Recently, they announced that AT&T Uverse would add a new feature where you can use your Xbox 360 as an HD receiver. I do not have an HDTV, but my 360 is hooked up to my fairly high-end CRT monitor, and so I will actually get HDTV for the first time this way. There are now more options than ever to get your media - music, movies, and television. None of them are ideal, really, and all of them have limitations, but you do have the options. FOCUS: How do you get your music, movies, and TV? iTunes? Amazon MP3 Store? Are you waiting for the big comeback of HD-DVD? Do you have a custom-built home theater PC? Do you just steal everything off of Bittorrent and lie about sending $3 checks directly to the artists you like? ALTERNATE FOCUS: If you could design the ideal media experience for yourself, how would it work?
FOCUS: Mostly I torrent stuff. I see a lot of live music and buy merch because I feel a little bit bad about stealing music - but other than that I don't care. I buy DVD's every now and then for stuff I really, really like. But mostly I'm cheap. ALTERNATE FOCUS: Ideal, perfect world - the cinematic experience would be delivered by some kind of direct neural path interface. None of this 'screen' shit - write it to the optic nerve. None of this 'Speaker quality' nonsense - but a sound experience written direct to your brain - no possibility of damaging your ears, no matter how loud you crank the volume. Background noise suppression? Fuck that - just flick a switch and turn off your hearing until the song's finished. You know what would have made 'Scent of a Woman' better? The scent of a fucking woman. And lets not get into how much better porn would be.
I used to be an absolute torrent fiend. Music, anime, movies, and especially cable TV shows; I'd get it all, burn to a DVD for storage, and save it for leisure viewing. Since then I've grown up a bit*, and get my content legit. iTunes for music (tho I might still dl some of their overpriced stuff), and Netflix is a total Godsend where movies and TV are involved. I've got my 360 hooked up for streaming it, plus LastFM for when I need some background music. *Also after 2 warning emails from my internet provider, I figured enough was enough. Peer Guardian didn't guard me enough. My ideal media experience would be very similar to that old cable channel The Box. Only instead of me or anyone paying per song, it would scan my complete library, determine my favorite genres (per decade), and beam those videos into my HDTV. I would then be able to transfer this content (via SD card or whatever) to any digital device I wanted for later use.
Currently I just have a regular CRT and a standard cable receiver. But I'm waiting for the CRT to blow, it should have gone years ago. I may push it over the edge. Then I'll get a respectable hi def TV. However, when I was building my computer I decided to put in a Blu Ray drive with a decently large monitor. In the past 3 years, my largest regret out of my entire life is fucking around with this Blu Ray drive in my computer. With a complete system build from scratch, this drive is the source and cause of 95% of all my aggravations. For every minute I spend watching a Blu Ray Movie (Which is awesome and way better than a regular DVD), I spend about a minute trying to get the fucking thing to work. If this Blu Ray drive goes, I will not be buying another. Unfortunately it's a "Once you've seen one you can't go back" deal. It looks awesome, and I now buy all the movies I want in Bluray, but I probably would have been 10x happier never touching it (yet). I was guilted into buying a regular Blu Ray player for everyone else, so I'll just use that to watch them on my monitor.
I'm currently a torrent maniac. Pretty much everything I watch or listen to is torrented (as well as a couple of games for the Wii). I kind of feel bad about it, I mean it is technically stealing. Luckily I'm awesome at rationalizing. I basically don't make enough money for anything aside from living expenses. I try to make up for it by telling people I know about good music or movies or tv shows I watched. I figure what is worse, me never watching/listening to someones work, or me listening/watching for free and then telling lots of other people to do the same. I'm sure one or two of those people do the same. Of course, I also tell people to get into the torrent game all the time so.... Also, if you don't want to get busted using torrents, all you have to do is cap your upload speed. Message me if you want to do this, but don't know how.
I'm also a huge torrent user. I'd wager to say I both download and upload at least 100 gigs a month. Now that I have a PVR it's gone down a little bit, but I still download a ton. No one I know has ever had a warning from my ISP (thanks Canada), so I pretty much download anything and everything I can. I got a phone call about a month after I got my new laptop because I downloaded 350 gigs worth of stuff in that month, but they just told me to keep it under 150/month and I'd be fine. I do go and see quite a few movies in the theater though, and that's the only way I'm able to sleep at night.
I stream Netflix through my PS3 into my HDTV for most of my content. I have HD cable and DVR so it captures a bunch of other stuff I like to watch or that my wife and I watch together. I figure that at some point in the next year or so I will probably take the plunge into getting all my TV shows online via hulu, network web sites, or similar services and drop the cable bill from my expenses, but that's kind of a pain in the ass to find everything I want and 30 yers of TV habits are hard to break. A bit of a side tangent, hooking my computer up to my TV and playing Civilization 3 on a 55" monitor really does make you feel like a Bond-style supervillain. It rocks.
Seriously, if you have a PS3, Wii or Xbox and don't have Netflix, you are a moron. I already do this. I hook my laptop up to the TV with an HDMI cable and just use the TV as a giant monitor and control it with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Not paying for cable is awesome. I also just ordered a Roku for the smaller TV, depending on how much I like it I might get one for the big TV too. Not being able to just flip on the TV and watch whatever is on is kind of annoying, but I also find myself spending less time watching mindless shit when I have to consciously choose what I watch. I also have more free time to study, work out and troll internet message boards.
I've got a 225GB seedbox, 100mbps up and down. $25 per month with unlimitted torrents and bandwith. I just ftp files from there to my laptop/desktop and put them on externals which are hooked to my WDTV media player, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Dig...VR4A/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1287158285&sr=8-3, which allows me to view the files on the 42" TV in the living room.
