I’m not a Boxee user and in truth I don’t really know what Boxee does. But I do know that Boxee is some sort of TV device that uses a signal feed of either over-the-air antenna (OTA) or unencrypted cable-TV (clear QAM). And Boxee as well as many other high-tech and some low-tech setups would be significantly marginalized if the FCC has their way. That’s right, the FCC whose purpose is to serve the people of the United States has somehow been co-opted by the cable companies (Big Cable) and is pushing for a measure to force you to have a cable box at every outlet. (Yes, technically, you could use a CableCard at an outlet instead of a full cable box but to be realistic, cable cards are not going to be mainstream devices. Besides, it is still a device you need to get from Big Cable, so there’s not much difference for this discussion from a full cable box.) Ars Technica has a good write up that summarizes the issues.
In their proposal, near the top of page 3, the FCC states that “77 percent of cable subscribers have at least one digital cable set-top box or retail CableCARD device in their home”. That may be true but ignores the fact that there are likely other outlets in the house that do not have a cable box. It also ignores the fact that it’s very likely that a good portion of that 77 percent isn’t very happy about even having that one cable box in the house. So what’s the percentage of all outlets where a cable box is desired? And even if you assume for a minute that there are no other outlets in those 77 percent of households and that all 77 percent of those households are happy having a cable box, what about the other 23 percent? That’s not a trivial amount of households!!! We aren’t talking about a small isolated group of Americans. Even in the most favorable view of that statistic, the FCC is saying they propose that a nearly quarter of all American cable subscribing households will be mandated to add special equipment rented from the cable company!!!
It was only two and a half years ago that Big Cable started this attack by moving all the channels that they were allowed to off of the “cable ready” channels and onto the digital broadcast spectrum. So as I feared then, it was the opening salvo in the war to fully control every television tuner with a Big Cable provided device. The cable provider makes more money on rental and the cable hardware manufacturer makes money on the sale of the device to the cable provider. So everyone is happy. Except for the consumer. That the FCC is supposed to be watching out for.
I think it’s amazing that the FCC thinks it’s important to protect me from a 30 millisecond view of MIA’s middle finger but doesn’t think it’s important to protect the country from an onslaught of corporate takeover of our television equipment.
Here’s what I think is the best clip from the whole run of Drew Carey’s Improv-a-ganza. Amazing volunteers – where do you find a kid that knows the theme from The Good The Bad and The Ugly!? Go Cooper!
I got a call today with a caller ID of 213.550.3111 saying that I had been selected to take a political survey and if I did the survey, I’d win a free cruise to the Bahamas. Was this one of those pretend surveys that had an ulterior motive? Was it a real survey? And why was I, a Massachusetts resident, of any interest to any survey company? I was too curious to just hang up. So I pushed “1″ to take the survey. First question was about the economy and seemed like a neutrally worded question, so so far so good. Second question was about political parties and it was also neutral. Sill good. Third question was about approval of current president which was still neutrally worded. And then the automated voice thanks me and says “please hold to be connected to a travel reservation specialist for your free cruise to the Bahams”. Three easy questions and I win a free cruise? In a blink, I decided it would have to be a scam and that it must be a clever way to harvest people’s personal information and/or credit card info so I hung up. But I’m curious if anybody else has gotten the same call and how they may have gone or maybe if anyone knows of where the scam is.
I saw this last week after Newt won the SC primary and I’ve been trying to figure out how to distill the brilliance into a quote of the day but I couldn’t come up with it. You have to see the whole clip (at least after about 30 seconds in). (The still image may look stretched because I tweaked the embed layout from Comedy Central to try and get the obnoxious top banner moved off of Jon’s face.)
Wow, that was a decisive victory last night in South Carolina. Hunh. I guess Newt’s populism can really gain traction with some people. I was guessing he’d be a close second but he’s a clear winner instead. I’ve been hoping Newt would keep nipping at Romney’s heels through the next couple of months and then just go away. Since I think the country is on the right track and the Bush 43 mess just takes time to clean up and Obama is doing the best he can with a Boehner led congress, I am hoping for an Obama victory. And the best way to ensure that is to have a weak opponent. And since I’ve been assuming that opponent will be Mitt Romney, the more Romney is attacked now, the less appealing he’ll be in November.
But I had a scary thought this morning. I woke up thinking about the surprise win yesterday and impressed with the impact populism has. I was also a little surprised by how collegial all the candidates sounded. As though they recognized that they needed to be confrontational to win South Carolina but need to switch gears in case they need to work together. And then it hit me: What if the winner is Romney and he picks his former rival Gingrich as his running mate? Romney would pull in the moderates and the rich who want the country run for them while Newt would pull in those drawn by his populism. And that ticket might be tough for Obama to beat. A scary future for our country.
Oh, and before you say that they couldn’t get together because they are rivals, c’mon. First of all we’re talking about Republican politicians which means they are masters at saying something to make their case regardless of the truthiness of it. They’ll have no problem switching from attacking to a love fest (like Perry and Huntsman did when they dropped out and scrubbed their web sites of anti-other-candidate messages) and they’ll make it all about unifying to beat Obama. And that will help sell the populist message even more. Second, we’re talking about Republican politicians which means that their goal is election and not principles (despite what their supposed message has been) so they’ll have no problem shifting again to move towards each other to make peace for the unified goal of power.
The only snag for these two potential lovebirds would be their individual baggage. Romney is so pro-captialism that he’s anti-real-people (companies are not people) and has money everywhere (including in the Cayman Islands) and houses everywhere and yet pays less in taxes percentage-wise than the average low to moderate income guy. Newt may not have literally asked for an “open marriage” but he was probably caught cheating on wife #2 with eventual wife #3 and that’s after leaving wife #1 while she was sick. And Newt is of course the guy who consulted with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while they were in the midst of causing the housing crisis he is against now. So that’s a lot of shared baggage and you could argue the ticket would be better off with a relative unknown without the baggage. Still, the whole relative unknown thing didn’t work out well for McCain/Palin so the GOP may push for something like a Romney/Gingrich thing.
I just saw a request come through on Poopli for a show that I had recorded but not on ReplayTV. I had it recorded on MythTV. So I wondered: could I transfer a show from MythTV to ReplayTV? The answer is yes and here’s how I did it.
When I last wrote about the TV season, it was the end of 2011 season and I was surprised at how a couple of shows had wrapped their season. Now, well into the next season, I thought it was time for another look at Chuck, Hawaii Five-O, Nikita, The Office, and The Good Wife.
Christmas has now passed and the “War on Christmas” will go into hibernation for the next 11 months. But we are in a cycle now where we annually need to choose between being overly politically correct or religiously insensitive. Does it have to be this way? Of course not. I say we should say “Merry Christmas”, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. Like another political hot-button issue, it’s about terminology… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
