Archive for the ‘post-tv’ Category

The Costs of Cutting Cable A Year Later

Monday, November 16th, 2009

This month marks the one year anniversary of our Post-TV experiment and while it is often hard to read Management on these things I am willing to judge it a success. However, there were some surprises in terms of consumption patterns and costs. Below are the numbers in the past year that we have spent at Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix:

Amazon Subscriptions
Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations Volume 6 – $18.90
Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations Volume 7 – $18.90
Deadliest Catch Season 4 – $30.24
Deadliest Catch Season 5 – $13.23
Guns, Germs, & Steel – $5.67
Swords Season 1 – $15.12
Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre World Season 1 – $18.90
Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern Season 4 – $18.90
Out of Egypt Season 1 – $11.34
Mad Men – $24.57
Shark Week 2009 – $11.34
Total – $187.11

iTunes Purchases
It’s the Great Pumpkin – $9.99
A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving – $9.99
A Charlie Brown Christmas – $9.99
Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown – $9.99
Arthur Season 11 – $9.99
Arthur Season 10 – $9.99
Dinosaur Train – $12.99
LazyTown – $17.82
Little Bill – $13.99
Mama Mirabelle’s Home Movies – $6.93
Martha Speaks – $24.99
National Geographic Channel Kids – $6.93
Oswald – $19.99
Sesame Street Vol 1 – $19.99
Sesame Street Vol 2 – $19.99
Sid the Science Kid – $16.97
Smithsonian Kids – $3.97
Super Why! – $9.99
The Adventures of Paddington Bear – $12.87
The Wind In The Willows Season 1 – $10.99
The Wind In The Willows Season 2- $10.99
Wallace and Gromit – $6.88
Wonder Pets – $19.80
WordWorld Season 1 – $10.89
Yo Gabba Gabba Season 2 – $17.91
Total – $324.82

Netflix
12 months @ $18.01/month – $216.12

MLB Live
$35 per year

Grand Total – $763.05

The biggest thing that struck me as I tallied up the numbers for the past year is that the costs of media acquisition are upfront and largely erratic when compared to the predicable subscription costs of cable or satellite as we found out in an effort to obtain programming for Gabi since pulling an over-the-air TV signal was an unmitigated disaster. What we saw in terms of outlay was a steep curve when we gave up on trying to get local programming and sought it on iTunes but after that initial binge purchases dropped off considerably–a little more than half of that iTunes total occurred in April. Amazon, on the other hand, has been relatively smoother with only a slight bump in late spring which oddly coincided with a weekend spent in a hotel with cable programming.

So while the total numbers are eye opening, an average of $60.67/month, I suspect that the next year will see these costs to continue to drop for a number of reasons. The large bump in costs was centered around going with a Plan B to make up for our inability to get a PBS signal over the air. Looking at the receipts I’d argue that our overall purchases are declining at a rapid rate because we have more content than we can watch based on our current media consumption behaviors. Which brings us to the biggest reason of all: we are hardly watching TV. Rather we are listening to music and reading or surfing the Internet, when we do watch TV it is in very focused bursts for a movie or a string of episodes.

Next year, I imagine the average monthly cost to decline by some 30-40% which would see us realize a substantial savings over the cable bill we had shouldered ($125/month for a satellite subscription through Dish and prior to that $145/month for a cable subscription, no Internet, through Comcast). While the savings is great really the biggest benefit that I am gleaning from the experience is a clearer head and a feeling that my free time is more productive.

Life outside the walled garden of subscription programming is just fine.

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30 Days with the Roku Netflix Player

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Roku Netflix Player TopWith the recent inclusion of the Amazon Video on Demand service, and the talk about more services being available this year, this slim black box has gotten a little more indispensable and pulls the curtain back to reveal what life will be like after the cable and satellite companies pass fully into obsolescence.

The Netflix Player (now being re-branded as Digital Video Player to highlight its flexibility) is priced very competitively at $99 USD when compared to the other devices like Vudu and Blockbuster’s OnDemand which really kill their value proposition by charging per rental, the all-you-can-eat model of Netflix encourages you to explore and watch things that you might not normally or to re-watch shows like we do with our daughter–Word World at $1.99, 3 times daily, 7 days a week can add up quickly. Now, Amazon VOD is positioned in a similar way as Vudu and Blockbuster so we really haven’t dipped our toes into their waters just because the idea of “buying” movies that are “stored” on their servers leaves us a little uneasy because that purchase is more like a “lifetime” lease for their service goes away your purchase goes with it. Subscriptions just “feel” like more bang for my buck, I suppose.

