
Cutting The Cord And The Impact of a PC In Every Living Room - jasonlbaptiste
http://jasonlbaptiste.com/jason-l-baptiste-random-thoughts/cut-the-cord-with-mainstream-htpc/
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sophacles
"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 :).

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jasonlbaptiste
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.

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sophacles
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.

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jasonlbaptiste
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.

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sophacles
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.

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jasonlbaptiste
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.

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sophacles
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.

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jasonlbaptiste
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.

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gr366
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.

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jasonlbaptiste
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.

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mikeryan
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.

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mikeryan
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)

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jasonlbaptiste
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?

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

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jasonlbaptiste
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...](http://blog.boxee.tv/2010/01/07/boxee-box-internals-revealed-
nvidia-tegra-2-ftw/comment-page-1/#comment-13185)) 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.

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wheels
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.

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jasonlbaptiste
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.

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vsync
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.

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

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

