It is a little known fact that I have not seen a live TV broadcast in my house for a little over 18 months. Like many people, I used to have cable TV—but, unfortunately, never quite managed to enjoy it very much. For one thing, my family’s habits are rather different from your average North American family: for example, we tend to eat rather late at night—a dinner starting at 8PM is not all that strange for us; this means that we miss a lot of programming that we are interested in just because, well, we’re not in front of the TV when it happens to be on (and TV at the table is out of the question).
Then again, my taste (as well as my wife’s) doesn’t seem to mesh too well with the your average Joe’s, either. I despise any form of reality TV, couldn’t care less about sports if my life depended on it, and I absolutely, positively can’t stand commercials—why do I have pay a premium to watch commercials?
Finally, and this was really the nail in the coffin for me, I think that our cable packages are stupid at best, and offensive at worst. For example, my “basic” cable package includes such wonders as the Aboriginal Channel—I have nothing against the fact that such a channel exists (and, in all fairness, they sometimes have better programming than the main networks), but I honestly don’t care. Yet, I have to pay for it in order to get the channels that I actually do want to watch… which, of course, are neatly spread across multiple packages so that, by the time I’ve picked the ones I’m interested in, my bill comes in to well above $100.
When we decided to ditch the cable, I had two fears: first, that we’d have trouble keeping up with the news and, second, that we’d have trouble keeping up with our entertainment. The first problem has been deftly solved by means of the Internet, where news abounds and is delivered to me when I want or when it happens, and not at pre-defined times that some nameless executive has decided in some corporate boardroom.
For the second problem, at first we relied on our trusted library of DVDs—we have a few hundred on hand, and that’s plenty of entertainment—plus a number of digital devices that handle streaming: a PS3 hardwired to a 500GB hard drive, and an Apple TV.
Once you ditch cable and rely on DVDs and streaming, you realize two things: TV channels as we now know them are an incredibly obsolete idea, and that the differences between DVDs and digital (and the insistence of the entertainment industry on physical media and copy protection) is misguided when it comes to technology—really misguided.
Here, in no particular order, are a few random thoughts on TV vs. disc vs. digital.
1. Portability and Durability
Advantage: digital.
DVDs are easy to move around, and almost everyone has a player these days. However, they have two major drawbacks: they are easily damaged, and they are easily lost—particularly when you have kids.
Digital video, on the other hand, is nearly indestructible—not because the devices on which you store are inherently safer (drop a hard drive on the floor,
like I did, and you’ll see how fragile it really is), but because it’s dead easy to back them up—which is something you can’t legally do with a copy-protected DVD.
By the same token, while on a one-on-one basis DVDs are possibly more portable, I can move around my entire digital collection of videos on a hard disk that weighs barely over 400g and fits—very comfortably—in my pocket, or in the pocket of my laptop case. Of course, I need a laptop to make it work… but what about an iPod then? All I need is a set of video cables, and I’m golden.
2. Price
Advantage: depends
Determining the price advantage of digital vs. cable vs. DVDs is difficult, because it depends largely on what you watch—in particular, if your TV habits depend on live coverage (for example, if you watch a lot of sports), then live TV is, for the moment, the only viable alternative, and you’re stuck with cable.
However, if what you watch is available on all three media, it’s a little easier to make a comparison.
A
top-tier package with Rogers costs around $104 a month—that’s $1,250 a year. According to the U.S. Bureau of statistics, the average American spends around 2.77 hours a day watching TV, equal to about 1,011 hours every year. From this, you need to subtract the time you spend watching programming that can be just as easily obtained from the Internet for free, or that you do not want to pay for altogether. Given that the average hour of network programming
contains around 16-18 minutes of commercials, you’re looking at around 47 minutes of commercials—let’s round it up to one hour even to account for the fifteen or so minutes you spend watching the news and the weather (which is probably overly conservative). Thus, your actual annual total goes down to just 646 hours.
This means that, assuming you were an average person with a top-tier package that gives you access to movies, specialty channels, your favourite shows, and so on, you’d pay around $1.93 per hour of entertainment to your cable company—and that’s assuming that all your TV-watching time comes from your cable company—no occasional rental, no DVDs, and so on.
