The end of TV

I had been hearing favorable reviews of the new "Terminator" TV series, but am usually busy with other things in the evening, so I have not been able to catch it at its broadcast time. So I downloaded the pilot from iTunes--the first episode is free.

It took about thirty minutes to download the forty minute episode. We watched it on a widescreen 15" laptop set about four feet away, which gave us a larger apparent screen size than the 27" television on the other side of the room. Did I mention there were no commercials? Nothing like watching a one hour program in forty minutes. It was a good show, and I'm ready to pay two bucks to watch the next episode. In fact, for what I am now paying for cable TV, I could download and watch 25 hours of paid TV, at two dollars per hour--commercial free.

There were some shouts of horror from certain parts of the household when I mentioned discontinuing cable service, but it is getting harder and harder to find a reason to turn the TV on.

However, watching video over the Internet comes at a steep price for the DSL and cable providers, who lack the capacity to handle this if everyone starts doing it. This article is very technical, but the bottom line is that the current copper infrastructure lacks the capacity handle the switch to getting what we call "TV" over the Internet.

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