Haven't had cable in almost 3 years now, and don't miss it at all. Actually, I'd be tempted to say that my horizons have expanded as a result, as I watch more BBC and other non-North American programming as a result. I've wired every cable outlet in my house to have an ethernet connection, and I have high speed wireless throughout. I have a dedicated server that does nothing but search for and serve torrents. Each cable outlet has a Western Digital media player that connects to the TV via HDMI, and connects to the GB network to my server. I initially used some software to search for and grab torrents automatically, called "TED". <a class="postlink" href="http://www.ted.nu" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.ted.nu</a> It was a bit off from what I wanted, so I spent a day and hacked it up to do what I wanted, and have used it ever since. (It used to be an open source project with the Java source freely available). I also have a ton of DVD's that I've collected over the years and have ripped them into both high-def versions for the big-screen TV as well as a smaller iPod version for travelling. (Mind you, I do have a 12TB SAN at home, so storage isn't an issue) I probably spend about 10 mins a day sifting through various torrent sites and picking stuff I might be interested in watching, and setting them up for download. All in all, I've become used to watching stuff a day after they've come on, without commercials, on my own schedule. And I don't see me changing any time soon, unless the main studios get their heads out of their ass and figure out this new technology thing.
I'm curious what those of you who have canceled your cable do for live sports, if you're into them? I'm assuming "go to a bar" is the common answer. Aside from maybe 4 shows and live baseball & football, I have no need for cable. Yet I use owning 2 LCD HDTVs as an excuse to continue to pay $150/month so I don't miss any of my teams. As for me, aside from what I DVR on cable (TDS/Colbert, Dexter, Eastbound & Down, Boardwalk Empire) I use Netflix streaming via Xbox or PS3, depending on which TV I'm using.
I used to torrent also, but with what happened to a lot of people that torrented Hurt Locker, I was scared out of it. I guess for people to protect themselves from getting caught they could get behind a proxy, but its still risky. When I was in college I downloaded a ton of movies with a program called DC++. Its a file sharing utility that works on an intranet, so it doesnt get tracked by ISPs, etc. Since it works on an internal network, movies which usually exceed a 1 GB, downloaded in a minute or so. It was used by a lot of students and I got over 100 great quality movies from it. Now that Im out of school and on my own, I have basic cable and the ability to stream Netflix movies to my PS3. Its so cheap now that I think the need to torrent is really starting to shrink; not to mention Google video, Hulu, etc. As far as music goes, I use Frostwire. Its a more basic version of Limewire, doesnt have garbage, and doesnt bog down your system.
I get all of my t.v and movies streaming from icefilms.info. Don't have to download it and stuff shows up pretty fast (night of usually) and it's all pretty good quality. All you need is firefox, divx, and a script called greasemonkey. So easy a technologically illiterate fool like me can do it. I miss watching sports, but not enough to justify a cable bill. When my internet goes down I am beyond fucked, but I should be reading anyway.
Personally, I'm not into live sports except for auto racing. For that I have no problem watching it some time later. For that matter, I prefer the BBC coverage for F1 and I can't get their full red button coverage anywhere other than torrents. Also Speed TV blows anyway.
I don't own a TV, I follow all of my television shows second-hand the day after they air through websites like Megavideo. Also have Netflix Instant Play on my laptop but I don't have access to the DVD side of Netflix. All of my music is from CDs that I bought myself. Years ago I used to buy a couple CDs a week but now I'm poor and I buy maybe one new CD a year. Anything new I want to listen to is done through Pandora, Grooveshark, or Youtube. Not the greatest setup but I don't value media that much anymore. I still have my $2000 sound system hooked up from when I was an audiophile but these days I usually just listen to music through my shitty laptop speakers. I wish I still had the luxury of having time to spend listening to and appreciating my music, but as it stands I just use it as background noise while I do other stuff.
It's quite a complicated system, although not half as complicated as Nettdata's, firstly I have to assume that you know how to torrent files to begin with and what a private bit torrent tracker is. Then you need to sign up for a seedbox, I use http://www.whatbox.ca I have the 225GB hydrogen option which is 25$ a month. You get an unlimmited amount of torrents running, a 100mb/100mb connection, so that the actual upload speed and download speed is 10mbps maximum each. Whatbox, like the vast majority of seedbox providers do not allow public trackers such as bitjunkie, demonoid, isohunt amd thepiratebay. Only private trackers. Most private trackers require you to be invited to them by another member, which luckily for you I'm a member of about 25 of them. Depending on what you want to download I can give you an invite. The thing with private trackers is that you need to be able to seed what you download, to keep a 1:1 ratio. Not a problem when you've got a 10mbps upload going. Here's two screenshots of my ratios. <a class="postlink" href="http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/7214/cheggit.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/7214/cheggit.jpg</a> is from cheggit.net which is a porn tracker only and <a class="postlink" href="http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/6052/supertorrents.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/6052 ... rrents.jpg</a> is from supertorrents.org which a scene release tracker which provides most things, music, apps, games, tv, films etc. Once you've got the files on the seedbox it is then time to get them to you. There's 2 main options that whatbox give you. You can ftp/sftp the files straight to your computer, or you can sytram them to your computer if you don't want to download the whole file. I always just sftp (secure file transfer protocol) the files to my computer and then put them on an external hard drive.I have a WDTV media player which will play pretty much any file you can throw at it. This is hooked up to the 42" TV, and that's where I watch the files. To ftp files you can use a few different ftp programs, I just use filezilla.
Personally the only sport I watch is MMA and I can get that through my laptop (hooked up to the TV) or through the Roku. But yeah, if I watched football or baseball I would get cable in a heartbeat. Racking up a $50 bar tab every time you watch sports to avoid paying for cable is pretty silly.