I finally ripped the cables out of my house.
They hung in menacing black tendrils all over my basement and I resented them from the minute we bought the house. The cords were a tantalizing reminder that, for a fee, I could bring cable programming into my house, a prospect I saw as tantamount to reversing the sewage lines.
I have resisted cable for 30 years, and clung to my pathetic rabbit ears through the disastrous conversion to digital TV. Digital TV turned my television screen into a patchwork of evaporating Chuck Close-like squares. While some channels [--] all of them in Spanish [--] now come in with a fidelity verging on the photo-realistic, most periodically dissolve like Scotty and Sulu dematerializing on the transporter.
Only about 11 percent of Americans cleave belligerently to their antennae, too cheap or uptight to spring for VH1. But there is a new temptation on the horizon, and it does not require cumbersome black cables slithering through your floorboards.
It's Internet TV, which may do to cable what cable did to broadcast, which was what broadcast did to movies, which was what movies did to vaudeville, and what pretty much everyone has done to newspapers. It will give them competition.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that CBS reached a multimillion dollar deal with video service Netflix to stream classic TV shows like "Cheers" from its library. The news came just days after Amazon.com offered its "Prime" customers movie and TV shows instantly available for viewing over the web.
In other words, never mind the cable and or that puny computer monitor, your entertainment console of the future will be the same one it has been for the last 70 years [--] the boob tube.
Increasingly, televisions are being manufactured to connect to the Internet, allowing viewers to stream video, as Republican-American reporter Sam Cooper reported last week. Twenty-one percent of all TVs shipped last year were Internet enabled, and most of them come with the ability to access a video streaming device, like Netflix or Amazon.com.
If you are tech-savvy, you can also access Internet TV through an electronic device like a game console or Blu-ray player. Through these portals of the imagination, you may access such riveting television as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter. Both Google and Apple are also elbowing their way into the game, in many cases partnering with television manufacturers that offer subscription services, many of which, like Hulu, will be free [--] at least initially. So Apple TV, for instance, has a decoder box. If you subscribe to the service, you can download the shows and are charged in the same way as if you had downloaded a song from iTunes. You can access Netlix videos for as little as $8 a month.
That's a lot less than the average $70 fee Comcast's cable customers paid monthly for video services last year.
"Something like this was bound to happen," Carolin Lin, professor of the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Connecticut, told me. "If cable TV continues to exist, it will have to change the way it exists."
But don't toll any bells, for the cable TV industry is far from doomed. It has billions of dollars invested beneath the asphalt of this country and will not go gently into the wired night.
But Internet TV disarms cable in this respect: Cable companies have obdurately refused to sell their services a la carte. That means that if you're a prude like me and only want CNN and the BBC, you have to navigate through a swamp of drivel to satisfy your particular taste. Internet TV offers an alternative: a small fee for limited viewing [--] particularly attractive to those like me who lack the time, inclination or budget to access an all-you-watch orgy of rubbish.
The trade-off is the same cross we have borne with the Internet all along [--]when the world is at your fingertips, plenty of sludge gets under your fingernails. But at a moment when the colossus of cable TV is gorging on America's checkbook, we can't afford not to get our hands dirty.
I have resisted cable for 30 years, and clung to my pathetic rabbit ears through the disastrous conversion to digital TV. Digital TV turned my television screen into a patchwork of evaporating Chuck Close-like squares. While some channels [--] all of them in Spanish [--] now come in with a fidelity verging on the photo-realistic, most periodically dissolve like Scotty and Sulu dematerializing on the transporter.
Only about 11 percent of Americans cleave belligerently to their antennae, too cheap or uptight to spring for VH1. But there is a new temptation on the horizon, and it does not require cumbersome black cables slithering through your floorboards.
It's Internet TV, which may do to cable what cable did to broadcast, which was what broadcast did to movies, which was what movies did to vaudeville, and what pretty much everyone has done to newspapers. It will give them competition.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that CBS reached a multimillion dollar deal with video service Netflix to stream classic TV shows like "Cheers" from its library. The news came just days after Amazon.com offered its "Prime" customers movie and TV shows instantly available for viewing over the web.
In other words, never mind the cable and or that puny computer monitor, your entertainment console of the future will be the same one it has been for the last 70 years [--] the boob tube.
Increasingly, televisions are being manufactured to connect to the Internet, allowing viewers to stream video, as Republican-American reporter Sam Cooper reported last week. Twenty-one percent of all TVs shipped last year were Internet enabled, and most of them come with the ability to access a video streaming device, like Netflix or Amazon.com.
If you are tech-savvy, you can also access Internet TV through an electronic device like a game console or Blu-ray player. Through these portals of the imagination, you may access such riveting television as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter. Both Google and Apple are also elbowing their way into the game, in many cases partnering with television manufacturers that offer subscription services, many of which, like Hulu, will be free [--] at least initially. So Apple TV, for instance, has a decoder box. If you subscribe to the service, you can download the shows and are charged in the same way as if you had downloaded a song from iTunes. You can access Netlix videos for as little as $8 a month.
That's a lot less than the average $70 fee Comcast's cable customers paid monthly for video services last year.
"Something like this was bound to happen," Carolin Lin, professor of the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Connecticut, told me. "If cable TV continues to exist, it will have to change the way it exists."
But don't toll any bells, for the cable TV industry is far from doomed. It has billions of dollars invested beneath the asphalt of this country and will not go gently into the wired night.
But Internet TV disarms cable in this respect: Cable companies have obdurately refused to sell their services a la carte. That means that if you're a prude like me and only want CNN and the BBC, you have to navigate through a swamp of drivel to satisfy your particular taste. Internet TV offers an alternative: a small fee for limited viewing [--] particularly attractive to those like me who lack the time, inclination or budget to access an all-you-watch orgy of rubbish.
The trade-off is the same cross we have borne with the Internet all along [--]when the world is at your fingertips, plenty of sludge gets under your fingernails. But at a moment when the colossus of cable TV is gorging on America's checkbook, we can't afford not to get our hands dirty.
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