Consumer Affairs today has published Cut the Cable with IPTV. A long and detailed exploration of the online television landscape, it’s actually a pretty good argument for keeping your cable subscription for the time being!
The intro leads you through an exhausting 11 sites you’ll want to go to individually to find archived “catch up” TV in whole episodes.
The article gets going with some intriguing contradictions presented as incisive analysis:
“We did questionnaires with viewers ages 12 to 22 in 10 countries around the world and got the same result. When it comes to content, they unquestionably do not pay. It’s almost like one of the 10 Commandments: Thou shalt not pay,” says [Elroy Jopling, research director for consumer services at Gartner Inc., a leading information technology research company]. “I think time shifting is going to produce so many interesting changes in video because that is something people will put their money down for.”
Consumer Affairs then covers time-shifting, focusing mainly on current offerings (triple-quadruple plays) and the past (VCRs, anyone?), and then moves on through a la carte channel selection and on to the idea of your custom home environment being portable — TV that knows what you want to watch and that will serve that up to you automatically — along with Facebook-style targeted advertising.
These things are each new[ish], but where’s the revolution? Forgive me, but I still see a pay- and advertiser-driven landscape. And a lot of trouble to go around collecting my TV content from a plethora of sources.
Isn’t one of the joys of TV just sitting back and vegging (sp)?
I’d still pay $60 a month to avoid all the trouble. In fact, I do. But that doesn’t dampen my belief in the better options yet to come!
Infighting among strange bedfellows says a lot about future plans: Co-incident with CBS relaunching C|Net-acquired TV.com into a potential rival of Hulu, Hulu pulled its content from the site.
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