Cutting The Cord And The Impact of a PC In Every Living Room | Hacker News Reader

Cutting The Cord And The Impact of a PC In Every Living Room

jasonlbaptiste.com

"Who will do to the 50 inch screen what the iPhone did to the 3 inch screen?"

The first service to offer a-la-cart programming over ip, in an open format. Recorded tv, on demand is nice, I am a huge fan. It is a wonderful format for things like series I know I like. But sometimes, I just want to be fed my entertainment. Sometimes I want to learn about/find new things. Some combination of these is what the TV industry is currently good at. Also for live sports. If uverse allowed me to select channels individually, or in very small groups (eg mtv package, or possible a bundle of mtv, vh1 and cmt) I would have 70% fewer channels. For everything else I would not mind paying direct for shows. If someone can successfully pull this off they will be very, very wealthy.

There are many hurdles tho, and more than one chicken/egg situation. However, if it can be done... I'm a fanboi of a non-existent company :).

It's hard to know what will win. Vudu is looking to sell itself today and it's not a huge exit. Tons of other set top boxes have come before it. I think open platforms with the lowest common denominator (ie- anything can be put on it) win. That's my belief why a full fledged computer is poised to do this over a set top box solution. There is a very good chance I could be wrong. I'm just speaking from personal preference / research.

I totally agree, I'm suggesting that the other end is where the revolution needs to happen. Currently all content is provided in a way that is absurd. The standard model is 'you will watch our playlist', instead of "we provide a good, themed playlist service but out of individually purchasable contents". I think that someone will finally do ala-carte, with a serious on-demand backing and things will change drastically. There is already a start here, with hulu et al being more popular than "experts" thought it would be.

This is where the NBC deal scares the living shit out of me. They own a lot of great content and with Comcast owning them, they could restrict how NBC shows are offered on the Internet. On the flip side, content owners will do well (if not better) with great content.

I think this process could also open the door for more niche producers. They won't need to make the network happy, they just need to provide good enough content to profit. It could help get rid of sadnesses like "the learning channel" from becoming TLC -- reality tv that sometimes has a sciencey or sociological twist. Some content may be lost/locked up in a dinosaur's grave for a while, but hopefully that will become moot.

Absolutely. It will allow for a democratic platform where good content will win and not be cut off due to the decisions of a few. Now with that said, America loves crappy content like Jersey Shore. So, I try not to look at it as "good content", but content that people want to watch.

I look at shows like Firefly -- any decent scifi really -- the masses aren't interested, people like me will only do on-demand (even if it is downloaded etc), and will buy merchandising. This can't work in most current network models. But in something like we are discussing, there is room for it be profitable -- maybe not insanely so -- but profitable nonetheless. This is why I think "good content" will flourish in such situations. People will still watch jersey shore, but people like me can get good content too.

An interesting thing has been going on lately anyway -- there are a lot more 12 episode seasons. And a lot more summer seasons. Content producers are starting to experiment. The syfy show Sanctuary started out as with a "pay for webisodes" model. Things are starting to move in interesting ways already.

My prediction: Joss Wheadon does a fully internet only show sometime in the next decade that is sci-fi. Dr horribles sing along shows he knows how to do this right.

I agree that this is the way things are headed, and I will be all too happy to jump on this bandwagon. The only thing keeping me from cutting the cord (or ditching the dish, in my case) is live sporting events. I'm not a sports fanatic, but I like to be able to turn on a basketball or football game (or even baseball if it's a reeeeally slow day). My house is situated out of line-of-sight from the public TV broadcast towers and I would have a serious beer gut if I went to the local sports bar to watch, so I'm beholden to a TV subscription package.

Eventually someone will realize the livestreaming sites are the way to do this. That's why I see it's a question of when, not if. Piracy/content online usually works in cycles something like:

1. Users post things pirated (live sports streams) because they cant get it from the producers. 2. Producers sue the service that enables this. 3. Producers realize that they should actually help enable this in a legal manner instead of preventing it. 4. Producers partner with the services and offer the content for a price or ad supported. Piracy still continues, but at a slower pace and the content producers are getting paid in some form at least.

