There’s a bridge from the Internet to your TV–Steve Jobs & Bill Gates are the trolls under it

I solved the Last Ten Feet… by walking across the room

I can’t remember ever feeling quite so smart and quite so stupid at exactly the same time.

There’s a concept you hear every so often from media pundits and technology providers: the last ten feet. Basically it refers to the process of digitally delivering movies and TV shows and other video content via the internet. Internet speeds and compression and bandwidth have gotten to the point where high quality video can be sent from anywhere in the world right to your computer… but you probably want to watch it on your TV… and your TV is only another ten feet or so away… but the internet just doesn’t know how to get there.

So there are all sorts of proprietary solutions for how to connect your TV to the internet. If you want to buy an Apple TV, you can port your iTunes videos to your TV through Apple TV… but Apple TV is lame so it’s not being broadly adopted. Microsoft has its cumbersome home network system or its Xbox Live system where you can buy downloads of TV shows & movies or stream Netflix movies if you have an account… but you can’t just download or stream anything you want, only what Microsoft or Netflix has negotiated to sell you—and Netflix has a particularly weak catalog since suppliers are sick of getting nuggied by Netflix’s business model that seems to help Netflix and nobody else. Playstation 3 has a similar operation developing, as does Wii and Roku (formerly a Netflix-only box) which are offering broader catalogs from Hulu and Amazon Unbox. And there’s plenty more… it seems like every day someone is popping up with a new set-top box that will finally connect my TV to the internet.

Basically, everyone wants to be the iPod of movies and TV. Apple figured out how to integrate your stolen mp3s with your walkman in a seamless configuration that was hip, stylish, and integrated into Apple technology… the rest is a CNBC special on the genius of Steve Jobs, rugged capitalist individualist.

But iTunes and the iPod were integrating my access to *everything* into a newfangled walkman. It worked because the internet was already providing me with all the music I could possibly want to hear, Steve Jobs just gave me a simple way to organize and enjoy what I already had. iTunes did not generate false scarcity, it managed abundance.

These set-top boxes, however, are creating a false scarcity of available video content. They’re trying to tell me what I’m allowed to see and how I’m allowed to watch it. I want to watch Battlestar Galactica so I download it on my Xbox, but then I’m not allowed to take it off my Xbox without Xbox-branded plugins. I want to watch Season 1 of True Blood, but HBO only seems to have it available digitally on iTunes… who imposes DRM that prevents me from watching it on my TV unless I buy their stupid set-top box. I can’t even watch it on HBO On Demand through my cable provider, even though I pay a monthly subscription to the bastards and I hardly ever watch any of their goddamned programming. So I wind up calling Blockbuster (since both my local indie videostores have gone out of business thanks to Netflix) asking to see what discs they have in stock like I’m back in 1992 or something. Ridiculous.

Don’t these disservice-providers understand that I want to watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it? I don’t want to wait 2 days for Netflix to deliver it by mail like this is some Benjamin Franklin pony express bullshit… 2 days from now I’ll want to watch something else. And I certainly don’t want to have to choose from Netflix’s paltry Watch Now catalog just because they’re too miserly to offer suppliers enough incentive to sign on their streaming service.

So… I wanted to watch this mumblecore movie and of course it’s not on Xbox Live, it’s not on Netflix Watch Now, it’s not on Amazon Unbox, it’s not on Hulu, and it’s not on my Time Warner Cable On Demand. It’s not available for download on the filmmaker’s website or on the distributor’s website. But it is on Pirate Bay. So fuck you set-top box providers and fuck you filmmaker and distributor, you make it so I can’t see this thing legally and conveniently I’ll just download the torrent.

So I download the torrent and I’m about to watch it on my computer when something occurs to me… why can’t I just walk it over to my TV? I dump the file on one of the USB flash drives I have laying around. These days they’re like $20 for 15 GB and I keep accidentally leaving them in my pants when I do my laundry so I have like a gazillion of them laying around.

I drag the avi file I just downloaded from Pirate Bay onto the USB flash drive and I walk ten feet to my TV. I start looking for USB ports. Voila! Xbox has USB ports. I plug it in. I navigate to Video Library and it shows my USB drive. So I click it and there’s that little whippersnapper of an avi file. I click there, Xbox downloads some driver automatically, and 10 seconds later I’m watching the movie on my bigass flatscreen TV and it looks pretty fuckin sweet.

Am I an idiot? Does everyone else already know you can do this?

I did a little more research and found that on Amazon I can buy an iPod-to-RCA adapter for 53 cents. If you aren’t a techie, RCA outputs are the red/white/yellow plugs that come out of your VHS player or DVD player (if you’re not using one of the newer options like HDMI) and plug easily into just about any TV on the planet.

