Inside Chris’s Head

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?

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No this is not post encouraging you to start space exploration rather it is to encourage you to start TV exploration on the BBC America channel with the return of the second and final season of the drama “Life on Mars”. With this 8 hour season BBC America promises to wrap up the story of Sam Tyler. Sam Tyler is a English police inspector who gets hit by a car and finds himself in 1973. He is still a police inspector but his native Manchester has changed much since he was a boy in 1973 and the police department has probably under gone some of the biggest changes. So Sam solves crimes, some of which may or may not change the future. All the time he wonders if he really traveled in time or if he is just hallucinating since he has a pretty good idea that in the future he is lying in a hospital bed in a coma. This is not one of those series where you watch it and think, “oh this is just like in…”.

Popularity: 5% [?]

My family and I were fans of the show Traveler which aired this Summer and then was cancelled. Now that it is clear that the show is not going to come back David DiGilio one of the co-executive producers has written on his TV Guide blog what was supposed to have happened on the show. I hope that all the fans of the show who read this… both of them… will find some closure in this information.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Right out of the plot to a Sci-Fi movie comes this story from Peru:

Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a “strange odor,” local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.

Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said.

Granted when this happened on BBC’s new series Torchwood last week a gaseous alien came out of the rock, processed possessed a woman, shagged every man in sight and then turned them to dust when it consumed their energy at sexual climax. The story from Peru did not mention this behavior… yet.

Popularity: 7% [?]

In case you missed the news, the major networks will be using a new mechanism for tracking their ratings this season. Instead of the overnight ratings they will be using “Live plus 3″ which is the ratings for the people who watched when the show came on or who watched it on the DVR in the next 3 days. This is a great step forward towards acknowledging that a number of us watch TV on our schedule now and not on theirs. As I thought about this advance a few thoughts occur to me.

If everyone had DVRs think about how good that would be for the networks. Right now prime-time is 3 hours long and outside that the network assumes no one is watching, but my DVR is watching and would gladly record shows of interest to me. So that makes that time more valuable to the network. Of course I usually fast forward through commercials and that makes the time I watch shows less valuable to the network. But then when there is a good commercial that catches my eye I rewind, watch it again and show it to my family which makes it more valuable. OK, so it would be fair to say that this whole DVR thing complicates the life of the network.

I also noticed that in my family our DVR has shows that are a month old that we plan to get around to watching. So “Live plus 3″ will still not see our activity, even though it is a step in the right direction.

The whole DVR, TV on the internet, TV over ip will make television an interesting industry to watch over the next few years, but I would suspect the networks would appreciate it being a lot more boring.

Popularity: 5% [?]