I have been trying to figure out what the video setup of the living room of the future is (or at least of my future) and a new discovery on ABC.com makes me wonder if it is time to ditch my television completely.

But let’s back up a bit first. My current setup did not used to seem quite so dated. I have a big screen tube style TV (the largest tube from back when my company went public) connected to the DirecTV box with (their brain dead version of) TiVo. Flat screen Tvs have now come down in price to the point that I am willing to buy one, but if I get an HD TV then I need to get a new DirecTV and this is where things get complicated.

• I love the TiVo but because I have the DirecTV (brain dead) version of TiVo I can’t copy shows off to put on my laptop or iPod to use when I workout. I could buy the expensive HD version but it still does not have all the TV functionality I want. And frankly DirecTV is fine but I am more loyal to the TiVo than to them.
• I could switch to cable (ComCast) and that would even allow me to change my DSL line to cable. Given how my DSL line with AT&T is less reliable than my old DSL line and also screws up with our phone line (the old line was a separate line) that is a plus. But ComCast’s own TiVo box is still not in my area and it sounds like they also have screwed up a good solution.
• I could switch to cable and get a new TiVo box that would work with cable cards to connect to the cable network. This would be a more acceptable solution but also is the most costly per month.

All of those options are more expensive than doing nothing and not appealing enough that I have made the switch yet.

Getting back to last night, I was catching up on Lost because I had only watched the first episode of the season and my TiVo was getting full. I watched a couple episodes on my TV and I watched a couple of episodes on ABC.com. I have previously used ABC.com and find it more than adequate for the task. I can’t fast forward through the commercials but they only give me two and a half minutes or so for a show instead of 20 minutes on broadcast. That seems to me to be a fare trade. I would not be surprised if this was also more valuable for them as I can recall (unaided brand recognition) that I was watching ads for Toyotas Tacoma (do they know that they named a car after the city in the U.S. with the highest suicide rates?) and for Starwood resorts.

What I did not realize until last night is that Lost has two different versions of Lost on ABC.com. About a week after they release a show they release an enhanced version of the show which is annotated like a show from Popup Video. As the show goes along they explain that the color light Desmond is seeing is like the color of the light from back in season 2 when the hatch blew up. Sure it was distracting, but it was also cool and it was something that ABC could do because this show was being distributed on the Internet. Having a second version of the show that some people will love and some will hate would just split their audience on network TV so they would never do it. It would use up another precious time slot on the schedule (of course they could air it late it night when TiVo could find it but the cost they would have to pay the studio and the fact that they don’t control the affiliates would get in the way). On the Internet that show is additive for them.

So what if my next “Television” is a computer. Are we there yet? I don’t think I can get all of the shows I watch through any one legal method and legal is a requirement for me. Shows I watch on BBC America don’t seem to be on the web yet. I could buy shows on iTunes although the crossover for when the shows are more expensive than a $50 cable bill would be 25 shows and I think I watch more than that.

My todo list:

• Are all my shows on line somewhere
• Is my cable (satellite) bill really only $50? (Always marry an smart woman with an MBA if you can so you don’t have to pay the bills.)

Is MLB Baseball the only thing keeping me attached to broadcast television?

Popularity: 26% [?]

I have blogged about my experiences with Twitter before. I realized recently that these posts document my journey from a twitter skeptic to a twitter addict.

• Twittervision - People I don’t know telling me things I don’t care about
• Microblogging with Twitter and Jaiku
• My Favorite Quotes - Confessions of a Twitter Lurker
• Notes from the 2007 PNME (Podcast and New Media Expo)
• Twitter and TwitterPod
• Living with CPA (Continuous Partial Attention)
• Hope vs What?

There are a number of different ways that people use the microblogging service that is Twitter.com and there is some contention about what is the “correct” way to use it. Merlin Mann (who made my list of favorite twitter posters in: My Favorite Quotes - Confessions of a Twitter Lurker) has argued that twitter is poetry. The 140 character updates that one is limited to in twitter are a form of haiku.

But I find more and more form me personally twitter is more like digg.com. It is a place where I learn interesting stories from interesting people. I notice that I gravitate to some of the people I follow who have an interesting story to tell me. I still use RSS feeds to track interesting blogs but I find that I only check my RSS reader every other day or so now, because I have already read the best stories via twitter.

