Looking back over the past few months, and thinking about bringing back the blog, it's amazing how many things have changed. Just a few months back, I was paying almost $100/month for cable and high speed internet service here in Alameda... It wasn't that bad a deal compared to the other local options, but with all the download to own and rental content out there (not to mention free streaming), I figured I could ditch the cable box and still see all my favorites via iTunes/Amazon/et al. That, combined with Internet news sources, a Slingbox back to Yoko's house in Japan, and restarting my old Netflix account, was supposed to cover all bases of what I "need" to see, and help prevent all that icky "opportunistic TV viewership".
Flash forward a few months - iTunes is struggling to get more studios on board, NBC pulled out of the iTunes store to start their own Hulu-baloo (more on that LATER), and the WGA is on strike making just about ANY form of acquiring TV moot (at least, all the shows I watch are done for the year, or never even started). So, I'm back to square one: if I want good shows in a timely/usable fashion, it's back to bittorrent. I mean, how else would I find out about something like "Intelligence"?
On the positive side, Netflix is back, and I can't believe I ever dropped them! So long as one stays on top of watching movies, and returning them in a timely way, it's an incredible value over a premium cable movie channel. The biggest problem seems to be finding titles that Yoko and I both want to watch, that don't need to be constantly paused for explanations one way or the other (like, "Why do you like Owen Wilson again?"). The recent price drop helped, of course... We're paying right about half what we used to, and watching less crappy TV and more good movies ('Wedding Crashers' excepted).
I don't know exactly what the future holds, but it's becoming a lot clearer that the entertainment industry has a huge gap between production, distribution, and monetization. And BOTH gaps need to get filled quickly, or risk a massive 'tune out' by the Joe Average viewer. And the non-average folk? Oh, we're already long gone - just about any multilingual/multicultural house has their ways - satellite, BT sites, Veoh, Slingbox, etc... With the ability to fling the middle class of just about any country about the world in new and interesting ways, comes the need to get relevant NATIVE content to those folk. And there's just no reliable, legal way to do it in most cases.
When it no longer matters where you live or work from, how are territorial licensing arrangements going to survive? Let me know!
