If you are like me, you are increasingly concerned over the high cost of cable TV.  Prices are going up, selection is going down and the quality is sub-par at best.  If you are gay and want to watch gay channels like Logo TV – you are forced to buy the upper tier of cable or satellite programming in order to get the channel.  Same is true if you are a person who likes the Military Channel or the International History Channel.  I pay almost $100 every month for cable TV and there may be 5 to 10 channels out of 250 that I watch – to me, it is a complete waste of money.

So why do I think that cable TV could be the death of online videos?  There is a trend now with ISP to regulate how much traffic you use on the internet.  It is scary but the days of “unlimited web traffic” may be passing us by.  If you are the unfortunate person (like me) who has to have Comcast for both cable and internet – you will get or have gotten the letter that says you will be limited to 250GB of traffic a month.  Now while 250GB might seem a lot, if you are an online gamer, download movies, watch HD content or use any of the Internet TV services – you will find yourself consuming much of that 250GB bandwidth.

The cable company will claim that this is an attempt to enhance your internet experience, to cut down on piracy and reduce congestion but frankly I think it is a ploy to get you to stop watching online video and get back to watching cable TV.  You Tube gets more than 10 million unique visitors a month (Kirkpatrick, “Tech Blog” July 17) just for starters (not to mention all of the other video sharing websites).  If I was cable TV, I would be a little worried.  Online video has proven to be the future, its quick, easy – you can find most of the time what you want and often find hidden gems out there that someone has taken the time to make or produce (DuderShow or U People TV are two online examples for me).  You just can’t find that on regular tv anymore.  I spend more time watching internet video than I do watching standard tv.  And don’t get me started on high definition which is compressed to ridiculous levels on both Comcast and Direct TV.  And Comcast is more than guilty of trying to stuff more HD channels in its line up than it can possibly have.  Let’s face it, you can’t put a six lane highway down a two lane highway  and get the same results – and that’s what these cable and satellite companies are doing with their HD offering (but I digress).

So I will keep using the internet as it evolves into the next viable multi-media platform of choice but I can’t help but wonder if the reason why our nation has such a inferior internet backbone (compared to let’s say Japan or other Asian companies) is because the cable and satellite industry has such a hold on this country that they are preventing the very evolution that should be happening with online video and internet tv.  What do you think?

Thomas (Content Producer – Click Click Expose)