The Future Is Now

"The future is now! Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone and computer. You'll be able to visit the Louvre on one channel, or watch female wrestling on another. You can do your shopping at home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend from Vietnam. There's no end to the possibilities!"
-Chip Douglas aka The Cable Guy

First of all, I'll never miss an opportunity to say how much I love the cable guy. But, also it's amazing how well that quote actually fits in with the tone of this post. That movie came out in 1996 which is long before all of those things were entirely feasible, yet it was clear that every one of them was going to come true. Interesting. Anyhow, I read this article a few days ago about a guy who cancelled (for the record, I've decided that I'm going to spell cancelled with two L's from now on. I really don't like this one L spelling.)his cable TV service because he's able to use his XBox along with a couple other devices to watch all of his TV shows and play video games and surf the web and stream movies through Netflix. This guy is my hero. I mean, I guess I knew it was theoretically possible to hook this up and cancel your cable all together and not have to deal with absolutely terrible service that they provide, but this guy just went out and did it. He's a revolutionary.

Reading this article inspired me to change my Netflix subscription to the unlimited plan so I can run it through my PS3. In order to run it you have to get some sort of disc to put in the Playstation, which should arrive today, so I can't tell you yet whether it works well or not. But I will say that I have started to watch a lot of TV online. I have been watching Heroes online because, for some reason, I like it better that way. I have watched episodes of Lost online after having inadvertently missed one on my DVR somehow. The same is true of a Modern Family episode that I missed earlier this year. (PS - If you're not yet watching Modern Family, then stop reading this post and go to the ABC website and start watching it right now. I guarantee that Modern Family is more entertaining than the remainder of this post.) Additionally, this Netflix thing streaming through the PS3 is a fairly recent turn of events.

When I first got the PS3 the Playstation Network was essentially a small scale operation. I mean the scale of it must have been huge, but the scope of it was pretty narrow. It was basically just for playing video games online against other people. Recently when I updated to the new operating system a whole new world opened up. The new Playstation Network is an incredible thing. They've integrated movies and TV Shows and obviously you can still do the video games. You can do the Netflix thing and obviously also just browse the web. I'm uncertain as to the current state of their web browser, but in the past I know that it didn't really work properly with a lot of websites. That may have also changed with the recent upgrade of the network, but I don't know for sure.

Anyway, the one bad thing about cancelling your cable subscription is that you can't watch any live sports. This, for me, is a dealbreaker. There's no way I can go without watching the Mets, Yankees, Knicks, Giants, and Jets. Also the Sunday and Monday night football games and also the occasional interesting NBA game. At the same time, Time Warner Cable and the Fox Network are both grandstanding now about how that network may be removed completely from the cable system. If that happens, then we'll lose NFL football on Sundays. Whatever ass clowns are running Time Warner need to die immediately. Whoever is deciding to let the Fox Network go is probably the same gie who decided to take a perfect DVR system and replace it with an absolutely terrible DVR system.

Anyway, if they can work out that live sports thing, I will be among the first people to completely cancel my cable service and go entirely online. Something tells me that's going to be difficult, however.

Time Warner Cable Sucks

A few of us were discussing this over email the other day, and it merits discussion in this larger forum.

First, a little background. Cable, phone and Internet are all packaged together in New York City. If you want all three, you pay Time Warner Cable about $200 a month (give or take a few bucks depending on whether you buy any premium channels, go without a phone, get an extra cable box for the bedroom, etc.). This is the only non-satellite option that is generally available to most New York City residents. And given that battling with a landlord over satellite installation would be about as much fun as jamming a PEZ dispenser into your eye, most people just go with Time Warner.

But here's the thing. Time Warner Cable sucks.

It is fucking terrible.

One of the contributors to this blog recently observed that "I hate [my cable box] more than anything else including terrorism." It's not big things. They don't superimpose turtlenecks over Emmanuelle Chiriqui (scwhing!schwing!) during episodes of Entourage or anything like that. But the little stuff adds up. The sound cuts out for no particular reason sometimes. If you tape one football game for more than ten minutes you lose every episode of the Daily Show that you taped last week. It costs a fucking fortune, etc. But such is life, right? You deal with it or you shop elsewhere. Well that's all well and good, but now they are just trying to piss me off. Because of the aforementioned problem of keeping a five-hour Superbowl on tape, my old cable box crashed. You remember the one:

Who would have thought I would ever miss you?

So we had to get a new one. I cannot find a picture of it on the web, but it is (a) bigger, (b) uglier, and (c) about a thousand fucking times worse than the old one. Micro League Baseball on Mike Gray's Commodore 64 had a better graphics array than the display on this fucking thing (side note: someone told me that the software changed regardless of the cable box; seems odd that it happened the day we got the new box, but whatever). The machine is about as responsive to the remote control as Mrs. Side Bar is to me on a Tuesday morning (zing!). And the fast forwarding. Dear god the fast forwarding. Like the old model, this cable box offers the user a choice between several different speeds of fast-forward. But it's really no choice at all. It either goes so slowly that you might as well watch the commercials, or so quickly that you jump 5-10 minutes into the program before you can get it to play at a normal speed again. How the fuck are the Mets already losing, the Phillies haven't batted yet? Oh wait, I just fast-forwarded into the middle of the 6th. Neat.

I think it's on pause.

I know this may seem like it is not a big deal, but I would be the first to admit that I watch a lot of television. And when DVR technology first came out, it was pretty amazing. But Time Warner has managed to make it so fucking tedious to use it that it just amounts to a huge step backwards.