Philoking.com

I am sure they know it’s coming. I doubt customers are dropping like flies yet, because they are already paying for internet access and it’s not at the tipping point yet.

Thing is, I am quite sure, I am not the only customer that has woken up and realized how little I actually need cable TV.

Of course there are the sticky issues of sports, news and Dexter of course (literally the only reason we paid for Showtime) but that list is going to continue to shrink and you can bet that Comcast, Time Warner and the rest of those clowns don’t want to end up being a low-rent Internet Service Provider. So what to do?

Personally, we just bought a new house and I only wired two rooms for Cable TV. The rest of the house has TVs with Xbox 360s connected via Ethernet. Between Zune, Netflix and our Home Server (and soon Hulu plus) there is no logical reason to be paying for a cable box for those TVs. I am sure the other two will drop soon enough and I’ll be buying a couple more Xboxes.

So where are you? Do you find your use of cable diminishing? Do you already watch Internet based video on your Television? Do you still watch most of it on a laptop or desktop computer? I am curious what everyone’s usage patterns are.

Cable is going to pasture for me pretty soon.

I voiced my displeasure with me AppleTV experience on Twitter and to a few friends this weekend only to be told that it’s not the AppleTV’s fault, it’s the content I chose (Survivor) and not the fault of Apple. Of course one of those friends is an admitted Fanboy and the other is a big fan himself, but it makes me wonder. Having just finished three seasons of Heroes in HD quality on Netflix via Xbox 360 (HDMI) I was shocked to see that Survivor’s video quality was just about on par with YouTube. I wish I could say I am exaggerating or blowing it out of proportion, but I am being quite literal.

Quality sucks, who do I shoot?

So Matt thinks that “It only looks as good as what was delivered to Apple.” Which I get, but that makes me question Apple’s quality control and pricing. I paid $19.99 for this season of Survivors, that’s $1 more than the Seasons we purchased at Fry’s on DVD. So I am paying more money for less quality. Something doesn’t sound right.

So who is responsible? Should Apple provide content quality ratings of some sort? Should they discount substandard quality content? Should I get an asterisk of some point that says “This is <1500k bit rate content and it’s going to look terrible on a larger TV?” I feel like I did not get what I paid for.

One of the things I have noticed with Netflix is even Standard Definition content looks really good. I have watched 30 Rock, Heroes, Dexter, Harper’s Island, not to mention countless movies and documentaries and have yet to come across something that looks as bad as what I have seen so far with AppleTV, and I pay around what this season cost a month to watch whatever I want.

And while I am on my soapbox, a few other questions about your content delivery and media options:

1. Why does everyone love Netflix Watch Now, but have a huge problem with paying a subscription for music ala ZunePass? What’s the difference?
2. How much would you pay per month if everything was available, even new releases?
3. Should the AppleTV be so automatically integrated with iTunes on the Mac? What if I don’t want the video on the AppleTV copied onto my Mac?
4. How important is it to you to be able to get one copy of a content item and use it on any of your devices regardless of brand?
5. If all TV shows were available on Netflix the day after (like Harper’s Island) would you cancel Cable?

These are just some of the questions I am wondering. With Comcast totally screwing over us Media Center users by dropping analog cable and making it all but impossible, without some questionable hackery, to get digital content, I am pretty close to dropping cable tv. If I can get fast, reliable internet from FIOS or Quest, and get the most important channels via Over The Air HD, supplant my watching options with AppleTV, Xbox 360 and Netflix, my need for cable is dropping rapidly.

If you are not following the current trends in Internet Service Providers (ISPs) closely, you might wake up surprised one day. On the tail end of an un-successful, but not over,  fight against net-neutrality, ISPs have decided to take another stab and killing the blistering growth of internet video to save the flailing cable industry.

This time it’s called Metered Bandwidth. With big hitters like Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner on-board and actively testing in markets, I find myself concerned and considering a pre-emptive change to how I get internet access currently.

The problem is simple. Cable companies exist to sell you TV. If you have internet and television through cable, simply examine your bill. If you have something similar to mine you will probably find something like this:

So basically if you count the cable boxes and cable service itself, it accounts for 82% of my already monstrous bill. It’s obvious that they have good reason to be shaking in their boots. With services like Hulu and Netflix providing compelling alternatives at free or close to it ($8.99 for Netflix to stream all you want) it’s a changing world. My father recently sent his cable box back to watch all his basic cable on a Windows Vista Media Center PC and all of his on-demand content on Netflix.

So how do they try to make it up? Let’s look at this AT&T alternative. Your internet fee provides 5GB of bandwidth per month. A single HD quality movie is 7GB. They charge you $1 per Gigabyte when you go over. Let’s look into my mom and dad in this future. They watch a lot of TV. Usually two are on in the house for I would guess 4 hours a day. If both were getting video content online at HD quality, this quickly becomes a problem. If you take the 7GB HD movie, assume it’s two hours long, you can come up to about 3.5GB per hour per TV. So in one evening they could consume 28GB of bandwidth. Extrapolate that for a month, and you come up with something shocking. Do the math, $835 in overage charges.

I may be a cynic, but it sounds like direct approach to try and kill internet delivered video in it’s tracks. The scary part is that the government does not declare internet a utility, so the regulations that were put in place against telephone and cable providers regarding television pricing, do not have any power to protect the consumer.

The end to this horrifying alternate reality is that cable companies protect their dying model, innovation gets crushed, and customers suffer a trifecta of Quality, Value and Choice.

I want to end saying I definitely understand that if they don’t make the money with Cable anymore, they have to come up with an alternate business model. I, for one, do not mind paying more than I pay now for pure internet access. (not more total, more than the internet service portion of my bill) If I was able to get all of my video entertainment online, I would gladly pay $100 a month for fast, reliable and un-metered bandwidth.