A couple of days ago, I forked over $17.35 to Netflix, for one month of the mail/streaming combo package. In a couple of days, I'll also pay $135 to Cox Communications for digital cable (Starz/Encore and one other small premium upgrade), and cable Internet service to the house. This is a quote from an email I received from Cox on September 13th:
Dear Cox High Speed Internet Customer,
We'd like to take this opportunity to announce the availability of the Data Usage Meter. This new feature provides an easy way to check monthly household high-speed Internet data usage at any time. Monthly data usage is the amount of data that users send, receive, download or upload each month for movies and videos, photos, web surfing, email, gaming, and other files.
Each of our packages has a specific data usage amount. The amount depends on your Cox High Speed Internet package and corresponds to the speeds provided with the package. Our speediest package provides the highest usage amount. You are currently subscribed to the Essentials Package which has a monthly data usage amount of 50 Gigabytes (GB). This is equivalent to streaming about 27 standard definition movies, or 16 high definition movies in a month*.
The vast majority of our customers do not exceed their usage amount in a month and Cox does not charge you an additional fee if you exceed it. However, if you find that you are exceeding the usage amount for your package, you should check for the following potential causes…
The message goes on with suggestions about checking your computer(s) for spam bots, things like that. Clearly, the writing is on the wall: "If you try to replace our cable programming with a streaming service, we will nail you. Hard."
I chuckled more than once over Tim Camrody's post over on "Wired." Tim seems to have forgotten that he writes for a magazine that regularly tells me which ginormous "wired" (as opposed to "tired") $3,000 TV I should hitch up to my $4,000 Dolby 7.1 home theater system and $300 Blu-Ray player. (No, I don't have those things – our Kenwood home theater cost $525 on Black Friday 2001, and a free Hitachi DVD player was part of the deal.) Oh, but wait, the "FUTURE" for this high-end technological wonder is a streaming service that serves up 1970s-era broadcast-quality movies with two-channel audio and – very occasionally – subtitles.
At least until my wife fires up her laptop for another round of "Mafia Wars"; then, either her game crashes or Netflix gets a bad case of bandwidth hiccups. It's a coin toss.
You know who does *not* screw me over?
1) Digital Shelf, this little independent shop that rents movies and games. Everything is a seven-day rental, most things are either $1 or $2. The carpet is old, the shelving is old, the college kids behind the counter are sometimes indifferent, but the prices and selection are great. And if a disc is scratched, they will fix it, or trade it out, and I'll get an extra day or two to keep it.
2) CD Tradepost, the retailer of pre-owned music, movies, games, game systems, and game peripherals. You're always welcome to try before you buy, all purchases are guaranteed for at least seven days, and the prices are reasonable. If they don't have what you want, you can leave your name and number along with the title of what you want, and if they get a copy, they'll call you.
No major rental chain (Blockbuster, RedBox) or streaming service can compete with that kind of tag team. Yeah, it may be a little more time, and a little more gas money, but at least with a DVD, I can hear all 5.1 channels. And if my wife gets bored, she can fire up Facebook without interfering with my movie, or vice versa.
I think, to get the bandwidth needed to really make streaming content a high-quality reality, we're going to have rip up the old copper coaxial cables and replace it with fiber-optic – nationwide. I think Google is going to lead the way once they've fixed up Kansas City, Kansas to their liking, but it will be our children, maybe even our grandchildren, who will really get to enjoy truly nice streaming media.
I appreciate Netflix making the effort – thinking out of the box with both the postal and streaming delivery of video entertainment – but I don't think we're quite ready for any of this.
The movie and TV industry are the lucky beneficiaries of the fact that video requires roughly 10x more bandwidth than audio, so they've had years to learn from the music industry's demise before we all had enough bandwidth to start easily watching video over the internet. Yes, Spotify is awesome for users and it's awesome for Spotify but it's not awesome for Sony Music. The movie and tv studios are not going to go gentle into that good night. They'll only be forced to negotiate licensing on equal footing with internet distributors once there's sufficient content they don't control going through new channels like Netflix, Vudu and YouTube.
Thus the attempt by Netflix to do an end run around the studios with House of Cards. I imagine that their first goal with this series is to deliver a big hit that will draw subscribers the way The Sopranos did for HBO. But that their even larger goal (dream?) is that it will be the pebble that begins an avalanche of content from independent producers.
It sounds far-fetched given the costs of production, but keep in mind that 1. the cost of all the equipment to film, edit, mix and distribute high-quality video is plummeting, 2. there are armies of film-school students out there that want to make a name for themselves (most of whom don't have jobs with an unemplyment rate at 9%) and 3. most importantly, disruptive technologies don't initially have to be as good as the thing they replace. They just have to be cheaper, more convenient or more effective in some way. Lots of cheap, niche content with loyal followings like Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, The Guild or Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy can start to displace studio content if they're easily available on Netflix or YouTube the same way that digital photography displaced chemical photography. It didn't matter that at first digital cameras had terrible photo quality. You could take as many pictures as you wanted to! Cheaply. Whenever and wherever you wanted.
The Dish 