Family Tech: Making cable collapse like a 'House of Cards?'

Around 1950, Lloyd Covert hauled a wire from his home up to the hilltop behind his house, to an antenna he’d erected there. His became the first house on his street to receive a television signal from faraway Buffalo.

Soon, he augmented his factory worker pay by selling his signal to neighbors.

Cable companies first sprung up in these hill towns along the Pennsylva­nia/ New York border. Until a few years ago, the fifth-largest cable company was headquartered in the next small town over from Lloyd’s.

In the 1970s HBO and Showtime figured out they could provide program­ming through cable systems, starting a land rush of cable-only channels. Now, many subscribe to cable, even when they get strong signals from broadcast stations, just for those cable-only chan­nels like Disney and Discovery.

Cable systems offer hundreds of chan­nels and pay-for-view, and seem strong and powerful.

In fact, they are dying.

They are as doomed as carriage manufacturers were when the first auto­mobile chugged out of a workshop and passenger liners were when the Wright Brothers left the ground in 1903. It took a few years for the Model T to begin replacing horses and the Boeing 707 to truly doom transatlantic liners, but ultimately they were all but gone.

Internet-delivered TV will ultimately doom cable companies. Why, produc­ers are asking, should I struggle to get my program bought by a channel? Why should a channel have to struggle to get included on cable systems? Instead, the producers can stream the video direct to viewers via the net.

Netflix started, as Showtime did, pro­viding movies to viewers, except they did this by streaming video over the net instead of through a cable company.

And just as Showtime and HBO began producing their own content, Netflix is coming out with a new TV series that only it will have, “House of Cards.”

Starring Kevin Spacey, and produced by him and the producer of the “The Social Network,” this is a major production that networks and cable powerhouses wanted to have.

Netflix outbid them.

“House of Cards” is not the Model T that will kill off cable companies, but is a step toward it. If you have shopped for a TV lately you may think the built-in apps to deliver Netflix or Youtube are an unneeded bell and whistle. In fact, it is a way to somewhat future-proof your television for when streaming Internet TV becomes common.

For older sets, there are devices like Google TV, Apple TV, Roku, Boxee Box and others that hook between your TV and the Internet and let you serve Internet content on your larger screen.

At this week’s link page, I’ve put in links to compare some of these prod­ucts. They are generally affordable; many are around $99.

There is a service cost of course. Net­flix is $7.99 a month. Amazon’s stream­ing video is included with their Amazon Prime services or per view. Hulu Plus has full seasons of TV programs for $7.99 a month.

You may already have a device in your home for streaming some Internet TV to your television. Wii and PS8 game consoles can already stream Netflix and some others.

Cable companies are fighting back.

Some now offer the feature of stream­ing your subscribed channels to your iPad tablet. They will try to find ways to adapt and survive, but in the end, hope­fully the consumer will end up with more choices. 

Read more at the link page at bit.ly/FamilyTech.

Mark is the author of the ebook, “Get Productive Fast with Evernote.” Details at Mark’s blog, markstout.blogspot.com. Email markstout@gmail.com.