Michael Chaney says:

I finally did it. I cut the cord a little over a month ago, and it’s been quite a change for me. There have definitely been some growing pains and some learning curves to overcome, but in the end it’s been well worth the leap. So where to begin? First let me tell you a little about my hardware setup.

Last December I decided to build my own home theater PC, or HTPC, from scratch. I found a small motherboard based on the NVIDIA ION platform (http://bit.ly/TNwg9). It had everything required to connect to my wireless home network and connect to my living room TV, just add case, hard drive, RAM, blue-ray drive, and OS. Now I’m kind of a techie type, and this wasn’t my first time building a PC, but I have to say this was the easiest build ever. It took 30 min to put all the pieces together, and about another 30 min to install the OS and all the software. This was my first time installing Windows 7 and it was a breeze. It had drivers for all my hardware and that was it….done! Another great thing about Windows 7 is the Media Center software that comes with it. I was able to access my Netflix account, numerous network shows over the Internet, and the cheap USB over-the-air DTV tuner I purchased. Setup was a cinch and after only a couple of hours, I was lounging on the couch streaming last night’s CBS Survivor episode. The USB tuner gave me the same quality picture I could get with my TV’s tuner, and the built-in DVR that Windows Media Center gives you doesn’t degrade the quality one bit.

But I soon discovered one big problem…..the reception. I found out that a tiny indoor TV antenna was not going to be sufficient to consistently tune in all my local stations out here in the burbs, so I ended up installing an unnecessarily huge 10′x11′ directional antenna in my attic. I’ll save that fun story for a later day, but trust me when I say don’t do that unless you absolutely have to

Now I have all the hardware in place, the antenna tuned in, and I’m ready to go, so now what? I need some content. I first started by making a list of all the cable shows and channels I used to like to watch, and set about to find them online. I would like to say that I was able to find them all, and someday hopefully that will be that case, but there are many show and channels that are gone from me. No more BBC America, History Channel, or Discovery Channel. I can view clips online, but not full shows. I was happy that I’m still able to get all the news programming I want (or don’t want), and that I can get full episodes of almost all my network shows and Comedy Central. I did find that the best leader in online streaming is PBS. All of their shows are well organized for browsing on the couch and the quality was the best I’ve seen anywhere.

This leads to my second lesson learned. Not all video streams are created equal, and this gets even more apparent when blown up on the big screen using a low-power computer. Most video out there on the Internet uses Adobe Flash for streaming. Flash is very CPU intensive, and the Intel Atom processor that comprises the NVIDIA ION platform isn’t up to the task. Although it works just fine running Windows and the other programs, it just doesn’t have the horsepower to process Flash video. The ION platform is designed to offload video processing to the NVIDIA graphics chip, but only for certain types of video, namely H.264 which is the standard used in HD Blu-ray video. Over the past months I’ve had do deal with watching Flash-based video in a smaller window instead of full screen or else the picture would be too jerky to be watchable. Then came Flash version 10 and Apple’s QuickTime 7 which both support the H.264 HD video codec. Now the jerky Colbert Report that I used to watch in a tiny window streams in full-screen HD almost as good as you get over cable! Since this is the main codec supported on Apple’s devices such as the iPad, I expect many more streaming video sites to move to H.264. This will be the solid foundation needed to make living room Internet TV a truely viable alternative to cable, and I can’t wait!

To sum all this up, Internet TV in the living room is still very much in the early adopter phase, and it’s mostly going to be geeks like me who are willing to build the systems necessary to get the true couch potato experience out of the Internet. As with the early days of the PC and the Internet, this too will eventually become as trivial and ubiquitous as buying a laptop and surfing the web, especially as purpose-built HTPCs and Internet-connected TVs hit the market. One thing IS inevitable. At some point there will be a critical mass where ease of connectivity to streaming video, increase in picture quality, and Internet savvy consumers all converge to make this the new model for entertainment, and when that tipping point comes the change will be fast and furious.