Popcorn Hour C-200 and the Internet TV Revolution

It would appear that our televisions have gone from analog to digital stations just fine. Okay, ¢â‚¬Å“just fine¢â‚¬Â is a little too broad of a generalization; after all, there was a record number of calls (317,000) to the FCC last Friday on this subject.

However, the FCC was prepared, and they had 4,000 operators on hand to answer what they knew was going to be a rush of calls. Many of these calls were handled by ¢â‚¬Å“re-scanning¢â‚¬Â the converter boxes. The www.dtv.gov website had a record number of hits.

Of course, there were some who failed to get a signal on the day of transition. If you were one of them, all I can say is: you were warned. I mean, I saw one of those emergency messages every day for the past year telling me to switch, or else. If you were still going off analog signals before the switch, and didn’t listen to the myriad warnings, then you deserve whatever fate you made for yourself, really.

Fortunately, I have cable, so I was covered. However, I am now questioning cable. You see, I have discovered that about 80 percent of my television watching is now done online. The other 20 percent is just channel surfing, when I am too tired to focus on anything in particular.

I think a lot of viewers have the same viewing habits as I do. After all, why should I watch television based on some sort of schedule that I don’t want to follow? Instead, I want to watch the programs that I want to watch when I want to watch them. Not only that, I don’t want to go through all the trouble of setting a VCR, or even learn how to set a DVR.

No, I want to go online, and find the shows that I want to watch. In fact, that is how I have watched all kind of shows that I normally would have missed for the past year. I have discovered a whole crop of shows that I never would have even tried if not for watching television online.

I still can’t believe that major networks still have not picked up on the fact that more people are watching online than scheduled television broadcasts. Isn’t the problem with the writers, back when that strike thing was going on?

This new viewer mentality is probably why Syabas has created the Popcorn C-200, ¢â‚¬Å“an Internet settop box that streams digital content from the Internet or its internal hard drive to the television set and stereo¢â‚¬Â. The C-200 is supposed to be the new version of Popcorn Hour A-110, and is capable of accepting video content from sites like YouTube, Vuze, Revision 3, CNET TV, Veoh, Blip.tv, NBC, CBS, CNN, and BBC. It is also possible to accept image content from Flickr, Pikeo, and Picasa.

The Popcorn C-200 is not the first device that allows you to watch ditigal video content, and it will not be the last. Something tells me that as the prices of cable and internet rise, people may have to choose one or the other.

So perhaps we are looking at an age where the next television transition will not be to digital, but to the Internet. So, unless you have a high-speed Internet connection, you might not be able to get TV. Of course, that would assume that all major networks as well as the cable networks, all go completely online.

Source1 and Source2