The TV Revolution Is Here

For those of you who have been living under the rock, there is a TV revolution going on. Let me get this out of they way first... yes I do "borrow" TV shows off the net. Let me tell you what... I'm really not sorry... the amount of money corporations are making off us is insane... and there are no limits every year it's more and more and it will never end, unless we do something about it. I agree people need to get paid, but in my opinion entertainers get paid way too much, yes they do entertain millions of people but that's just because the way the system is setup. There is plenty actors out there who would be happy to work for much less money. I feel like I'm getting off topic here, all I'm trying to say is that we pay way too much for entertainment.

I recently moved and just got cable installed today, it's costing me $50 a month... what am I paying for? well basically 20 minutes of commercials per hour and other promotions within the actual shows.

Why did I get cable?

Well, I love basketball and need to watch it live and shows like HGTV (my GF ;) )haven't fully made it torrents yet. Ahh, Torrents... one of the most amazing inventions since probably the internet revolution. See pirating has always been there... it's been there in the early 90s when you could download games off BBSs and it's been there when you could download tiny files called MP3s through MIRC way before Napster. It's just now though that the general public is getting their hands on the nice and easy to use tools to let them "borrow" content off the net.

The future Now?

In a way the future is here... here is a perfect example.. couple of weeks ago when I still had analog cable the new Heroes episode stared airing but I couldn't watch it right then. So I turned on my Windows Media Center in Vista to record the show right off cable... about an hour and a half later I came back and started watching it... picture quality wasn't great (analog cable) plus all the commercials were kind of annoying... meanwhile uTorrent blip appeared which stated that the new episode of Heroes just started downloading... so I stopped watching the crappy cable copy... waited about 20 mins and I had the same episode on my computer. Here is a little comparison.

Cable

Torrent

See, most people aren't at this level yet but it's easy enough to setup that all the shows you watch you have uTorrent watch for in the RSS feeds and you've got great quality content without wasting time on commercials or being glued to the tv. Now yes there are other solutions like PVRs but you still have to pay the big bucks for content you mostly don't watch... and what you do you have to be inconvenienced by commercials.

Movie are another big area where most of the bandwidth is being used up by... do you know why? Shitty Hollywood movies. Coming from a semi-film education I have an idea what goes on behind the scenes with script writing. Hollywood has this very child like behavior of banging it head against a wall until after they've totally killed any given genre and then they move on to the next one. In the 80s it was the Horrors, now it's the comic book heroes... just think of how many truly great movies have come out in the past few years... not many... why was The Matrix so popular? It was different... there are so many great stories out there waiting to be told but nobody gives those stories a chance...instead they go and make American Pie 4... this is why I among thousands of other people on the net will not go and spend tons of money on cookie cutter movies for $15 a movie.

Anyway that's one big rant off to bed now. Have a great night.

Fedex, UPS, eBay Shipping Who need em…

What am I talking about you ask eh? :) Well I'm talking online purchasing, specifically eBay and their lack of shipping price control. It's absolutely sick that you have pay $60 for shipping of a memory card from China or Hong Kong. I'm sure everyone one of you have gone through this at least once in your life... you order some tiny product on the web, it gets shipped to you for twice the cost to purchase it and then UPS slaps a 29.99 price tag for breakage fee, plus taxes on top and you're paying 3x the amount you purchased the item for.

So I was thinking would it be great to try to get rid of this process? Well I think for certain purchases it's possible to do. For example: Lets say you buy a brand new ipod for $100 on the web. It's NIB (New In Box) and it's located in Australia. Now lets say someone else buys the same product but it's in Canada and they're located in Australia. Instead of shipping the items cross continents you ship the same item but locally between the two people. When you find people like this you connect them together, so you have two buyers and two sellers involved in each transaction

You're basically taking purchases which would normally get shipped across the world and try to find the same item locally that's being sold by someone else. You still pay the same person but the item comes from someone else. Now you save on all those shipping and import charges. I think there is potential in this type of idea if someone can figure out how to do it. There obviously would be problems with DOA products but again if we can over come those we could save tons of money and the environment (fuel).

Thought I would throw this out there.

My First Shared Idea: FlicrFrame

Ok so from time to time I get some good ideas... I'm always thinking of new products that could make it big... some of them like software I'll keep to myself because I can actually produce them and see where they go; however from time to time I get some good product ideas that involve manufacturing... and to say the least I'm not interested in getting involved in that at all. I'm dedicating a section of my site for those kind of ideas... and if someone has the resources to make these things happen, well good luck :) and if you make some money maybe send some my way ;)

Anyway I love coming up with ideas... product development is something I want to get into... I love taking something and brainstorming on how to make it better and come up with an approach nobody has ever thought of.

So my first idea I would like to share with you is:

Digital Picture Frame on steroids :) Let's call it FlicrFrame

So about 4 years ago I bought my first digital picture frame... it's great, 640x480 resolution compact flash interface... I think it was from Kodak... paid about $200 for it. Over the last few years they went away completely I couldn't find them anywhere and if I did they were twice the price... so finally the digital picture frame returns... tigerdirect has a few in stock now... I just bought one for my mom for Xmas.

Anyway I was thinking... this is all great but with flicker content exploding out there I thought wouldn't it be great to create a digital picture frame that has Wifi/Bluetooth support... image this...

You get a picture frame for your girlfriend or someone in your family... turn it on... put in your Flickr userid and select either a picture set or the whole Flickr library... and all of the sudden you have random photos coming in directly from flicker to a picture frame that's either sitting on your night table or hanging on the wall :) You could also send picture from your photo via bluetooth or from any pc in your house...

Now lets take it a step further... hmm YouTube :) Let's connect to my brothers YouTube profile and have the picture frame in the background download a few clips and display them on the picture frame every so often... Cool eh?

With all the APIs available out there this is very easy to do... all you need is some money to tie in all the hardware together and developer VERY EASY (this is key to sell to the public) UI for people to get digital content.

That's it, I hope that next Xmas or the year after this will hit the shelves... spread the word if you would like someone to make this product.