I’ve been using media center PCs at home for over a year now, all the time wondering at what point I’d be brave enough to cancel my satellite TV subscription.
Over the last couple of years the breadth and depth of online entertainment available has exploded – the Netflix Watch Instantly service is fantastic, there’s Hulu and the broadcast networks’ own sites like abc.go.com, there’s iTunes, Amazon and Blockbuster where you can instantly rent or buy almost any movie you want. In the UK the online TV services from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are all outstanding. You choose what you want, and you watch it on demand when you want.
And the hardware gets cheaper and cheaper – a basic Windows 7 media center PC is now around $500, last year I put a $70 Bluray drive into one of my machines and finally I’ve got around to hooking up a $40 digital antenna to the TV tuner built into our main PC. The last step gives free HD access to all the broadcast network channels over the air and turns the PC into a DVR. Free HD TiVo.
True, I did watch a lot of the recent Australian Open Tennis using my Dish (Satellite) DVR, but the ESPN 360 service online (which is just phenomenal) provided live and on demand access to every match too. Not HD, but still great quality pictures, even projected onto a six foot wide screen.
So what does that leave?
There is some stuff on the cable-only channels I can’t get online, but not a great deal that I actually watch (or want to). There’s some stuff online which is only SD not HD, but a lot of that doesn’t really benefit much from HD (Stephen Colbert is just as funny in 480p resolution v 720p).
The vast majority of what I want to watch is available online or free over the air, and by contrast most of what I want to watch is NOT available on cable, or at least not on demand. And there’s more content online than you can ever possibly watch.
So why am I still paying $100 a month for cable TV?
And why are you, when for about 6 months of subscriptions you could own a media center PC instead?
I think there are two three key factors here – the first is inertia. It’s a hassle to get around to replacing cable boxes with antennas and media PCs. Plus even if it’s cheaper in less than a year, it’s an up front cash outlay on hardware. So you don’t get around to it, and you stick with what you’ve got and what you know.
The second is the fact that the PC isn’t designed to be driven with a remote control on a TV screen, which makes doing it something of a pain in the neck. I have a remote, and a mouse, and a keyboard sitting on our living room couch to drive the PC. Not ideal. The networks are counting on this stopping us all cutting the cable in a big way. Look what happened to Boxee when they tried to make the PC a friendlier thing to watch TV on.
The third and final factor is psychological – cable is a security blanket. It’s easy to use, it’s reliable, you can count on stuff being available which might not be online. But the more the weeks go by without us watching anything on our Dish DVR, the more I feel my psychological addiction to pay TV is waning. We’ve got two satellite boxes in our house – one we barely use, and the other I honestly wouldn’t know if it had stopped working three months ago.
Very soon now, I’m going to cut that cable, I really am …