[Ran D. St. Clair]

A Brief Aside

Many years ago I had cable TV but didn’t like it. It was basically the same as broadcast TV with a couple of movie channels and some infomercials. It also cost me a substantial monthly fee which felt like a waste. For the last 20 years here in the bay area I put up a TV antenna wherever I lived and received plenty of channels for free. More recently, with the conversion to digital TV the number of channels has effectively doubled, and that’s just counting the ones in English. I never wanted, or felt the need for satellite or cable in all those years, especially at $40 to $60 per month, though I will admit that some programs and series are more and more available only on satellite or cable.

I see many RV’s around with the large dome satellite dishes. Their owners seem rather wealthy and retired in most cases, so perhaps they don’t care about the monthly fees, not to mention the expense of installing the equipment. It seems to work well, at least as well as satellite does most anywhere. The picture quality is quite good, but it still seems to suffer from the “150 channels and nothing on” scenario.

Many years ago I bought my young son a PS1, (Sony Play Station 1), which later became a PS2, and now a PS3. For most of those years they were just gaming stations, and well worth the money for the many hours of entertainment my son enjoyed. I was never into gaming myself, but with the PS3 it became possible to download movies over the internet. The PS3 has Wi-Fi built in, so I added a wireless router to my PC and was ready to go. For about $4.00 I could download a typical movie in standard definition and then watch whatever I wanted. It would take 4 to 6 hours to download with my not so speedy DSL connection, but it was fine. I don’t watch that many movies, and I don’t mind paying for what I actually use, but I don’t like monthly fees.

More recently Netflix got together with Sony and offered a fair portion of their movie library for “movies on demand” through the PS3. They are also available direct to your computer, and now days more and more people are dedicating a PC to their entertainment center, meaning there is now more than one way to watch internet movies on the TV in your living room. When I say, “movies on demand” I mean you pick the movie you want to see and just start watching it. When I say movies I mean TV Series, and all kinds of stuff, not just full length movies.

I still don’t like monthly fees, but for $9.82 per month, including tax, they finally hit my price point. It’s not all perfect. There are some compression artifacts. I have to laugh when first officer Spock’s black hair floats above his head for the blink of an eye when he steps down to the bridge. Mostly it’s very watchable though, and way better than the old analogue days when we watched through snow, crawling ants, and colored shadows.

What I really like is sitting down to watch an hour long TV show and skipping all the commercials. Let me be clear, I don’t skip over the commercials, they just aren’t there. 30 to 45 minutes of TV is perfect with a meal. I sometimes watch a movie in two parts, half with one meal, and half a day later, or whenever I want, because I can. I am no longer tied to their schedule, and if I don’t like the show it costs me nothing to turn it off or find something better.

Not all movies are available via Netflix, and not all of those are available to be viewed instantly. Thousands are, but many more are not. I expect that many more will be available over time, but I can also see where the cable, satellite, and commercial sponsors have got to hate this, and will probably do their best to kill it. There is also the movies by mail option, but that doesn’t work so well for an RV on the road.

All this relates to my Stealth Camper design because I am working hard to have excellent Wi-Fi capability, but not even interested in Satelite. Even if there weren’t movies on demand over the internet I would do the same. The internet is my lifeline to communicate with all of you and many others. I figure that between the internet and broadcast TV for things like local news, I have everything I need.

I think the golden age of satellite and cable are almost over. I say “golden” for the big money made by the satellite and cable providers. I imagine that they will adapt, and you can be sure they will be hitting up your congressman to protect their interests, but the writing is on the wall. Data is data, and economies of scale will drive the cost of data delivery ever lower.

To be continued…