[mythtv-users] Some notes on Google TV

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Mon Nov 15 00:31:02 UTC 2010


On 11/14/2010 03:49 PM, Brian Wood wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>    
Well yes, I've been wanting to cable cut for ages.  In fact, when I was 
at BitTorrent and we were building an online video store, I really 
wanted to convince Comedy Central to let us do a good quality (and 
un-bleeped) version of the Daily Show, because that's one of the shows 
that keeps people from cable-cutting.   You can watch it online legally 
on their site, but a day later, and it's one of those few shows that is 
really better watched right away if you can.

However, it's not just news and sports, as there are still the so-called 
water-cooler shows, which people want to get into discussing right away 
in online forums and other places, and they also prevent cable-cutting.  
And the cable companies know that.

Netflix and DVD still have long delays.  For most shows it doesn't 
really matter a lot, but for certain shows there is a spoiler factor 
that also tends to make people not be satisfied with Netflix.   For 
example, I did not watch "Lost" on TV and was thinking of watching it 
via DVD, but now there have been so many spoilers about the ending that 
I probably won't do so at all, and even if I did it would be a different 
experience.

On the other hand, for many shows I take advantage of the fact others 
are watching live.  For most series, I record the show, wait 2 weeks and 
then go to sites like tv.com to see if fans think it was a turkey 
episode.  If so I delete it and read the summary of what happened.   You 
can turn a mediocre series into a good one if you only watch the best 
60% of the episodes.  I have been toying with writing a MythTV tool to 
do this real time with SNL sketches.

Google TV is an odd bird.  The truth is, you can see how a desire for 
cable cutting is part of the design.  However, they are not foolish.  
They know how many people are not planning to cable cut, and they are 
working to support them too, in fact to bring them over.

This has the networks scared because on the one hand GTV helps people 
watch their shows, and on the other hand it bypasses their channels.   
As such, Hulu decided to block Google TV.  (I watch Hulu on my Myth box 
inside the regular browser, they have not really thought to try to ban 
it, and it's hard to see how they could, even though they would want to 
if they noticed it.)  They also did this to Boxee.

For a long time, MythTV has been a leader in innovation in home tv 
watching.   I think with Google bringing the Android platform into the 
box, it will take some of that over.   This is not necessarily bad -- 
competition brings about good things.


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