Oh TV, I love thee

Oh TV, how can I watch thee...let me count the ways:

1. Live TV in the living room (so 1983)
2. Tivo'd shows in the living room (goodbye commercials)
3. Media Center PC in the living room (Tivo + $1000 - $13/mo.)
4. Tivo'd or Media Center'd shows on the Portable Media Center or Windows Mobile device (slow transcoding sucks)
5. Tivo'd or Media Center'd shows on the PSP (via some series of
decryptng and transcoding)
6. Video Ipod ($1.99/show is mighty pricey and they look ugly on any screen bigger than credit card)
7. Some off brand portable running Linux or BSD straight out of Taiwan or Korea (LOTS of formats supported, but usually bad UI, and bad PC software)
8. Windows Media Center Online Spotlight - Comedy Central Motherload from your sofa with a remote control...'nuff said (man we need some folks to fix the naming of our products)
and so on and so forth, forever and ever

You get the point...there are a LOT of ways to get your daily fill of Days of our Lives and guess what, there are going to be a LOT more ways coming up.

Yahoo Go! links Web services to phones, TVs - Wireless World - MSNBC.com
Microsoft partners with Murdoch in video pact (I guess no one remembers how DirecTV screwed Microsoft in the heyday of UltimateTV...here we go again)
Google sets up the Video Lemonade Stand

And soooo much more. Yes folks, TV 2.0 is finally upon us. I, like you, have been waiting for this for a long time. Man, I'm kicking myself for missing CES this year...CES TV junkies, I envy you.

TV 2.0 catch up

So it's been a while since my last real post and here's a recap of transgressions in the TV world since then:

• Apple drops the bomb with iPod Video and iTunes with Pay Per Download Video (PPDV?). By the way, if you want a FREE IPOD VIDEO, just click. These are the same guys that had the freebie deal before, but now they're giving away the latest and greatest iPod nanos and videos. The best part is that some of the deals are quite good. For example, the Citi Dividend card is AWESOME. Hongyun and I have one and we use it for our groceries and gas purchases. It gives us 5% back (up to $300 per year) on these kinds of purchases and since gas and groceries are always getting more expensive, it really does work out nicely...consider it a $300 bonus at the end of the year to buy some Xbox 360 games to go with the new Xbox 360 dropping next week (you did preorder one didn't you? If not, good luck explaining it to your kid).
• Steve Jobs uses Pixar's rock and hard place relationship with Disney to finagle episodes of LOST for the iTunes Store.
• Netflix drops the ball and gives up on trying to fulfill rental requests through streaming video. Reason: movie studios are bone heads and prefer people pirating their content than makign a few bucks through rentals each time the content is viewed. Imagine this: a movie distributed via P2P, but is wrapped in a special file format that locks it for certain folks or randomly unlocks it (have Windows Media Player check a server to unlock the content, the server will randomly handout freeviews to 1 in 10 folks...the others have to pay $2 to watch the movie). Talk about viral....maybe they'll figure it out before it's too late...maybe not.
• NBC and CBS announce plans to give people shows without commercials on demand for 99 cents. So lame. Let me count the reasons why:
  1. Bitter that they couldn't pull a deal with Apple to get into iTunes
  2. Can I download them to a portable device or laptop to watch them on the go? No.
  3. Why wouldn't I just pay for a Tivo for $13/month and get all the shows I want commercial free? Sure I have to push buttons, but it's easy. Also Tivo lets me transfer them to my laptop (although I loathe the Tivo Desktop software...that's some scary piece of code they released-Mac users, considers yourselves lucky for not having to deal with the crap fest).
• AOL and Time Warner FINALLY figured out what to do with their alliance. Took them long enough. When they first merged 5 years ago, the idea that went through my brain was wow-that's a natural fit. AOL's got the eyeballs, TW's got the content AND the broadband. It took them 5 whole years to get their heads out of their asses and figure it out. Anyway, it looks like it's going to be too late for them to make a big splash since Microsoft may buy AOL. The dialup Internet Acess business is definitely the slow boat to nowhere in the tech world. We haven't heard anything official on the inside so who knows what's going on.