The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘cable’

I’ll just come out and say it.

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PSA: Use your computer’s SPDIF connection if it has one

Initially I was like, “Why am I writing about a USB cable ?” Then I read the little description and was like, “Oh, neat.” Yes, I used the word “neat” like a schoolgirl in 1954. Anyhow, the cable blocks data synchronization. Why would you ever want that

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Don’t you dare sync, Mr. USB cable

Am I the only one who finds large-scale miniatures slightly ironic? If anyone else does, they obviously don’t find them ironic enough to stop making them. The Seoul Museum of History just finished up a full-city recreation that takes up a whopping 317.29-square meters.

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Seoul, Korea at a 1:1500 scale

Today HBO announced it will be making its movies and TV Shows available on the Web to subscribers through HBO Go, which up until now has been in private beta. HBO Go is part of the cable industry’s TV Everywhere strategy to make TV content available online to paying subscribers. It contains 600 hours of movies and TV shows which can be streamed live and even in HD. HBO Go is available first to Verizon FIOS subscribers. Since I am a Verizon FIOS customer, I logged into HBO Go this morning and checked it out. Below are my initial impressions and screenshots.

The videos play decently and you can watch in HD, but if I wasn’t already paying for HBO I certainly wouldn’t pay for access to this site. The choice of shows and movies is just not that great. You can watch every episode of The Wire, and the current season of The Sopranos, but not one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You get a lot more in your cable subscription, especially if you get multiple HBO channels. The on-demand option is great, but essentially HBO Go is competing with much broader array of choices on the TV which can also be made on-demand through a DVR. There are some movies like The Watchmen and Taken, which I think I’ve already seen three times each this month on TV, and a spattering of older archived movies like Canadian Bacon, but for the most part the selection is worse than what you get on Netflix via its streaming option. I’m not sure I want to see The Chumscrubber in HD.

The site itself is well-designed, image heavy with lots of entry points. You are greeted with a slideshow view of ten shows and movies on heavy rotation, including the movie Taken, HBO Series Big Love and The Wire, and a Dennis Miller special. If you have HBO, you can’t really avoid any of these shows, so nothing special there except that you can stream it anywhere on your laptop. Tabs across the top allow you to explore deeper into movies, series, comedy, sports, documentaries, and “late night” (aka, HBO’s hard-hitting sex documentary series like Real Sex).

For each series, you can choose any episode for at least one season, but some shows are missing. You can also create a watchlist to watch shows later. When I was clicking through the site, the streaming quality was great, but when I tried to switch to another show or movie the audio to Canadian Bacon kept playing in the background.

Next weekend Peyton Manning will lead the Colts to a victory over the New Orleans Saints in Super Bowl XLIV. Hot new commercials will run and there will be remembrances a-plenty about Katrina. Retailers are hoping that you witness all this on a brand new HDTV.

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The 6 rules of shopping for an HDTV this Super Bowl season

Strikeforce will air, for free, an MMA fight on the EA Sports MMA Web site this Saturday.

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EA to broadcast Strikeforce fight on EA Sports MMA Web site on Saturday

Comcast is in discussions with partners to offer a music streaming service to its customers as an à la carte offering, we’ve heard from multiple sources. For an additional monthly charge of $5 or more, users will be able to stream on demand music online via a website and on their TV via their cable box.

For the last 18 months a Danish ISP called TDC has been offering customers in that country the ability to stream music online as part of their basic ISP packages ranging from $47 to $65 per month. From what we’ve heard from our friends in Denmark, the service is very popular.

The Comcast service would offer users the ability to stream music without any additional charges. Services like MySpace Music, Spotify and MOG (and the late iMeem) offer similar services today, but not through the cable box.

In the past we’ve said that the music industry’s last stand will be a music tax, and they’ll aim for the ISP’s when they finally try to convince governments to do it. Comcast’s planned service isn’t a music tax, and presumably it will be an optional add on to normal Comcast ISP and cable TV services. Still, I can see a time in the not too distant future that we’re all paying $5/month for music via our ISPs. Whether we choose to or not.

Here’s a selection of yesterday’s stories: DIY: Build your own vacuum tube Tesla coil Someone obviously wants the crowd-developed Cable Caps, but I don’t Forget the whack-jobs, the NASA photos don’t show trees Finally! USB-powered latte foamer Disgusting: The GUMMI-X toy kit is an edible insect maker

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Daily Crunch: Coffee on Mars Edition

The cable companies suck. All of them. Some suck less than others. But they all suck. We need someone to whip them into shape. And that someone may be Apple.

