Why is internet TV so hard?

So I would seriously love to, as I know many folks are doing, switch away from paying for cable and just start using Internet based video instead. The problem is, that while there are lots of good options out there, nothing seems to just be the ’solution’ that handles it all. The current landscape has:

Boxee

A good looking solution to get all sorts of content, with the drawback of needing to dedicate a machine to it. But wait, Hulu/Boxee have been fighting and you can’t get Hulu on it, which cuts out a hunk of the major networks. That bites. Now Hulu has released it’s own standalone player. So you could install both on a machine. But you’d be left with an awkward need to switch between applications (w/ a remote control). Plus it’s primarily all ‘grownup’ content that is provided, not much, if anything, for my son.

Xbox + PlayOn + Netflix

I have an Xbox already, and I can stream Netflix to it, done deal. That’s nice. But that’s not current/new shows, and it’s missing lots of ‘extraneous’ content. Much of that can be solved via software calledd PlayOn, that will do real-time transcoding and stream content from all sorts of online sources (including Hulu) to the Xbox. There are a couple of drawbacks however. First of all I’m going to need a dedicated Windows box to pull this off. And it needs to be a fairly beefy one to handle the realtime transcoding. Secondly, the interface is a little ‘poor’, because they can’t put a custom application on the Xbox itself, so you browse it through the media browser, which is very similar to just browsing directory structures. Directory structures with LOTS of files in them. The biggest drawbacks that I see however, are that it doesn’t do HD video (yet, although even if they do allow it, it would need a massively powerful machine to handle it), and it has a smaller selection of sources, which doesn’t include any ‘kid’ shows (PBS, Sprout, etc) for my son. Now that being said, the Xbox Marketplace itself has lots of kid content, if you are willing to pay for it – Though primarily the ‘fun’ content (Scooby Doo) vs the educational (Sesame Street), though a few educational ones exist (Caillou).

Apple TV

Of course there is the Apple TV solution. Pay Apple a few hundred, walk away with a box meant ot just be hooked up and run with. This is actually a fairly compelling option, especially because it not only has tons of movies and TV shows available. But it’s one of the few options that is HEAVY on the kid content as well. The main problem that I have here, is that it’s a complete mental change. All the content costs money. $2 a show or more. Realistically, it’s duplicating the functionality I already have available via the Xbox Marketplace if I wanted to go down that route, Just w/ a broader selection of shows than Xbox. It also comes with the benefit that anything purchased this way could also be transferred to the various iPhones and iPods that are hanging around my house. Plus the box to support this is much cheaper than a powerful enough box to handle PlayOn. But again, going this route means planning on paying for each piece of content. Though maybe that would be good and convince us to watch less TV. But it does mean less chance of using TV as ‘background’ which I often do while working on projects.

Conclusions

In the end, at least at the moment, none of the solutions are perfect, and keep me paying a large amount of money for my cable. Of course part of that is because I’m paying for various HD packages to get the best quality shows, and few of the online options even come close to that at the moment.

So what am I to do? It seems the simplest and most complete solution for me at the moment, is to use the Xbox + Netflix that I’ve already been doing, and just also add PlayOn into the mix to get streaming ‘current’ video. This still requires the purchase of a good quality transcoder box, which I don’t have at the moment. Plus it means still needing to find good solutions for educational shows for my son. But it would allow a major drop in my cable bill. I just wish that instead there was a way to natively stream Hulu and similar things to the Xbox, so that I didn’t need to use the PlayOn transcoding (and so that I could get them in HD)

Though the one benefit of going Apple TV, would be owning the shows in a ‘collectable’ format that can be transferred around, saved, replayed, etc. Anything I might buy on the Xbox Marketplace, is stuck on my Xbox

Upcoming Conferences

I’m going to be doing a fair bit of traveling in the near future, and wanted to point out a few stops along the way:

PHP|tek Conference

May 19 – 22 — Chicago
I’ll be presenting two talks:  Highly Scalable Web Applications and The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development.  I also plan on participating in the Hack-a-thon that is being held one evening, for people to sit down and together work on enhancements to various Open Source projects, such as Zend Framework or Phergie.

Dutch PHP Conference

June 11 – 13 — Amsterdam
At DPC I’ll be giving the same talk as at PHP|tek: Habits of Highly Scalable Web Applications, plus a new talk: Code & Release Management.

Looking forward to hopefully seeing a few of you there!

Preparing to begin at Zend

So I sit here tonight, doing some preparations to start my job at Zend tomorrow morning.  I took my family away to a resort for the weekend primarily as a present to my wife for her birthday.  Though it also served as a celebration & transition from one job to another.  Quite enjoyable even if we both left with neck/back aches because of the hard beds, and we had our gas siphoned off overnight.

