TV- CBS Making Progress
It is pretty amazing to me the sorry state of the TV networks taking advantage of the Internet as a distribution
medium. The only real excuse is that most people don’t have a computer hooked up to a TV yet so they can’t really
watch TV programming sent via their computer. Still, with a set of early adopters all over it, you would think someone
would get in front of this trend.
So far the best solution I’ve found is Amazon Unbox. Unbox is cool enough that I’m planning on cancelling
some of the premium channels on cable and just getting individual programs via Unbox. While I felt that $2 per
program was too much for TV (its still too much for 30min programs, they need to price differentiate more),
when I look at how many programs I can buy a month and still save over the Comcast
subscription, it becomes easier to justify. Plus I get real DVD quality content, better than most broadcast HD
and I get to replay anytime at that quality.
The other night we went to watch the latest CSI episode and discovered that the recorded version was trash. Somewhere
between the Media Center and the HD broadcast antenna the results were jumpy and cut out. Since CSI is one of the programs
available on Unbox I went there to get the program. This was a day after the broadcast but the new episode wasn’t online
yet. This I really don’t get- hey, if I’m paying $2 to watch it, they should pretty much have it available online
before the normal broadcast time if anything.
However a quick visit to the CBS web-site saved me. They have this new video player they call the InnerTube
that has full episodes of most of the shows available a couple of hours after the west-coast air time. They
force you to watch a couple of ads, but thankfully they are fairly brief (although they crank up the volume even
worse than normal broadcast ads do).
The quality isn’t as good as Amazon but its almost as good as broadcast/cable after you PVR it.
Hopefully this is a sign of good things to come. Now if someone had a $20/month
subscription service that would give me all the HD quality video of TV shows I want…
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