Justin.tv has been my go-to source for live sports for the last year. I've only watched a few matches total but the overall connection quality seems to have been on an upward trend since last years' BCS championship.

Baseball already does this but that's because they're the only sport to hang onto all their internet streaming rights.

Most sports have internet streaming tied to their broadcast deals which prevents them from being fully streamed.

Slight edit for those who don't know. There are Over The Air HD antennas. If most of your sports content is on one of the big networks (football, some basketball and football) or on a local over the air channel these work pretty well. I have one plugged into my HDTV/Monitor at work and was able to get HD football on it pretty damn well.

There's a ton of people on the net using UStream and Justin.tv to restream live sporting events.

Check out http://atdhe.net/

I doubt Justin.TV sees this as a solution, it's piracy.

There's a huge problem with this model. Right now it works because its a small enough percentage. But the problem is that the content providers would be losing a huge portion of their income w/o cable.

Right now your cable provider pays large percentage of your cable bill back to the networks. ESPN get's $3-4 dollars per sub a month. That's literally ~4 billion in revenues from subscriber fees. Even now HGTV and Food Network are getting pulled from Cablevision over an argument over pennies per month per subscriber (they're around 15-25 cents a sub ESPN gets the most in fees).

You can't just cut the cord and not pay fees the whole model for content breaks down.

You can still pay legally for content on services like Amazon and Vudu but I'm not sure you're going to end up saving that much money.

This leaves pirated content, livestreamed via something like Justin.tv or another service (and they have to be showing up in some attorneys' crosshairs) or bittorrent content.

I'm sure more and more people will be switching to the internet for their video transport layer, but its not as simple as most expect. I think right now is the heyday for internet content, but I think in the next two years you're going to see a serious crackdown on unauthorized streaming services (including boxee who likes to scrape websites for content)

The economics will certainly be disrupted, but I don't think it will be as rough as it might be. Apple's recent negotiations for a cable subscription package show that content owners might actually make more money per subscriber:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/21/apple-tv-kill-cable/

"Another part of the report has Apple paying $2 to $4 a month to the major networks per monthly subscriber, and $1 to $2 for a cable subscriber. "

It's eventually going to grow from a small percentage to the majority. The question is what will the end result look like and who will be the casualties along the way?

Good post... Curious to see How people react in the consumer market to the boxee box.

Thank you. I think the reaction will be pretty good. It's the start of things to come as Boxee has the goal of being on all platforms. An interesting byproduct of the Boxee box is the remote that they will also sell separately.

They will also be releasing the code to the boxee box (http://blog.boxee.tv/2010/01/07/boxee-box-internals-revealed...) which is interesting since it runs on tegra 2 (which runs dual core ARM 9). I'm assuming that means they have ported Boxee to arm architecture, though I could be wrong there.

Please, please, add some contrast to the text color there. #636363 on #ffffff in an 8.5pt font is rough on the eyes. I firebugged it to #000 / 1.3em and it's much easier to read.

agreed, give me a few mins. h/o.

updated: changed article font to black and upped the size. gracias amigo, i needed a good kick in the ass on getting that done.

How about not setting the background to #ffffff like a jerk. I don't like staring into the sun every time I browse Web sites.

Note that HN uses nice soothing background colors.

Also note that if you don't explicitly set a background color it defaults to #ffffff pretty much everywhere, yet I can set my default to light gray and be happy, yet sites look pretty much the same.

Also note that HN encourages civil conversations - calling someone a jerk is not civil.

I didn't do it to be a jerk. I definitely should have changed it though. Working on this now pending Panera Bread's internet being flakey.

Much better -- thanks. :-)

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

I hear this all the time, but all I watch on cable is sports.

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