Television/Cable/BitTorrent
September 29, 2005: Well, the Veronica Mars season premiere was last night and unfortunately I couldn't watch it (that's bad) because I was out on a date (that's good). In the past, I would have Tivoed it, but since I've moved back to my house I no longer have cable or satellite. I've been debating whether or not to pay the 60 or 70 bucks a month for hundreds of channels of crap (that's bad) and I think my mind just got made up (that's good). You see, even though I can only get like 4 channels via the airwaves (that's bad), I took a quick look for the show I missed this morning (the next day!) and there it was all patiently waiting for me (that's good). An hour or so later (I didn't notice because it was downloading in the background) and there it is on my desktop. So, Comcast, DirecTV, Tivo, et all: Screw you guys, I'm going home (and watching what I want when I want). A side note to the above mentioned companies: I'd happily pay let's say $25/month for a box that sat by my TV and gave me a nice interface onto all those shows out there on BitTorrent. You'd have to do some work to make sure the files were high quality, etc, but since you have the originals that shouldn't be too hard. Maybe there'd be a cap on how many I could download. Heck, with TV I'd even be willing to submit to relatively stringent DRM since I have no real desire to "own" the shows outright.