SubscribeThe implications of cable-TV cord cutting continue to be discussed on several newscasts airing around the country, prompted by an Arbitron study showing Americans are more willing to give up their televisions than forgo the Internet.
In Providence, Rhode Island WNAC-TV spent five minutes pondering life without cable, noticing younger people are increasingly not even bothering to sign up, preferring the convenience… and price of watching everything online for free.
WNAC-TV’s The Buzz suspects the days of “free” might be numbered, however.
[flv width=”480″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WNAC Providence Cut the cable cord 4-15-10.flv[/flv]
Make no mistake: The big cable, satellite, and telco carriers are still sitting pretty with more than 100 million TV subscribers. Nevertheless, a new report claims that more and more viewers are “cutting the cord” in favor of watching their favorite shows via over-the-air antennas (remember those?), Netflix, or the Web. (5 minutes)
The problem is once something becomes ingrained as free, people view it as a public good, and people won’t pay for it ever again. Even if you clamp down on the free model, people will just go to something else instead of paying for it again.
This is why the cable companies are scared.
There is a BIG misnomer that if you watch a downloaded video or streamed video from the Internet, you have to watch it on your computer, wrong. I kept hearing that several times during the video. Most video cards nowadays, have dual monitor support. A simple dvi to hdmi adaptor, that you can get at monoprice for a few dollars, and you can watch whatever on your TV with your popcorn like the guys in the video pointed out. The neat thing about it, is the fact that you can watch anything that CAN be played on your PC. That… Read more »
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… Read more »
Have you tried Media Player Classic Home Cinema? I have found it to be the fastest and best player around and it plays about everything you could throw at it.. And, it is free to boot. WMP, VOC, and some others are slow and really use CPU a lot. http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/media-player-features.html Quoted from site: “Media Player Classic Home Cinema allows you to enhance, decode and accelerate a broad span of movie formats like x.264 with GPU assisted acceleration and image quality enhancing. The WMP Classic Home Cinema player does not require many system resources than the rest of the video media… Read more »
Here’s a timely article talking about CBS’s move to HTML5 and H.264. It states that if CBS is successful with its move, other broadcasters and premium video providers could follow suit.
http://newteevee.com/2010/03/25/cbs-testing-out-html5-for-ipad-videos/