Couch Potato Juke Box

You know how I was all up in arms over the drawbacks of the new TiVo Series 3? The one that costs and costs and costs?
I think that one of the things I was hoping it would allow is streaming of video from a computer. It doesn’t, and even when it does it probably will only be a Windows thing.
So, I decided to stick with the cable company DVR for $10 per month. Cheap. Still, something gnawed at me, that monkey on my back that wants me to spend money indiscriminately and regularly. Which led me to the Apple Store, again.
I picked up a cheapo Mac mini — cheapo being a relative term, it was $300 less than the TiVo. I’m telling you, the Mac mini is the most useful computer ever built, because it is the first personal computer that begins to fulfill the dream of cheap, small computers that you can buy in a bag of a dozen and sprinkle around the house.
There are two minis in my house now. The original is hidden away in the back closet, serving this (and a dozen other) websites and dealing with my email. It plugs away day after day without complaint, with no viruses or the like. It’s freakin’ fantastic, this simple tiny Mac that just does it’s thing and doesn’t bug me.
So, this new mini. It sits quietly on a shelf under my television, and serves up video via Apple’s FrontRow software.
I’ve been converting my videos — such as the various films I’ve done — to MPEG-4 format and putting them into iTunes on the mini. The mini is connected directly to my plasma flat panel by DVI, and the Mac runs it at full 1080i high definition resolution. One press of the tiny Apple remote brings me all my videos, ready to watch on demand. No more juggling DVDs, I can just browse my collection and pick something, and it plays immediately.
Of course, Apple has already grasped this concept, probably years ago and that’s why they released the Macs with remote controls and FrontRow, to see what people do with them before launching a new product. That new product will be the iTV box. Yes, I could have waited for the iTV (due next year sometime). But as of yet, we don’t even know what its capabilities will be. I opt instead for an actual computer — using a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse stashed away in my coffee table, I can use the mini to read my mail or surf the web on a big high def screen from across the room. Not the way I’d want to work regularly (which is why I think that the convergence of television and computer is not going to happen the way many pundits think — it will happen the way I’m doing it and the way Apple is engineering it, with passive entertainment).
One of the best things about this setup is that the Mac displays any size or resolution video nicely. Some of the films I’ve made are in high definition, which plays great — and since my DVD player doesn’t play HD, this is the first time they’ve been seen in HD without having to haul in an HD deck and connect it to the screen. I also sometimes do videos which are in PAL format. My regular DVD player plays them, but with strange jumps every few minutes, a side effect of the conversion from PAL format video to NTSC, the American format.
Those same PAL videos play flawlessly, in their native format, using FrontRow. The benefit to this is that PAL has more lines of resolution than NTSC, and a really good widescreen PAL video approaches high-definition resolutions.
I can already see the future: the steady decline of broadcast television (especially cable stations) in favor of purchased content with no commercials, no network logo bugs, no constant promotional banners and other annoyances. Watch the show on your own schedule, without being marketed to ad nauseum. Just buy the episodes you want and view them anytime. This all sounds like regular on-demand service, but even that is dripping with ads and screen-marring nonsense.
No, the future is content sitting on your own video server, ready to watch anytime without distraction and annoyance. And of course, this all requires a new paradigm because in the current broadcast system, the customers are the advertisers. We viewers are the product. The program is just the bait. Will Hollywood be able to shift to making the viewers the customers?