Follow Chris Christensen at http://twitter.com/chris2x

Popularity: 16% [?]

I finally got around to reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine. If you are not familiar with the “long Tail” concept (which seems unlikely) the basic idea is that while you can make a lot of money selling hit movies, music, books, etc, you can also make a surprising amount of money selling a little of a lot of less popular movies, songs, books, etc.

Amazon.com has been one of the biggest poster children of the Long Tail effect. As they started their business they carried many more books than it was possible to carry in the local Barnes and Noble. Both Amazon and the local book store would carry the latest New York Times best sellers but Amazon would also carry books that were not economically viable in a local store. They might only sell 100 copies of one book a year, but they might have a million books that they sell 100 copies of. The long tail is a graph of a demand curve.

I have been putting off reading this book not because I thought the idea was uninteresting or unimportant but because I had not grasped the depth of the idea and just how much more there was to glean from this simple idea. Anderson no only explains how Amazon.com is a natural progression from previous long tail ideas like the Sears & Roebuck catalog but also how the long tail is not one demand curve but the some of a larger number of niche demand curves. This is made most obvious as he analyzes how the music business sells fewer “hit” Cds any more but has numerous niche hits and an amazing variety of niches. Part of what is driving the long tail is the ability to search and find products of interest.

Anderson’s book should be a must read for anyone who is interested in business or working in a business that is effected by the change in demand curves, which is just about everyone. It is a well-researched and insightful book about a topic that was deeper that I realized.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Today is the last day in My Oovoo Day, which might more accurately been named My Oovoo Couple of Weeks. What is Oovoo? Does the post office deliver mail on My Oovoo Day?

Oovoo is a new video chatting application that is available for Mac and Windows. It allows up to 6 people to have a video chat at the same time in a display that has been compared (by people like me who watched too much TV in their formative years) to the opening credits of Brady Bunch or the grid for Hollywood Squares.

My Oovoo Day was a cleaver marketing strategy to get promotional buzz for the software. The organizers of My Oovoo Day gathered a number of popular bloggers and podcasters and arranged for them to hold a series of chats. You could then sign up for one of up to 5 slots for each chat. As expected the bloggers and podcasters promoted the day. I signed up to chat with John Wall of Marketing Over Coffee, CC Chapman from Managing the Grey (and Accident Hash) and Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation. Because of problems with the My Oovoo Day event, I was only able to get into the chat with John Wall (the email confirmation apparently got eaten by my spam filter and you could neither cancel a registration nor register again to chat with the same person) but these were independent of the Oovoo software.

The event itself was interesting. I had not chatted with John before. The software was still pretty green. I was using a Mac and had to do an update to a new version on the day of the even before anyone could hear me. I crashed at least once so this still seems like Beta software. The audio worked well. The video did not keep up but that seemed to depend on the bandwidth of each user.

Bottom line, Oovoo is worth looking at for a small group video chat. The idea of doing an event like My Ooovoo Day is also worth looking at as a model of how to promote a new product, but… it would be better to wait until the product was a little more ready for prime time.

Popularity: 16% [?]

MacWorld is in San Francisco this week and I had a chance to go up for a Geek Brief meetup this evening. It is on days like today that I appreciate that I have an EVDO card for my laptop. For those of you not familiar with EVDO it gives me an internet connection through the cell system even when traveling, as I am now, on CalTrain between San Francisco and San Jose. So I have been chatting with a good friend from high school for the last 10 minutes while riding past Redwood City and now I am blogging as I pass Menlo Park.

I have even uploaded podcasts via an EVDO connection before. Upload speeds are much slower than download. Once it took me nearly an hour to upload a 35 minute podcast. But when you consider that I was in a car on highway 101 and stayed connected to my companies VPN for that hour even though I was traveling 65 MPH, that’s not half bad.

Certainly there are faster connections available, but having a connection that is more ubiquitous than Wi-Fi is a very nice thing. On the MacWorld show floor there is free wi-fi, but with so many iPhones and MacBooks you are luck to get a decent connection. Now if I only had a MacBook Air and 5 hours of battery life. Fortunately, CalTrain has power outlets.

Popularity: 10% [?]