So then I wanted to see what else I could play on my Xbox besides avi files. On our website Televandalism we sell all our movies as DRM-free m4v files because that’s the file type we found to be most compatible with iPods, and we figured at the time that the most likely reason to download a movie rather than stream it would be for portability via iPod.

So I downloaded an m4v of Pilates For Indie Rockers, dropped it on the USB flash drive, plugged it into the Xbox, and goddamn it played easy and looked awesome. No fuss, no muss… does that mean I can finally get rid of this goddamned bookshelf full of DVDs?

Maybe the rest of you already knew how easy it was to download movies and watch them digitally on your TV, but I didn’t… and I’m the kind of guy who’s supposed to know these things. Why didn’t I know it? Besides the fact that I’m a dumbass? Because it’s not in the interest of the massmarket aggregators, technology providers, and set-top boxes to market how simple it is for audiences to download platform-agnostic video content playable on whatever player they have handy and how filmmakers can sell their movies digitally on their own websites without having to lose 75% of the revenue to all these various pipeline providers.

But aren’t those revenue losses made up for by the fact that digital distribution is cheaper than manufacturing shiny plastic discs? No! Everyone talks about how the cost of distribution will decrease because of digital distribution rather than plastic DVD manufacturing, but in order to get into the iTunes store Apple has required an encode fee that is MORE than the cost of DVD-authoring plus manufacturing an indie-sized run of shiny plastic discs. Adding insult to a kick in the balls, the Apple encode is (a) the same fucking thing as outputting to h.264 quicktime for free in any number of applications, and (b) not transferable to other digital stores which have their own unnecessary encode fees. Basically, they’re all creating fabricated profit-centers that make digital distribution MORE expensive than traditional distribution. The middleman is boning both sides of the transaction.

It’s like if you and I wanted to hang out and there’s a perfectly safe path between our houses, but Steve Jobs and Bill Gates erected bridges and demanded we pay tolls and they spent millions marketing their bridges so we think we have to take them… but their bridges aren’t crossing a raging river, they’re just crossing a path that’s actually EASIER for us to take than their stupid bridges.

Microsoft loses money on Xbox sales, so they actually have to sell software and licenses and subscriptions etc etc–they need to sell content, not just Xboxes, so it’s not in their best interest to market the fact that you can buy video online and watch it through Xbox. Apple is a bit different… since the iTunes store is free and their margins are slim on downloads, they want you to buy iPods–so it’s important to them that whatever you buy in their free store encourages you to buy their proprietary hardware. As a result, no one’s running around raising a ruckus about how simple it is to watch a movie from the internet by using their hardware without using their pipeline. To be honest, I’m astonished they even allow their hardware to support it.

To be fair, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates aren’t the only ones doing this, I just use them as prime examples because they’d make particularly funny looking trolls. Last year Time Warner Cable rented me a DVR with USB inputs and I excitedly asked the cable guy if I could send in video files through the USB ports and he said “probably, but Time Warner Cable disabled all the USB ports before distributing the set-top boxes.” Fuckers.

There’s actually tons of simple ways to move video files from the computer to the TV, but these are discussed mostly in tech blogs not in consumer media. Brian just mentioned to me that LaCie is releasing a hard drive designed specifically for this purpose, but at $349 it’s no cheaper than an Xbox. There are plenty of even cheaper solutions.

The problem is that by muddying all this, they’re actually encouraging piracy. I download and stream plenty of video content legally and pay Microsoft, Apple, Time Warner quite well for it. If that mumblecore movie was available for download legally, I would have bought it–but by creating a false scarcity they made piracy the only way I could get the content in the format I wanted to consume it. I actually felt kind of guilty downloading it and if it was any good I would’ve felt even guiltier. But don’t worry, Justice Department: I was downloading it as research for this very important blog post.

So why has the buying and selling of non-DRM, platform-agnostic movies not become ubiquitous yet? If I can sell you a downloadable movie on my website that you can watch on your computer, on your iPod, on your Xbox, and anyplace else you want to watch it… then why would you choose to download it from Xbox where you can only watch it on Xbox? Or from iTunes where you can only watch it on Apple-approved players? And what’s the incentive for me to distribute through those pipelines if I get more money by selling to you directly? Because I’m hoping that by being on iTunes and Xbox you’ll discover my movie? That’s not very likely. Then maybe because being on those services somehow gives my movie credibility? Puh-lease.

The cost-benefit analysis here favors consumers buying direct from filmmakers’ websites, distributors’ websites, and DRM-free digital stores; and filmmakers, distributors, and e-tailers selling direct from their own websites while also hypersyndicating the content to all those other bridges for the suckers who want to use them. The only thing standing in the way of this model taking hold is the marketing campaigns of the service providers who all want to control the last ten feet between your computer and your TV.

I solved the crisis of the last ten feet. It’s called get off your ass and walk, ya fatass.

[get here by accident? this is a blog post from Hollywood-2.0, read more at www.hollywood-2point0.com]