One area where the age of information and high speed communications is still old school is the TV content business. The business model used by cable and satellite TV providers was written many years ago when channels were fewer and choices were less. But even though times have changed, content providers have not. They still want to make you pay for hundreds of channels you will never watch.
But times are-a-changin’. There’s Hulu and Fancast that have episodes of TV series on the Net. Then there’s devices like the Roku box that have hundreds of choices, but let you select the ones you want. Throw in Apple TV, Google TV, Netflix, and Amazon and you got more channels and choices than you can ever watch.
For me, I have a Roku box and free cable TV via Dish (it comes built-in to my apartment). But to be honest, I pretty much only watch sports events and PBS on my cable. On my Roku box I have Netflix, Amazon, CNET TV, TWIT TV (both those channels of shows dedicated to technology) and a few others, not to mention Pandora for my Music. I can watch episodes of TV shows (admittedly not the current episodes) as well as movies.
Admittedly, since I left Washington State, my movies and TV viewing has gone way down. There is so much to do here in Tucson that TV has lost some of its importance. There is just not that much time anymore for it. But that is me.
Still I am intrigued by the future of TV which is still cloudy, but I expect cable and satellite companies to put up one hell of a fight to keep things the way they are. But can they?
There is some non-TV stories in here also, so have at it! -JRC
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