As a quick follow up to my previous post about getting rid of cable TV service, I'd like to share this amusing news that had me smirking with joy: Comcast 3Q Profit Tumbles, Shares Slide. I assume this isn't related to the backlash around their implementation of Bit Torrent traffic filtering, but I hope it will make them think twice before ruining the only decent service they provide (internet).

Labels: cable, fear mongering, television

Internet TV got exciting this week. Adobe announced support for the h.264 codec in Flash, an ubiquitous and highly useful format for providing video. There is a lot that is very cool about this development, and there are people who know a lot more about it than I do who have written comprehensive and interesting blog posts about it. For me, I believe this development will help realize the 'Internet TV' concept, moving us from streaming clips to long format, near-HD content.

But the shocking part is that while the technology behind internet video took a huge step forward this week, cable television dropped another rung down into the cesspool of over-priced mediocrity it has been stagnating in for a decade now.

I received a letter this month informing me that my cable service, already around the $150 mark, would be going up another $5. No specific feature or upgrade justified this, just a vague marketing hand wave at a 'continued investment' into the future. Considering how little we actually watch television in this household, and how much better that experience is facilitated by downloading the shows online, we decided to kick Comcast out of our house.

1. What do they even provide?
Any sort of non-linear television programming is available online via Usenet, Torrents or whatever particular flavor of file sharing you prefer. Generally speaking, an hour long tv program (well, 40m once the commercials have been cut out) can be downloaded in under ten minutes. This is less than we usually wait for the DVR to buffer enough that we can skip the commercials. Despite all the money we pay for cable, more often than not we end up just downloading the show because its easier and a better experience.

So with that, there is very little content left on cable television that we can't obtain easily online. What's left is essentially news and sports. The internet and Katie Couric have rendered news television useless (and who's home at 6:30pm for the national news anyway), and the talking heads on the cable channels are about as useful as talk radio. This leaves Comcast providing exactly one thing that can't be obtained online: sports programming. Specifically, NFL games. We are paying over $1500 a year to watch the New England Patriots. If I had realized this earlier I would have just bought tickets to the games.

2. Can we get this content elsewhere?
So all that's keeping cable in the house is the NFL. The NFL is shown on the major networks, which are by law required to provide free over the air broadcasts. Not only that, they are required to provide digital, HD broadcasts of their content. Coming from Maine, and of parents who never got cable TV (I can thank them now), I had a bias towards broadcast. Its just not a great delivery technology in a more rural environment. The city is different. According to antennaeweb.org, a useful site that tells you what broadcasts you can receive based on your street address, I was within range of every major network's HD broadcast.

3. Make it happen!
I picked up a simple indoor antennae that had some good reviews from Radio Shack. They offer a 30 day cash return policy, so if the technology wasn't what it claimed to be I could just take it back the next morning. I plugged this into my bedroom LCD which has a built in HDTV tuner.



The TV flipped through all the channels and programmed in presets for everything that showed signs of reception. I sat there kicking myself for not knowing about this technology earlier as I watched over 20 channels blip by. Every major network (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX and CB or whatever it is) were being received in either 720p or 1080i. Most of them looked better than they do on Comcast HD. PBS has two offerings, and the visual quality is absolutely stunning. I had a few minor reception hick-ups with FOX, but a few adjustments to the antennae (which is done via remote control!) solved that. Victory over the cable monopoly was being pulled out of the air.

4. Further integration, making it cool.
Broadcast HD was obtained on the bedroom TV. Very cool, but we tend to watch sporting events in the living room on our projector. The projector doesn't have a built in tuner, so plugging an antennae into it isn't an option. Fortunately I had previously come across a device that not only solves that problem, it brings an additional pile of awesome to the broadcast HD world: The HD Homerun from Elgato.



Elgato has for a long time made interesting devices for the Macintosh that let you tune in cable or antennae programming and use your Mac as both the digital tuner for browsing show schedules and also as a DVR. You can record, pause and schedule programming like a Comcast DVR box. The HD Homerun takes this a step further. Instead of being a USB device, it plugs into an ethernet network, and allows you to share an antennae and cable cable connection (it supports two inputs at once!) across your LAN. Instead of having two large weird-looking antennas, I can plug the one into this box, and access HD programming from both bedroom and living room.

To function, this device requires a Mac. Fortunately I have a Mac mini in the bedroom and an iMac in the living room, already integrated with both the TV and projector. I installed an ethernet network between these machines earlier in the year for streaming HD movies over the network, and integrating with the Homerun box should be a piece of cake.

Conclusion
I do enjoy the convenience of cable. Its there, its always on and it generally works. Its very easy to flip it on when you're bored and find a Seinfeld re-run to fall asleep in front of. But paying over $100 every month for a service that I use infrequently at best is absurd. There is a lot of slack here and, circling back to the top of this post, the foundation has been laid this week for Internet TV to start pulling in a lot of it. I think there are strong parallels between the lazy, screw-the-customer attitude of the cable providers and that of the music industry pre- Napster. I look forward to sinking the money I used to pay for cable each month into a low-energy file server for holding all my new television programming.

Labels: brightcove, cable, insanity, internet, television, Video