I have a bunch of the movie channels because my cable company has a deal where if you get most of them, it costs about the same as getting HBO separately. I guess that’s what you call “value added”. Whoever designed that deal probably figured out that if you give people all of those 24-hour movie channels (the ones without ads), it’s going to make them want to watch TV all the time, and eventually they may not be earning as much money as before, so you’d better lower the overall price or they’ll end up having to cancel their cable service altogether, and then you’ll get nothing. See? That’s smart-ish. If you want to be sure that they’ll be able to pay the bill, include a DVR in the package. That way they can still go to work without feeling like they’re going to miss something good on TV, but they’ll definitely want to get all the good premium channels since now they’ve got a DVR to make use of.
It’s funny, but now that there are other ways to watch television and movie content, the cable TV ads are trying to make you feel like you should stay glued to your TV set or you’ll miss all the great stuff. That’s probably not the best long-term business plan, for the reason I laid out earlier. If you have a DVR, it’s really the most convenient way of watching whatever you want. Streaming stuff like Hulu has very annoying ads and the picture looks terrible, not to mention the fact that you need high-speed internet to use it reliably. DVDs take up a lot of space, and now that NetFlix has driven all the Mom & Pop video-rental stores out of business like a big evil video Starbucks, they have made the decision to stop purchasing new DVDs, or replacing damaged or missing discs from their rental library. Streaming is all the rage now, but not everyone’s internet connection is fast enough to reliably stream movies, plus for it to work on a Mac, you have to have an Intel processor. Some streamed movies really look awful too, which is inexcusable when you find out that a very select few look as good as a Blu Ray disc (!).
The big new thing is On Demand. They beat it into the ground as the greatest thing in the world at my cable provider, and it doesn’t even work; it automatically tunes your channel to it when you turn on your TV, and if you don’t punch in another channel number, it will hang for twenty minutes before finally presenting a menu that doesn’t function. Awesome! But if it does work, and it’s free (I’m guessing that it sucks like mine if you’re trying the free stuff, but it will work if you pay more for it. Color me cynical.), I’ll bet it will be as good as a DVR, as long as the content doesn’t go away before you get around to seeing it. But I suppose they will always use it as a way to try to squeeze more and ever more money out of everyone, especially those who work long days. No wonder they don’t include a DVR free-of-charge: then you might just be able to see what you want on it and not need anything further. And isn’t that why studios tried to outlaw the VHS video tape recorder to begin with, years ago?
