[mythtv-users] Some notes on Google TV

[Brian Wood]

On Sunday, November 14, 2010 04:12:34 pm Brad Templeton wrote:

> 
> I'm not quite sure why you would write such a long explanation to
> somebody who wrote "I dislike live TV as do many of us Myth users"
> because you hardly need to convince us of the point.

It's not just DVRs like Myth that are obsoleting "what's on?". More and more people are "cutting the cable", and moving to 
Netflix, Hulu and the like for their TV. Most of these people have never heard of MythTV, and many are motivated by 
financial realities, not a dislike for live TV.

I've spoken to some cable cutters, who seem to think they are "settling" for something less than what they really want, 
even though what they are "settling" for is in fact superior to what they had.

Except for news, sports and the occasional special, TV networks in the traditional sense are really obsolete today, but 
they will die a hard death, as corporations that have made money from the public in the past seem to think they have a 
god-given right to do so in perpetuity (see Heinlein's "Life-Line"), and most are incapable of adjusting to new realities, 
they seem to want to hire enough lawyers and buy enough politicians to prevent reality from changing, rather than adapt.

I now have more TV available to me from streaming sources than I do from cable or satellite (I have both). Myth allows me 
to get more from the traditional sources, but I see myself being able to move totally to internet-sourced material in the 
not-too-distant future.

Netflix seems to be leading the pack, their quality is very close to DVDs, and their reliability is excellent. The others 
run the gamut from a crapshoot to pretty good. Hulu has commercials (though not too many), and sources like PBS are 
essentially commercial-free. 

The main problem I see is that, in many cases, the ISP is also the cable company, and they are starting to fight back 
against the cable cutters with bandwidth caps and other anti-competitive practices.