I’m looking forward to jumping into the new job tomorrow.

To have some content in this blog post, I did want to point out a few new pieces of software I recently started using, somewhat in expection of needs of the new position.  One is EventBox, which seems to be a great Mac application that pulls data from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and others and organizes them together.   The second is that I wanted a more organized way for keeping notes, after a few suggestions from friends (such as evernote and VoodooPad) I opted for simply using a local installation of DokuWiki.  Primarily to stick to my PHP/Web roots, and I liked the idea that the notes were just stored as plain text files for ultimate portability.

Conferences, TravelPod & Travel

Well I realized today that I haven’t blogged since I accepted my new job at TravelPod.  (Even though I have 7 blog posts hanging back in draft form).  So I decided to break the silence.

So far, the job is excellent, challenging, and keeping me very busy.  Of course, I’ve had my share of other things to keep me busy as well, namely travel.

I just returned from ZendCon 08, which, as always, upholds a high level of quality.  It’s one of the best PHP conferences every year.   This year I gave two presentations, my standard “High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques“, and a brand new one titled: “The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development“.  Both were well received and the Knight Rider one was standing room only.  That may have been due to all the Knight Rider clips I was showing during the talk

I currently don’t have any future conferences that I’m committed to yet, though there are a number that I’m considering.  I do know that I’ll be making some trips to Ottawa (to visit TravelPod) and Boston (to visit TripAdvisor).

Oh, and I was invited to attend a Microsoft PHP Summit in Redmond in November and I’m really looking forward to it.  I’ll get to chat with MSFT and other PHP notables about things that the PHP community could use (in general, and from MSFT).  As well as hear what things MSFT may have planned.

I’ve accepted a job at TravelPod/Expedia

So after weeks upon weeks of gnashing of teeth, and talking with more than 30 different companies.  I made a decision and signed an acceptence offer today.

I’m becoming a member of the Expedia team, and specifically will be the Lead Engineer for the TravelPod Labs group.  A small group within TravelPod (a wholly owned subsidary of Expedia), that is going to be focusing on innovation and rapid development of new products.

I no longer work at digg.com

Well I originally announced this information on July 1st via twitter: http://twitter.com/EliW/statuses/847974862

However it seems right that I do so now here on my blog in more than 140 characters.

Though, the tweet mostly says it all.  As of July 1st I was no longer a Digg employee.  Digg and I mutually parted ways.   I really did have a blast at Digg (even if there were some very frustrating times there, but what job doesn’t have those?).  I feel very proud to have been an integral part of helping to build what has truly become a major brand on the Internet.

I have to say, it was in fact pretty cool having someone else be awestruck just because of the company that you work for.  In fact I’ll relate a little story.  My wife is a Project Manager for the Army.  One day she was over talking to her Tech Support team about some work issue.  Somehow the topic of Digg came up.  She mentioned that her husband worked for Digg.  She says that everything suddenly got quiet, and that the next words spoken were:  “Dude, he’s like a programming rock star!”

Those words, and similar situations, will be hung on my virtual mantle.  Right beside my 3″x3″ square piece of the Hubble Space Telescope Solar Array that I have, as fond memories from previous jobs.

I do wish to thank Digg for the great years, for the great friendships (which I hope will continue), and especially for the amazing opportunity to be part of something special.

Eli

PS.  Anyone hiring?

Dear Laid off Yahoo PHP Developers …

Digg wants you! Please apply at jobs@digg.com or go to http://digg.com/jobs/

iPhone headset jack

Ok, after just dropping $10 at the airport for an adapter for my iPhone so that I can use my good headphones while on the airplane … am I the only one who thinks that apple really dropped the ball on this? I mean, would it really have changed the phone size THAT much to have a normal jack?

Audio of my High Performance PHP presentation

Looks like Zend has put an audio version of the presentation I gave at ZendCon last year online: High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques

This was the biggest audience I ever had for a conference talk.  It was standing room only, and due to bright lighting I couldn’t see anyone in the crowd.

Go give it a listen, but I swear that their audio technician found a way to accentuate my accent.

Robots!

Recently (for my wife’s birthday), our house according to our Son inherited two robots.   More specifically, we now have Roombas.

As my son went around yelling about how we had a Robot, and how it was sweeping the room for us.   It got me to thinking.   Remember back in the day when we all watched the Jetsons and wished for the day when we too had a Rosie to take care of our house?

I realized that while we don’t have a humanoid robot doing it for us, we do in fact have ‘robots’.   I mean, I have robots now that sweep my floors.  My ReplayTV takes care of knowing what shows I want to watch and recording them for me.  Various X10 appliances in my house can automatically turn on or off.

So I guess we have reached that day, just not exactly in the way we originally dreamed of it.