Cutting the Umbilical Cord to Broadcast TV
Cutting the Umbilical Cord to Broadcast TV
by , 2:15 PM EST, December 22nd, 2006
A technology writer took up the challenge from his editor. Cut the TV cable. Put the TiVo box in the closet. Marching orders: see if his family could meet their entertainment needs from the Internet alone. And it all worked according to article posted at Wired News on Monday.
A brand new Mac mini was purchased and connected to the HDTV. An iTunes account was set up, and the self described guinea pig and his wife set about seeing if they could live without broadcast TV for a month.
When iTunes charges built up and sports were hard to come by, the writer turned to some free video services and his Xbox to supplement his viewing. He found plenty of free video programming, but sports events were another story. He noted: "It turns out, watching a New England Patriots' game online is impossible."
Having admitted that he steered clear of the iPod because of its DRM, the author went on to, ironically, tell of his woes with Microsoft's video rental system which Microsoft said were "the realities of the content industry."The bottom line in the experiment was that it took a Mac mini, the iTunes Store, an Xbox, and a little more money than his family had been spending on cable. But in the end, the cable line stayed cut.
He concluded, "In the end, getting videos from the internet is not the same as live television programming. However, in a few years, I believe it will be better."
Observer Comments
This is indeed the future. The movie industry and set manufacturers have tied HDTV in so many knots that a good chunk of the viewing public will find broadcast, cable, and satellite to be unbearably complex.
A tech savvy friend of mine has an HDTV set and cable, but when I asked him to tune in the secondary channels that a local broadcaster was transmitting he couldn't do it because somehow his tuner wasn't compatible with his cable. It was also impossible for him to recognize what channel he was watching by looking at the channel numbers on his TV because the cable TV company stripped that info out of the broadcasts. He had hundreds of channels with nothing but 203, 204, 205, 206, ect to identify them. (Which also meant that he could never use a Tivo. Maybe that is why his cable did that.) He could get HDTV, but had to wait for a station ID in order to know what he was watching!
All Apple has to do is fill up iTunes as they have done, and up the quality when faster internet becomes more common. Then sit back, and wait for the rest of the industry to destroy itself.
You can easily add an EyeTV Hybrid and an HDTV antenna to the Mac Mini. That gives you access to over the air broadcast, both traditional analog (at least until early 2009) and HDTV over the air (with the EyeTV's ATSC tuner). Here in San Francisco, you can watch the networks other than NBC, which is based in San Jose), along with some home shopping, weather, language, and non-English broadcasting, all in HDTV.
Also, the network websites stream many of their prime-time programs starting the day after their original broadcasts. CBS's Innertube site (presumably with apologies to YouTube) is even streaming the episodes of Smith that were never broadcast. The Comedy Central Motherlode site has big chunks of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, though not the complete shows.
So that goes a long way toward having a lot to watch without forking over the monthly fees for cable or satellite.
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