What “On-demand” Media Really Means And Why Your Cable Company Should Be Scared

I've been angling to get rid of my TiVo and cable for some time now and I believe I've finally figured out a solution that works best for me. It involves a lots scripting, Sabnzbd, and HandbrakeCLI and I'll tell you what I ultimately did next week once it's stable but it seems to be working as well as can be expected for these sorts of hacks. I posit that the TV industry is about to face the same threat dealt the music and movie industries but they still have a chance to make things better for themselves when the world changes around them. First, let's rehash the old arguments. What I'm doing is downloading TV shows and sending them to a media player near my TV. I'm doing this because there exist two separate infrastructures that interface imperceptibly at one key point - the official cable and online distribution networks and the shady underworld of pirate distributors. Right now that interface is a trickle, but it will soon be, pardon the pun, a torrent. The first infrastructure is the studio system. While I'm talking specifically about TV here, we can also extrapolate to talk about movies and music. This infrastructure is based on the advertising or distribution model in that they make all their money placing advertisements around their content or by placing their content onto physical media. But what is important to note is that the TV industry is in a completely different business from the music and movie industry. They're not "selling" a product. They're selling the space around a product. They they commission artists to make that product better in hopes of raising the price of the space around that product. They sell DVDs, sure, but that's a sideline.

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