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Time To Ditch Cable For Internet TV?
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."
I've canceled my cable, and I don't think I'll go back. It's me, my 3 kids, and my wife. They have all adjusted to streaming from Netflix and Hulu. About the only downside is missing out on life sporting events. I'm contemplating just adding a tuner card to my HTPC, and then getting those over the air.
Overall I'm very happy with the new setup though, it is saving me about $100/month (canceled phone as well) and we still watch the same shows. Of course YMMV.
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.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/
http://www.thedailyshow.com/
http://www.hulu.com/
http://www.youtube.com/movies
http://www.getmiro.com/
I haven't paid for TV for over a year now. Neither did I torrent.
For me I will never give up cable until I can get sports with the ease and quality that I can on my TV. Sports really need to be watched live, and unless streaming makes leaps and bounds the internet is not going to catch up with HD TV anytime soon. I always find that on the internet the term HD is used very loosely. HD movies on Youtube don't compare to cable, neither does a single TV show downloaded with bittorrent that is labelled "HD". I have seen some "HD web streams" and they are ... if your lucky ...the same quality as digital cable.
Don't get me wrong, I hate my cable provider with a passion, but I can't give them up.
My internet connection is via the cable company...
"Time To Ditch Cable For Internet TV?"
Not do-able if you get internet from your cable provider (Fios, or Uverse too).... If they see a shift, guess what: internet bandwidth costs will go up.
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
Cancel your cable if you want to save a little money and what you are interested in is available online. Free shows and movies online won't last forever, though. Free everything is just not sustainable, and right now they are just trying to capture eyeballs and prove the concept. At some point, expect paywalls to appear, at least for 'premium content' or selected episodes of a season or whatever. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Last I heard, the average person watches an astonishing eight hours of television per day. Switching to entertainment on the internet to replace cable won't happen until data caps are lifted. Let's say people don't even have to watch HD content. Just regular digital/standard content. And let us say you have a family of four. Or are a few roommates sharing a place. That's an average of 32 hours of streaming video content per day or almost 700 hours of content per month. Not counting all the other bandwidth suckers you have going on like radio, gaming, etc.
Come on, you really think someone won't find a way around it? If the rates become more than people think is reasonable, they'll pirate it. They already do. And technology in 3 years isn't suddenly going to become impregnable. At the VERY worst, it'll take one guy with a machine fast enough to virtualize Windows, fullscreen a paid Hulu account, and record the screen output to a video file, and you've got an unencumbered video you can share with friends.
No system yet has proven foolproof. If you can watch it, you can record it. And if the default experience becomes irritating enough, someone's going to work their way around it just to spite the media companies if nothing else.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Yeah, I don't understand the attitude that things are always a click away. It takes a long time to download, and the internet is not always stable or available. If you're streaming you'll still want to back up or skip forward. If you've paid for something, even a measly $1, you'd like the ability to watch it twice. 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. Though I suspect there are a lot of younger generation who can't imagine being interested in anything older than a tweet.
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...
And no one is going to let you skip commercials forever without having a subscription fee. 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.
Who has the time to do a clean - professional-looking - edit of every episode of Law & Order?
I have no clue, but whoever he is, he used to upload them to The Pirate Bay weekly...
There's no place like
It's an even better deal if you get the $99 Roku box. Plug it in and it jumps right on your WiFi network. Also hooks up to your router or modem with an RJ45 cable. Connects directly to your TV via composite or HDMI. I've had mine with my $15/mo Netflix subscription for over a year now. Roku also carries MLB (Major League Baseball) and Amazon's Video on Demand (rip off prices, but they do carry more recent DVDs and TV programs than does Netflix's Watch Instantly offering).
The stuff from Netflix is free (no extra charge) with your standard, snail-mail subscription (as low as $9/mo). NO COMMERCIALS. You can even watch current-season TV programs (they are automatically added to your Netflix instant queue every week on the day after they air via cable TV). I watched CSI, Numb3rs and Dexter like that last year. And, what you put in your queue (by selecting them on-line at the Netflix site) STAYS in your queue until YOU delete it. Even the TV episodes. You select the Amazon and MLB stuff directly via the Roku box (you rent the Amazon stuff for a limited time, another reason to avoid them -- don't know about MLB since I've never used it). You can watch the Netflix content over and over again. Did I mention NO COMMERCIALS.
The Roku box is rock solid and its software is maintained and upgraded automatically over the 'net. Excellent customer service (although you probably won't ever need to use it 'cause the unit is so reliable and easy to set up). Simple remote control and a coverflow-like queue viewer (with descriptions of each DVD or TV episode). Top notch engineering and UI design all the way around. You will completely forget you are watching streaming video. It's really that good.
I changed my $100/mo cable TV/Internet subscription to just Internet over two years ago (RoadRunner was the only ISP offering 15Mbps down around here). I'm Pandora (also no commercials) and Netflix/Roku equipped now. Life is good.
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"