a measly $1, you'd like the ability to watch it twice.
So... I push play again? (I don't pay per show, I pay Netflix a flat price, and Hulu has ads, but they aren't nearly as bad as standard TV)
Backing up to DVD is a good option. Maybe not for Cheers reruns of course, but if you're watching next year's equivalent of Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, it could be worth keeping.
I could see myself buying season DVDs. I'm more likely to rent then as needed from Netflix, because after 2 viewings, I won't care for at least 5-10 years.
I'm still wrapping my head around the idea that some people have internet good enough to stream this high definition video in real time, fast enough to treat the whole thing like it was on Tivo. They've probably got cable modems, which they'd have to give up if they got rid of cable...
I have a 3 Mbit DSL connection. Most shows are honestly not true "HD" quality, but they do come in much higher resolutions than old school TV. I rarely notice bad image quality ruining the experience. I have a "buffering..." incident perhaps 1x every hour or so, and it usually lasts much less than an average commercial break on old school TV.
And no one is going to let you skip commercials forever without having a subscription fee.
With Hulu/Netflix, I can't skip the ads. Since there aren't 6 of them every 12 1/2 minutes, I don't mind. Netflix has no ads. Hulu has ONE ad where you'd normally see a commercial break. Both are acceptable to me.
The whole "everything should be free, and high quality entertainment will spontaneously produce itself" idea seems very suspect. Too much like the whole dot-com bubble where visions of the future didn't synch up with reality.
I agree! I pay Netflix about $15/month. I pay for my DSL service. Sites that I don't pay into have ads. This seems reasonable to me.
Re:I still pass (Score:3, Interesting)
It is because of the actor's union (Screen Actors Guild - sag.org). The big music companies hire untalented musicians for cheap because they have no union.
To sum it up for the entertainment industry:
Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex (Score:3, Interesting)
But all Hulu has to do is insert a user ID into the stream. Something subtle, and distributed, so it can't be (easily) removed. When a pirated copy is found, they find the ID, and cancel that person's subscription, permanently.
Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex (Score:3, Interesting)
Though I guess they could try and watermark the user ID into the image itself by shifting a few pixels a few bits off the original color. That way to the naked eye every stream looks the same, but on a closer inspection pixel 123 is ff0001 on one stream and ff0002 on another. But I suspect that any watermark undetectable to the naked eye would also be tiny enough that when the output from the WYSIWYG program is encoded, any ability to link the file to a single account would be lost.
Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex (Score:3, Interesting)
I always wondered why they didn't do something like this with screeners. (In case you don't know, 'screener' refers to a copy of a movie that is sent to movie critics and censors before the movie is available to public). Take a minor detail, like the color of the purse a women in the background walks by with, and change it. Then when a screener is uploaded, all they have to do is download it, and look at that scene. By looking at the color purse, they know who's screener was copied.