How does that compare to legally downloaded content? On the surface, poorly—TV shows on iTunes are relatively expensive (a full season of LOST, for example, costs $38CAD, or $2.26 per hour of programming in standard definition, or a whopping $3.39 per hour in HD), while movies can be rented for around $6 each, or around $3 per programming hour).
However, there is a big assumption in both these calculations: that each hour of programming you watch is original. In fact, if you happen to watch the same show twice, its actual cost on cable increases (since you’re paying for the same programming more than once), while it might decreases on digital, since you pay for much of the content, like TV shows and purchased movies, only once.
What’s more, digital gives you exactly what you want, when you want it. Most cable providers now have digital on-demand programming, but at least some of it is on a pay basis—that’s right, because they’re not charging you enough already—and this lacks a clear advantage of digital: someone else gets to decide what you can, and cannot watch, at any given time.
3. Convenience
Advantage: digital
Streaming has a clear advantage here: there are no trips to the video store, no schedule but your own, and no programming but the one you want.
TV has more choice on paper, but, for some reason, anything I’m interested in never seems to be on. Some of limitations of digital are completely artificial, too—there is no good technical reason why TV shows must come out on iTunes after they’ve been aired on TV, or why some shows are not available at all other than content owners being a little out of touch with reality.
4. Openness and Easy of Use
Advantage: pirates
None of the “legal” platforms has any semblance to openness. DVDs and Blu-Ray discs are copy-protected, which is a true masterpiece of corporate douchebaggery: can’t copy, can’t back up, can’t break the protection to do either of the above. If your disc breaks, you’ve got to buy another one—just like when your car blows a tire, you have to buy a new car. Makes perfect business sense to me—in fact, I’m going to write Toyota that they should hire some of their executives from the entertainment industry.
Many digital players are nothing short of ridiculous: the PS3 has the smallest selection of codecs I have ever seen on a digital device (as well as the worst menu system ever designed by man)—second only to the Apple TV, which plays… one format, and only if you stream it from approved software. Neither can be legally modified to support more content—either Apple or Sony install it, or you’re out of luck.
It’s no surprise that people copy movies “illegally”—it’s the quickest and most convenient way to get exactly what you want. It also happens to be the cheapest (at least if you don’t mind waiting for hours while your torrent downloads), but only because oftentimes there is no reasonable alternative that doesn’t require relinquishing some very basic freedoms.
Consider this: until a couple of months ago, my options for watching a top-rated show like, say, LOST were:
- Get cable: $50/month, watch when the Canadian broadcaster wants, or $100/month on-demand or for premium channels like HBO
- Wait until the season is over and buy the DVDs: around $65CAD, but only if you have a Blu-Ray player (that’s another $200-400), not to mention that, by then, everybody else knows exactly what happens to every character except you
- Pirate the movie, and get 720p ready the morning after the broadcast for free
I don’t know about you, but Option 3 is difficult to resist—you get the most convenience for the least cost. Obviously, somebody simply thinks that it’s easier to sue the pants off of everybody instead of actually using some of their money to come up with a viable business model.
Over the last couple of months, iTunes has slowly improved here in Canada, and now I can get my hands on LOST episodes in 1080p the day after they’re aired at a slightly lower price than the Blu-Ray discs. Although my reward for saving the publisher the cost of printing and shipping three or four times the number of discs they’re actually ever going to sell is a meager discount coupled with the immediate loss of all bonus material, I at least get to watch the show reasonably close to the air date, in full HD and without the hassle of trolling pirate sites and waiting for someone to kindly post the right torrent.
Still, iTunes manages to fail from time to time. For example, Stargate Atlantis episodes used to come out on a Monday (because they’re broadcast on that day here in Canada), whereas they are released on TV in the States the previous Friday. That’s maddening—not because my life depends on being able to watch a particular show at a particular time, but because it makes no sense, from either a technical or a business perspective, for iTunes to follow the Canadian schedule—handicapping one channel rather than fixing the other seems a little ass-backwards to me.
Other than these occasional hiccups, iTunes + Apple TV is my current favourite. It is certainly not an open system, but it functions in a completely seamless way and gives me access to pretty much all the content I want, although importing my own still requires transcoding and could require ripping.