Internet TV

Dear Internet Media companies,

Have I got a deal for you!

Looking at my cable bill, I currently pay $88.59 a month for basic cable (no premium channels) and one HD DVR. If everything I watch is in-season, I watch about 50 hours of television a month plus local football (CBS). Obviously, this is ridiculous and needs to stop very soon.

So here's a chance for me to pay you cash money, Apple/Microsoft/Google/Hulu/whoever. I would gladly pay, lets say, $30-$40 a month for up to ~60 hours of television. It can be DRM'd, it can be "rented", I don't care, as long as I can play it in HD on my TV. I would also greatly prefer to be able to pre-download it so I can have high quality without network hiccups.

Unfortunately, the current internet TV model is ~$3 per HD episode, which makes it remarkably more expensive than cable, even for my limited usage.

As it stands, it looks like I'm going to have to cobble together my own solution of Windows Media Center DVR for OTA stuff, Hulu for some stuff, and iTunes for what I can't get elsewhere. And yet you wonder why people turn to BitTorrent...

Comments

Anonymous said…
yeah, downloading TV can't be very illegal, so I would go with that if there's no other way.

Get some merch from the show or sth. nice for yourself :)

Eventually they will come around if no-one is paying anymore
February 20, 2010 at 4:29 PM
Elan said…
If you run OS X, check out Plex (http://www.plexapp.com)
February 20, 2010 at 9:26 PM
Jonathan Pobst said…
@Elan

I hadn't heard of Plex, so I checked it out. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to offer anything over Hulu. It doesn't help me record OTA content, or get things that aren't available on Hulu.

The interface for setting up TV shows isn't very good, but the interface for playing shows is much better than Boxee or Hulu.
February 21, 2010 at 11:33 AM
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