The real middlemen they are cutting out are the cable TV and satellite TV greedfests, and I say "the more the better".
As more networks and services offer downloadable tv shows, and as adoption increases, the less we have to deal with the outrageous prices and ridiculously inferior technologies of the cable and satellite TV industries. For the price of a basic cable package many people can now get high-speed DSL (and someday WiMax will provide a nice alternative choice to that). If you can download your shows for free - even with commercials - then your Internet connection, with all of the other things you can already do with it, is many times more valuable than a cable TV or satellite TV connection.
Cable and satellite have been screwing us for years. They regularly increased prices as their costs went down and their revenues for broadcasting crap informercials and shopping channels went up. They failed to come up with a common digital standard that could be incorporated into televisions so that we wouldn't have to keep renting a decoder box for each room. They completely screwed us on CableCard, and many cable households still suffer from signal quality issues.
As for the torrent lovers: It's all good until you get a letter from your Internet provder saying that lawyers are asking for your account information because they harvested your IP address from a tracker. Torrent technology is awesome, but I'd rather download the files from NBC and wait for some brilliant hacker to get my PayPal donation for producing a decoder that removes the 7-day restriction and lets me FF through the commercials (no - I won't have time to edit them out).
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The real middlemen they are cutting out are the cable TV and satellite TV greedfests, and I say "the more the better".
As more networks and services offer downloadable tv shows, and as adoption increases, the less we have to deal with the outrageous prices and ridiculously inferior technologies of the cable and satellite TV industries. For the price of a basic cable package many people can now get high-speed DSL (and someday WiMax will provide a nice alternative choice to that). If you can download your shows for free - even with commercials - then your Internet connection, with all of the other things you can already do with it, is many times more valuable than a cable TV or satellite TV connection.
Cable and satellite have been screwing us for years. They regularly increased prices as their costs went down and their revenues for broadcasting crap informercials and shopping channels went up. They failed to come up with a common digital standard that could be incorporated into televisions so that we wouldn't have to keep renting a decoder box for each room. They completely screwed us on CableCard, and many cable households still suffer from signal quality issues.
As for the torrent lovers: It's all good until you get a letter from your Internet provder saying that lawyers are asking for your account information because they harvested your IP address from a tracker. Torrent technology is awesome, but I'd rather download the files from NBC and wait for some brilliant hacker to get my PayPal donation for producing a decoder that removes the 7-day restriction and lets me FF through the commercials (no - I won't have time to edit them out).