breaking chains: Kill Your Cable TV Bill Dead -- InformationWeek

Years ago, cable television was a godsend. In the mid-70s in Atlanta, I think I paid around $6 a month for no-commercial television and movies with great reception and no rabbit ears.

Today, cable has become what it replaced, commercial-ridden television, and it costs a hefty subscription rate, to boot.

In the INFORMATION WEEK article here are some workarounds you can start using now. Personally, we have a Netflix subscription, cable internet from Time Warner, and over-the-air HDTV. We haven’t had cable for nearly 20 years, since we discovered our then-4-year-old had become exceedingly fond of MTV and also had already memorized a good number of Beavis and Butthead riffs.

Kill Your Cable TV Bill Dead -- Video -- InformationWeek

here's another reason for the SB117 full frontal assault

DirecTV May Test Broadband over Powerline - News and Analysis by PC Magazine -- It seems that AT&T may be outflanked here, by just about everybody--the cable companies, the VoIP providers, the cellphone companies, the satellite providers, and now, to add insult to injury, our friend the electric company, and that more than likely accounts for AT&T's haste and desperation in ramming through the bad-for-everybody-but-them legislation known here in Ohio as SB117, sponsored by Lance Mason and Bob Spada.

If we can get broadband over our electrical power lines or through the air or over cable, and we can get VoIP over broadband, we don't really need all that legacy POTS that AT&T has held onto for years without improving, all the while charging premium prices for it. It seems that this is reckoning day for AT&T, and they're trying to dodge their demise by cozying up to our state legislators and trying to put their signature tin boxes on every treelawn between here and Cincinnati.

In the process, they're making us a technological laughingstock and pointing up our technological illiteracy and innumeracy as a community.

Remember, we don't owe AT&T anything. Let the market forces prevail. Let them fail. Do not let AT&T prove the sad old theorem we last heard from the open-source man, Bruce Perens: "If you can't innovate, legislate."

they're doin' it in Knoxville, too

Free Press : Is Tennessee Ready for AT&T to Enter Cable Market? Here's an intelligent piece from The Knoxville News Sentinel about AT&T trying to pull off the same full-court-press offensive in Tennessee that it is in Ohio, regarding delivery of cable services.

There are so few positives and so many negatives to the legislation that I cannot really see why it's still alive and kicking, unless the money's talking just too, too loud to our elected and appointed employees.

The AT$T cable-delivery behemoths we've seen--across from the car barns off Pearl Road and up and down poor Clifton Boulevard--seem to be especially vulnerable to all sorts of disruption. They're hastily contrived and cheaply installed. I think they ought to be put below grade, first of all, for security purposes, then second, for shielding, and then third, for appearance.

The nasty evidence we see of AT$T's late-stage attempt at entry into the cable market, when they're losing telephone market share to VOIP providers, is sort of sad. They've been outflanked and now are lumbering around trying to respond with the quickest-but-not-the-best maneuver to gain a toehold--the technology seems not to be too well thought through, the design is barely sustainable. They are desparate. They want to stay alive, they want to stay in the game, they want to do it on our backs. We've found these past few years, with VOIP telephone delivery, that they've overcharged us for years. They've taken our discretionary savings dollars to themselves and back to Wall Street.

We don't owe them anything. And they don't really owe us customers anything, either, besides whatever service we contract to pay for. Remember that their first duty is to the shareholders, not the customers. And they're not good neighbors.

time to get that huge monitor

Netflix to Deliver Movies to the PC - New York Times --Once again, Netflix is out ahead of the pack, and we all stand to benefit.

“We’ve gotten used to it,” Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, said of the doomsday predictions. But Mr. Hastings also said he understood why questions about his business kept coming up. “Because DVD is not a hundred-year format, people wonder what will Netflix’s second act be.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Hastings will begin to answer that question. Netflix is introducing a service to deliver movies and television shows directly to users’ PCs, not as downloads but as streaming video, which is not retained in computer memory. The service, which is free to Netflix subscribers, is meant to give the company a toehold in the embryonic world of Internet movie distribution.

free at last, the final cleansing

Today, I threw out my old AT&T Yellow Pages and AT&T White Pages, dated July 2006. We don't appear in them any more and haven't used AT&T since our last major altercation with them, stretching from the summer through the fall of 2005, during which time we transitioned to Vonage. We've cut our bill by 2/3rds, even including the cost of the Time-Warner cable service to carry the VoIP line--it used to be in the area of $350 monthly. We kept one of our old numbers, the back line, but lost our main business line in the switch--AT&T got nasty and/or grossly inefficient, and we couldn't transfer a number we'd had for business purposes since the mid-1980s.