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Last year (or maybe longer?) I had a Netflix subscription. I got it because I wanted to watch Battlestar Galactica and a couple of other shows, and I don’t pay for cable, so it seemed a reasonable compromise. I dropped it when my TV watching started to peter out.

In the interim, they launched an internet based video viewing system. Essentially you could play stuff, but a limited number of hours. Something like x hours per $ you spent on the service. So if you spent $17 on the service, you’d get 17 hours of view time per month. Not bad!

Well I’m thinking to myself “I need to see this next season of Battlestar Galactica” and I figure maybe I’ll get Netflix for a while again. Then I see that their internet based video distribution is now unlimited. That’s right – a subset of their content can be viewed on demand online. And with an HTPC, this is totally sweet.

Around Christmas I got turned on to Hulu by my brother. I thought it was cool, but the video buffer would stutter and so I didn’t end up watching too much that way. But that problem has gone bye-bye, and it’s a viable service. For 2-3 minutes of commercials (which you can AFW on), you can watch all kinds of new and old TV. I’ve watched a number of series on a number of networks. There’s no download time, it just streams the stuff to you via flash. It’s like having cable, only you have a ton of on demand content. New shows come out the next day, or maybe that day. The latest episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, is up already, and it aired last night. To wit:

Anyway, it’s been pretty awesome to have all this stuff at the touch of a button. It’s way better than the content distribution of the past.

• On demand video
• Old and new shows
• Not overwhelmed by commercials: only 2-3 minutes of commercials spaced out in the show.

• Free

Sure, Hulu is in a closed beta now, but there’s always OpenHulu and Veoh carrying their videos as well.

Anyway, I’ve gotten turned on to a couple of shows, like maybe Eureka, that have partial content on Hulu. Sure, I could download torrents, but those channels are not available to me over the air (eg Sci-Fi) and so I don’t. But Netflix can fill that void. They’re bound to have the stuff I want, like they did with Battlestar Galactica.

I signed up for the lowest plan that gave unlimited video. It’s $9/mo. It also gives a single DVD out at a time. For $18/mo, you can get 3 out at a time, but the online content is still unlimited, so I figure $9 is pretty sweet. I mean, that’s less than I was paying for basic cable! (I use an Antenna now – why not when HD signals look so good?).

Traditionally, an HTPC is tied in with the DVR concept: you use it like a big, time-shifting VCR. You need a cable connection, and you set it up to record the stuff you want.

Why bother?

Let somebody else record the shows. They’ll be made available to you somehow, many times without cost aside from your internet connection.

I’ll tell you something: If the networks seeded torrents themselves with Hulu style commercials, people would download and use those. Nobody would bother. People would time-shift the commercials sometimes, but many would just sit through them, ESPECIALLY if they weren’t overwhelming (in the Hulu model). Get a nice fat torrent seed going, and they’d save mucho bandwidth compared to services like Hulu. Right now they are using another old model: client-server. It’s like there’s this one dude giving out hugs. He can give 100 hugs a minute. But what if everyone he gave a hug to could give a hug to someone else, and it’s just like they got the hug from the dude? That’s a torrent. Everybody helps giving hugs out to anyone who wants them. So the original dude is still giving out hugs, but he doesn’t need to give so many. His hug bandwidth requirements are reduced, and the same needs are met. Everyone can take a part. And the data is duplicated across the network, redundancy style.

This is the new world, where corporations try to meet the needs of their customers by adapting technology to fit the new mode, rather than trying to maintain their old business model through DRM, FUD, the introduction of draconian laws, and litigation. We’re all looking at you, RIAA.

Of course, we don’t live in a Utopian world; more like a Dystopia. But wouldn’t it make sense? Wouldn’t it be nice? Sure, they might take a step in the right direction, by perhaps doing everything I’ve mentioned but wrapping it in proprietary video formats that require you to watch commercials. You know what happens then? If the commercials aren’t overwhelming (15-20 sec, no more than 5m in a 45m show) then people will sit there and deal with it. They’ll be happy with the video files. But if they are not happy with the commercials, then they will seek alternative methods. Some people will video capture their screens and kill the commercials, and then introduce torrents without the commercials. People will wait for those (some will) and use them instead.

For the time being, Hulu is awesome. When it grows popular (like Youtube) it will be a bandwidth hog, and Hulu eats those costs. It sure would be nice if maybe Hulu introduced some kind of cooperative streaming technology to distribute bandwidth. Some kind of cross-platform client application, perhaps? The default cache size might be 10-15g, and the default upload cap might be 50/kb. A central server would tell the clients what to keep and what to get rid of. The popular stuff would be cached for a couple weeks and then largely discarded. The not-so-popular stuff would be kept longer, since that client is one of the few that can help the server serve that content. After time, as the cache begins to fill, the client application could request that more space be made available to it. It could act “nice” (like a unix process) in terms of upload bandwidth and take a back seat when other applications need more, and when it’s idling it could take lots.

Anyway, the Hulu + Netflix combination should work out great. Hulu itself is awesome and more than meets my TV needs.

Trust me, you want to have a computer attached to your TV. It’s the bomb.