Roku Netflix Player FrontArguments aside for rental or subscription, the Netflix Player is fantastic. It is stupid-simple to set up from hooking it up to your TV, updating the firmware, and authorizing it with Netflix and Amazon. In our case, we hooked it up to a 10 year old 19″ TV in our bedroom and it looks and performs great with no lag in playback and a clear crisp picture.

The Netflix experience is much better than we had anticipated with the movies in our queue browsed in a coverflow-like implementation and while that might sound clunky we can easily flip through the some 250 items in our queue with little to no problem. What we would like to see, though, is the ability to make shelves for those titles so that we can quickly scan by genre, keyword, or even alphabetically. Once you find a movie selecting it brings you to a synopsis and the ability to play it either from where you left off or at the beginning and if it is a TV show you can select which episode to watch. On our DSL connection (6 Mbps/768 Kbps) buffering the movie takes a little under a minute but after that there are no hiccups and the picture does not have the same type of blocky pixelation that we often find on our Mac Mini using Silverlight.

What has us excited though are the mysterious 10 new services to make an appearance by years end. Management and I have been speculating about what services are next to come and while YouTube is likely we would love to see Hulu make an appearance. The recent kerfuffle with Boxee could be an argument for or against, one can never tell when it comes to entertainment executives and their whims but Hulu on the Roku would be a coup for Internet delivered entertainment. The more services available to the Roku the better as it might spur more companies to open up to more platforms and let their gardens grow over the walls.

Pros

  • Small set-top box
  • Comfortable remote
  • Easy set-up
  • Responsive navigation
  • Hiccup free viewing

Cons***

  • No search
  • No finding movies outside of queue
  • No sorting by genre or title

Bottom-Line: $99 + $9/month at Netflix is money well spent.

*** This are more cons regarding the implementation of the Netflix service as we really have not felt compelled to explore Amazon’s due to the cost of à la carte viewing.

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Post-TV Opening Thoughts

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

What we are running for a set up…

  • 32″ Westinghouse LCD (SK-32h240s)
  • Wii  (two controllers and nunchucks )
  • 2.1 Logitech speaker set we got from eMusic four years ago for being awesome (that’s what they told us anyway).
  • Mac Mini (1.83GHz, Combo Drive, 1GB RAM, 80GB Primary, 400GB USB)

Our experience…

  • iTunes hates everything and commands all input devices like a jackbooted thug
  • Power settings needed to be tweaked in order to keep the display from sleeping while we watched anything on Netflix or Hulu
  • The keyboard is gorgeous, light, and responsive
  • The mouse pairs fast after being turned on and is very responsive
  • DVD playback is smooth and fast, far better than the Memorex player we were using)
  • Netflix Instant is amazing

In the works…

  • Importing 33000+ song collection
  • Ripping Gabi’s Sesame Street DVD’s so that discs are less likely to get damaged
  • Set up feed reader so we can browse news easily
  • Import our photo collection

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Post-TV Entertainment Center

Friday, November 21st, 2008

So it begins.

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Post-Television First Steps

Monday, November 17th, 2008

We made our decision. This month we are shutting off the satellite service and sending back the equipment.  It will be a strange feeling not having this massive pipe of media content flowing into the house, I grew up with cable television and Management and I have always subscribe to the massive channel packages from the moment we moved in together.  Shutting it all off marks a huge shift for us in how we view entertainment and how we choose to be entertained.

Years ago I took a media studies course as part of my undergraduate degree, it blended rhetorical analysis, social psychology, and communication theory with the goal of examining how people use media and in turn how media uses people.  Media consumption is a two way street, viewers consume and in turn are consumed.  The first lesson of class was looking at the business model of television and I, like many in the class, viewed ourselves as the customer or the target for the networks.  That perception of the relationship could not have been further from the truth.

What I can away with from that class was that I am never the customer, I am always the product, advertisers are the customer and the content created is essentially bait for media companies to fish for viewers.  For years that understanding left me unsettled in the back of my mind and with Gabriella arriving it has surged forward to sit on top of my thoughts.  I don’t like the thought of being a “target” and when I think of my daughter being a “high value target” I am very uncomfortable.

Granted economics, like most everything in this world, is the primary initiator.  The savings we will realize is substantial, nearly $1500/year USD, but there are also the intangibles.  We will control our consumption patterns and hopefully avoid the narcotic trap of “television as ambiance” and in the process raise our daughter to be critical of the messages that swirl about the media-sphere.  My hope is that this decision will make it easier for her to ask those very important questions of “What is being said?”, “Why is it being said?”, “Who is saying it?”, and “How is it being said?”.  My dream for her is that she always questions everything even if sometimes it is only to herself.

We’ll see how the project goes and I’ll be writing about it here, from the challenges of wiring up the living room for a media center to the withdrawl from having television as a one-dimensional companion.  If we are lucky we will learn more about ourselves, each other, and the culture in which we swim.

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