Ho John Lee’s Weblog

The cable TV service at our house went out a few days ago. It’s hard to pin down exactly when, since we are atypical media consumers and often go for days at a time without television. The service tech missed his repair appointment window yesterday, so it’s going to be another day or two without network television. From time to time I consider dropping the cable service altogether. I never feel like I’m getting a good value, and some combination of DVDs and internet services seem like it will be a better fit “real soon now”.

On most school days, the television doesn’t go on at all, except if one of us is on the treadmill at home and happens to turn on the news. We don’t even use TiVo, although I occasionally try experiments with the home-built PVR du jour while wearing my “media technologist” hat.

The standard (analog) cable package from Comcast is around $50 per month. For us, this is probably 5 hours / week of cartoons, plus another 5 hours / week of mostly news programs. So, rounding up, call it around 50 hours per month of content. We don’t subscribe to any premium channels, and we generally don’t watch ESPN. My wife watches Korean dramas from time to time, but these are all on DVD or by video streaming (from Korea!). I could live without the cable news, since it’s usually just CNBC with the sound off.

This works out to around $1 per hour of cable programming, or $600 per year for mostly cartoons and CNBC.

I’m not too interested in watching video on an iPod, except possibly on an airplane or while travelling. What is interesting, though, is the possibility of getting online video distribution into the mainstream. iTunes has been fairly successful in popularizing legal online music downloads, and they may have more success than others in getting consumers to adopt a paid video download service.

$1.99 per commercial-free hour seems too high, though. I’m also not fond of the iTunes DRM system, having a household full of networked computers which come and go over time. I find I would rather purchase the CD and rip it to the server than deal with managing the DRM.

If the Comcast guys miss their repair window again, it may be time to try dropping the service altogether. The primary advantage they have at the moment seems to be incumbency, and the fact that it “just works”, except that it doesn’t.

I should probably hook up the antenna feed, though, which might give me an excuse to check out the local broadcast HDTV signal.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2005 at 10:30 am and is filed under Media / MP3 / PVR, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.