The time has come to pull the plug on cable, at least as far as television is concerned. Not only is digital cable ridiculously expensive, about $80 a month here in Texas, but also absolutely obsolete. And here is why: First, just about all of the popular sitcoms are now available on the web, and can be found on the appropriate network’s home page. Sure, they are posted a couple of days after the show is first broadcasted on live TV, but unless your purpose in life is to discuss the latest episode over lunch the next days, this should not be much of an issue. The quality is also decent enough so that a laptop connected to a large-screen television will do just fine. So what about other channels such as National Geographic or the Discovery Channel, which I actually would not mind paying for if they were available a la carte? Well, as discussed in a previous post, plenty of interesting content from music that spans the globe, to dedicated channels on nature, space exploration, and more - all can be found on Joost. A little more than a couple of months ago Joost finally emerged from restricted beta, so now everyone can use the service and enjoy all these channels for free. The feed quality is not HD by any means, and there are occasional hiccups in the service’s peer-to-peer technology, but the content selection is superb, the interface is simple, and once agai
n the picture looks ok on a large-screen TV. Now that sitcoms and random show are taken care of, how about movies? Well, I’ve had Netflix for a while now, and with their ever increasing collection of movies that can be directly streamed over the internet, in addition to their proven DVD mail-delivery system, I don’t remember the last time when I did not have a movie to watch when I was craving one. The quality of the video stream from Netflix is also very good, quite possible better than the streams from any of the TV networks. Thus, what is left are sporting events. Once again I’m mostly in luck here. Major tennis tournaments offer on-line passes that can be purchased to watch most of the matches directly over the internet, and the same is true for major soccer sporting events such as the world-cup or the euro-cup. Most of these passes are significantly cheaper than a monthly cable subscription and offer a lot more flexibility in term of being able to chose what match one wants to watch. My only dilemma so far is that at the present none of the Formula 1 content is available on the net – hopefully the Formula 1 leadership will wise up soon and follow some of the other major sports in moving broadcast to the net as well. In the mean time I will simply have to hit my gym more often and catch F1 racing while working out – which is probably better for me anyhow in the long term!
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