Apple may be on the verge of gaining two key television network agreements, according to The Wall Street Journal. Specifically, CBS and Walt Disney (which runs ABC) are said to be considering a proposal by Apple to offer a subscription-based TV service over the Internet. Presumably, this would work through iTunes like all of Apple-based content, but also presumably it would work over Apple’s Apple TV device (though maybe a new version of it) to bring this content into the living room, where people are used to consuming it. Simply put: This could be huge.

But “could” is the keyword. Just as Apple transformed the music industry in the earlier part of this decade thanks to the iTunes/iPod combination, and the mobile industry thanks to the iPhone, a device that offered all the television content over the Internet could force the cable companies to stop sucking. Of course, Apple already offers a ton of television content over iTunes, but there are a few big problems. First and foremost, you have to buy all of this content. I don’t know about you, but I have no desire to buy 99% of the television shows I watch. I would much rather pay a fraction of the purchase cost to “rent” them, as it were, for a time being. iTunes currently has no such option — it’s all or nothing.

And buying this content has another very real downside: You need enough storage space to keep it all. Seeing as some HD TV show seasons are 50 GB in size, this is an untenable model until Apple moves iTunes to the cloud (which it will do, eventually).

Another problem for Apple is that the Apple TV device has not yet proven to be a hit. But this is just as much Apple’s fault as anyone else’s. No less than Steve Jobs has said time and time again that the Apple TV remains a “hobby” and the “fourth leg” of a stool that doesn’t yet need a fourth leg. Apple could have done a number of things to help the Apple TV, such as opening it up to the Internet for use with Hulu and other services. But it hasn’t done that, instead opting to use it to move iTunes content. And it’s actually quite good at that, provided iTunes has what you’re looking for and again, you don’t mind paying for TV shows. A recent firmware update to the device, also made the UI much more usable for scanning a lot of content.

But the Apple TV, which sells for $229, could be a hit in a hurry if Apple offered its own television subscription service that allowed you to bypass the cable companies. Just think about it: Most people pay in excess of $50 a month (and some much more) to the cable companies. For what? Mostly for a bunch of crap they don’t want and will never watch (nor would they even have time to). The problem is that the cable companies have refused to move towards an a-la-carte offering, even though there is a clear demand for it. (It’s partially the TV networks fault too since they like to package their cable channels when giving them to the cable companies.) Apple could do that. And I would bet that is the plan. They may have to start out small with just one or two networks, but if it’s proven to work, eventually they would get more on board and people could start canceling their rip-off cable packages.

I did it myself last year. I cancelled all but the most basic cable and just used my Apple TV and things like Hulu to get all my content. It was much easier than I imagined it would be. Did I miss cable? Not one bit.

But I realize that not everyone is ready for that yet. But that’s why Apple’s role is crucial here. They have a proven track record of taking new ideas and technologies that seem complicated for the average consumer and making them appealing.

The networks are likely to play hardball with Apple though. They’ve all seen what happened to their brethren in the music industry when Apple came on board (they got bullied, but possibly also saved). According to the WSJ report, Apple’s proposal to the TV industry has already changed several times. One deal is said to be a $30-a-month package to consumers that would be a “best of television” package that included several shows from several networks, and more importantly, no commercials, according to the report. Not surprisingly, not everyone liked that idea.

Another part of the report has Apple paying $2 to $4 a month to the major networks per monthly subscriber, and $1 to $2 for a cable subscriber. This is more than a lot of these guys get from their current distribution deals. But Apple would also likely put costs on top of that so they make money too — though it might not be all that much. Remember, Apple doesn’t make that much money from iTunes, instead it’s a driver of iPod sales, and now iPhone sales. The same could be true with this model and the Apple TV.

While everyone is busy focusing on Apple’s tablet device, this could actually be the hot thing to watch for from Apple in early 2010. The report says Apple was hoping to launch this service in March, but that could be delayed, obviously, as the networks fight about why they should or shouldn’t join this venture.

There are at least a dozen headaches Apple would likely have to deal with to get the TV networks on board with this, but Apple’s close ties to Disney (which counts Steve Jobs as its largest shareholder) could help. While it may be just a pipe dream for now, I, for one, hope they’re able to blow up the cable industry. For too long we’ve put up with their sub-par service, their crap hardware, and their rip-off offerings. A change of the channel would do us all good.

[photo: flickr/rickremington]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Short Version: A solidly-built iPhone car dock whose unique, no-batteries-required sound amplification system actually works fairly well provided you get your phone’s microphone and speaker lined up correctly.

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Review: Kensington Car Mount with Sound Amplified Cradle for iPhone