What Content Can NOT be Pirated, Is still 100% Free and Millions of People See DAILY?
November 9th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
It’s not the movies. They are all over everywhere. It’s not music. It’s not photo’s or documents. C’mon…Its TELEVISION! What I mean is this: TV isn’t pirated out of the box because the episodes of LOST or V or the last NY Giant football game (sorry, I’m a fan) debut on TV. I can’t find the upcoming episode of V which is on ABC tommorrow -10/10/09 – on any torrent or newsgroup. It may show up AFTER its debut on TV, but never before. There are no ‘screener’s’ floating around the newsgroups. This being said, the content on these networks becomes all that much more important. And, I believe because its so accessable, that’s one of the reasons its NOT on the newsgroups or torrents as much as the movies and music are.
-Coming up:
Wal-Mart and Target – The last DVD standing
Cable operators are OUT of room…no kidding!
April 19th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Holy cow Batman!! We ran out of room?
So what’s a programming service to do when they don’t have channel space to put even their own cable offering on the air? Punt! How do you do that? Well, there’s a little under-the-radar company in San Jose that provides ‘web-infused’ TV. They produce a magic box and some magic proprietary software to the cable operator for FREE. That’s right, 100% FREE. They install it for them and maintain it for them. What does this give the operators? It gives them many more additional cable channels. What does it give the cable subscriber at home (read: you and me) ? More channels on their channel line-up. And its all seamless. It just looks like another channel. The channel or channels are controlled and surfed with the same remote that you were given when you signed up for cable. But here’s the best part. It also delivers the Internet on a channel all controlled by the same remote. You want to watch videos on YouTube, see what’s on Blip.tv? Its all there and easy to find and maneuver. No box for you to hook up, no additional NOTHING. I think this has a lot of potential for growth. They will be launching in a large system back East shortly. So, if you have a fairly robust website that you want delivered on cable TV to millions of cable TV subscribers, you can do that now. They are other pieces to actually how you get launched but its all do-able. Exciting times. I’m going to brush off some of my old cable channel concepts. They might just fly now.
The coming demise of Cable TV channels
April 3rd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Though Verizon is often associated with its phone networks, the company has been busy building up and promoting its advanced FiOS infrastructure. This high bandwidth service provides one of the most advanced packages of high definition television, high-speed Internet and phone service for customers in areas where it is available. For example, FiOS Internet download speeds currently max out at 50 megabits per second, compare that to traditional cable company speeds which are often 1/10th of that or less.
So, you’ve just gotten FiOS at your house. You now have 50mbps coming into your home. So, you set your TiVo to record from your TV through cable the newest episode of ‘Lost’. Oh, and just this past weekend you also got a brand new 56″ LCD TV and hooked your FiOS into the set so you could launch a browser on your new LCD TV set. Cool. Now you can surf the web on your new LCD. So, you’ve recorded ‘Lost’ on the TiVo and went to bed. The next day you come home and are ready to watch the episode of ‘Lost’ you recorded on your TiVo the night before. You sit down in your living room, turn on your big screen TV and discover that your browser is still open and lo and behold there is last nights ‘Lost’ episode right there on Hulu (or iTunes ). And its free (with a few 30 sec. commercials running ). So, you click play and sit and watch ‘Lost’ with online commercials (about a total of 8 mins of commercials as opposed to 22 mins on standard TV).
Then it hits you. Since your TV viewing habits are time-shifted anyway with TiVo, and now that you have FiOS and have a virtual TV, why should you pay for Cable? I’m mean, nearly all the cable networks and Broadcast nets are beginning to re-broadcast everything online. So why pay for Cable TV when you can view your favorite shows anytime by launching your browser on your big TV?
This merger of the TV and the internet will happen, but ONLY when the pipe into your home blurs the lines between TV and the web. Its happening today and most of us can’t see it yet, but we will. And this will be an issue for cable companies who down the road will be nothing more than a pipe into our homes. The web will carry into our homes what cable TV carries today. Its just a matter of time.
The above scenario is a true one, my in-laws have this today in Florida through FiOS. 
In trouble within 5 yrs and big trouble within 10. Its the pipe.
