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.

I wrote earlier today about my reluctant late-adopter status for audio podcasting, and now I come across an article about Apple quietly introducing video content to iTunes Music Store.

The quiet, fanfare-less launch of video podcasting (in fact, it’s not even clear when it was launched) is a bit surprising for the company, but there may be a reason: there’s not too many video podcasts out there in the wild. Furthermore, video podcasts are currently only playable on your computer, although it seems clear enough that a video iPod is on the way. If you didn’t believe it before, you should definitely believe it now.

I don’t recall if anyone mentioned video on iTunes at last night’s Search SIG discussion. Ev Williams (from Odeo) commented that a lot of what makes audio podcasting compelling doesn’t apply to video, in that audio can be consumed anywhere, and has an existing use model (drive-time radio), while video is typically consumed while sitting down in front of an increasingly large television at home. Eric Rice did show a live demo of video blogging on Audioblog, illustrating the possibility of large scale user-created video content in the future. I’m not sure who’s going to look at all the video, though. Perhaps the same people who are watching reality TV shows.

Once again, I’m well outside the demographic, since I barely watch any television at all these days. If I could get a commercial video podcast service to replace cable TV with, I’d probably subscribe now, though.