Knowing I would be stuck in the living room for a long time, I set about to work on the key piece of survival equipment: the entertainment center. It was in desperate need of updating, for sure. I had a TV that was purchased in about 1997. It was so old that it only had one input: a coax cable connector. So everything I wanted to see on my TV (DVD, video game, cable) had to run through an old VCR that had coax output. Since TV watching was suddenly going to become a much bigger part of my life, it was time to update my living room electronics.
I had basically skipped over several technology revolutions in TV watching. I had never had a Tivo, Blu Ray, a flat panel TV, or any flavor of HDTV. While that may be kind of sad from a techno-lust point of view, it was great now, because it meant I would gain a gigantic leap in entertainment performance for a relatively small sum of money.
Because I was always either working late, climbing, biking or whatnot, I never watched TV during normal viewing hours. I had gotten used to watching TV shows on dvd or downloading and watching them on my computer; usually watching whole seasons that way in few days when it was rainy or I was sick. Since I'm way too impatient to wait a week to see what happens on the next episode, this was great.
Then I got an iPhone, and started using iTunes to download TV shows to watch while flying. Then my Xbox got Netflix online. All the stuff I wanted to watch was becoming rapidly available online. Then one day my brother, a much more serious movie and TV connoisseur, told me he had ditched his cable. He had netflix, and Hulu, and iTunes. He just didn't watch it much anymore. I didn't, either.
And then I read this article in the NY Times.
And then I found out I needed hip surgery, with the associated long recovery time on the couch.
It pretty much all came together. I needed better TV. I could ditch cable and just watch stuff on the internet, with a computer hooked up to my TV. The economics worked out great, too: I was paying $145 per month for cable plus internet. If I just had internet, I could save about $100 per month. In one year, that's $1200 to spend on the gear to build a nicer entertainment center. Integrate over two years, and it's $2400. Integrate over my life and...okay, best not to get carried away.
My expedition partner, Anne, was totally on board with this. But careful research was in order. We had a lot of different formats of entertainment purchased already, and our system had to play them all. We also wanted to be able to control it all a remote, while sitting on the couch. This was a little tricky. If you're using a mouse and keyboard, you can switch from Windows Media Center to iTunes, or activate Boxee or Hulu Desktop or whatever. The people in the NY Times article had given up and bought a fancy remote mouse to control everything. But I was having none of that.
So, what obviously would be best was one program that worked with a remote and could launch everything. Mac? PC? Linux? One of the many entertainment boxes suddenly appearing at Frys? Every option I looked at had problems. One of the biggest sticking points was iTunes. Apple's damn proprietary format would rarely play anywhere else but on iTunes. One of the best ever media center programs, XBMC, used to handle it, but couldn't anymore. This bummed me out, big time, because I had seen XBMC in action on a friend's TV and loved it. It handled everything but iTunes now. Ooh. So close!
And then, Anne's father showed her the thing he had. It was an application called "Plex," it worked on the Mac, and it could seemingly do it all. It could even launch FrontRow, so you could navigate your iTunes videos, and then pop back to watch other formats, and Hulu, and Boxee, all with a remote. Once I tried it out, it all made sense: Plex is XBMC. It's a version ported to the Mac, using the same Python code background, skins, etc.
Plus, it has ready-made apps to watch all the major cable news shows, comedy central, NBC, Hulu, Netflix, Boxee, NPR, PBS, BBC, and God only knows what else. You can control it with an Apple Remote (which is pretty stylish), the Harmony remote, or (and this immediately charmed Anne) via an app on your iPhone.
So now I have a little Mac Mini hooked up to a nice new TV. We ditched our cable, and discovered that Comcast will actually pay you $12 per month to keep the lower 32 channels. That's right; it's $12 more expensive to have only internet.
In the last week we've watched the latest episodes of Big Love, a couple of seasons of Dexter, Mythbusters, Top Gear, and, thanks to Netflix online, all kinds of movies and old TV shows. I've got the current season of House queued up and ready to go as soon as I finish this post.
None of it via our local cable company.
TV as we know it is going away soon. Companies are going to freak out and maybe go out of business. But me? I used to never watch TV. This new, on-demand, a la carte way of watching just what I want is perfect for me. The old joke about "a thousand channels and nothing's on" simply isn't true for me anymore.
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