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Time To Ditch Cable For Internet TV?

Posted by Soulskill on from the slowly-but-surely dept.

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."

15 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. Is it live, or is it Memorex by Dachannien · · Score: 3, Interesting

    But can I keep what I download?

    1. Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex by cryfreedomlove · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Why do you want to?

      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?

    2. Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex by Dachannien · · Score: 4, 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.

    3. Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex by GameMaster · · 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.

      --

      Rules of Conduct:
      #1 - The DM is always right.
      #2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
    4. Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex by westlake · · Score: 2, 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?

    5. Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex by PitaBred · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Honestly? The commercials on Hulu are less of an effort to watch than they are to try to circumvent. They're few, they're far between, and they aren't horribly annoying and at a different volume from the show. I'll take those any day in return for free content.

      --
      My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
    6. Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex by mcrbids · · Score: 2, 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.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    7. Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex by fredklein · · Score: 2, 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.

    8. Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex by Golddess · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Perhaps I inferred incorrectly, but I took the method described as basically pointing a video camera at the computer monitor and recording the show like that (taking advantage of the analog hole). Only instead of a physical video camera, you use a WYSIWYG video capture program to record what is displayed on the screen. Since you're recording the resulting image and not the stream used to create the image, there will be no user ID in the resultant file.

      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.

      --
      "I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
    9. Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex by fredklein · · Score: 2, 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.

  2. wishing for by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I just want a way to watch the tv shows I want *using a portable HD* so that when on the road, or at the folks place (with dial-up), ect, I can watch my programs off that external HD without a net connection. I can download shows at work and watch them whenever....and I don't want to have to tediously rip DVDs and wade through broken torrents, legal would be nice.

  3. Was the internet meant for this? by Provocateur · · Score: 2, 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...

    --
    WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
  4. I still pass by buss_error · · Score: 3, 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.)

    --
    Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
    1. Re:I still pass by sowth · · Score: 2, 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:

      • Union: untalented employees get paid absurd amounts of money.
      • No union: employees get paid almost nothing. Anyone with a brain would not bother, so they get untalented employees.
      • In both cases, the people buying products produced by these systems get screwed.
  5. Already canceled mine... by krovisser · · 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.

    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