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The Mess that is TV Viewing

January 2, 2010 10:03:37.607

Tim Bray wrote up an excellent summary of the options for watching TV shows on your schedule (as opposed to the network's ideas) - it's applicable across the world, but especially outside the US. Here in the US, if I miss a show and haven't picked it up via one of the DVRs, we have plenty of options: Hulu, iTunes, Netflix - it's probably available somewhere legally.

I spent 2 weeks sharing Tim Bray's pain last year in France - as a traveler a DVR wasn't in the cards, and everything else (save iTunes, and even there, show availability is based on physical borders) just stops working.

This is just insane. It's a legacy of the old system, where shows came over the air on limited bandwidth, and you watched what they had and liked it. Now? With an IP based system, any show that's been released should be available for a fair price - the way it's set up now, the content providers are just driving the technically skilled to consider things like BitTorrent. As Tim wraps it up:

Speaking of functioning markets, watching episodes of a TV series (in the case of Lost, the most expensive ever produced), with no ads, for a low single-digit number of dollars seems like a good deal to me, even though I have in principle bought the right to watch these shows via my monthly TV bill. So that's my choice, given the choice. But if there's nobody who wants to take my money

That's the way a lot of the content/copyright business works right now. You stand there, wallet open, ready to pay someone - only they have everything locked up behind a wall of badly maintained spikes, and keep muttering unintelligible things - none of which involve a way to pay for the content you want access to...

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posted by James Robertson

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