Yay Google Video!

The Daily Show bit about the cable hearings on congress, which I haven't fully watched, once again showed the incompetence of the cable industry as a whole. Either that or greed. There is no excuse for there being no website through which I can download only the TV Shows I want to watch. The technology exists, and has for a very long time now. The lone legal alternative available is iTunes, where the videos are formatted to be watched on a two inch screen and not on a TV, and it only started offering videos a month ago! Embracing the online medium can be done with ads, or without video ads. The online medium is about to decimate what's left of the cable industry through services like Google Video, where I've watched more helpful video's than even I'd like to admit.

Every single channel, from my beloved Discovery Science Channel to the Speed Channel need to make their website a portal where people can buy programming. They will only be 5 years late in doing so, but god-forbid they might actually realize that the reach of the internet is close to a billion people now, an order of magnitude higher than the cable networks. CNN acknowledged this fact with the Crossfire/Jon Stweart episode. The last two statements offcourse mean nothing, since in reality there's very little profit outside of what the cable companies' managers see. Luckily, we're not all cable company managers.

This industry is perhaps the best example when it comes to something literally holding back progress, kicking and dragging while it refuses to acknowledge the fact that the true economic value of their content is highest when it's accessible to all through any network. The decency part of the hearings aren't even worth talking about. Jon Stewart said enough about that in the bit.

I will be hoping that the FCC allows consumers to pick individual channels, maybe finally forcing cable providers to embrace the online medium. If that doesn't happen, I'm going to keep downloading things like I have been for a while now, just in HD soon. Here are some other good stories on this.