In other news, Hulu, under pressure from it’s big media corporate owners, caved to their petulant demands and made Boxee remove Hulu streams of television content. It appears that the big media owners of the shows do not want you seeing their advertising on your television, but it is ok if you see that same advertising on a computer. They are clueless, for we simply plugged our laptop into our TV (micro-DVI adaptor to S-Video, then S-Video into the receiver for up-conversion to 720p HDMI/DVI to the TV) and watched the episode of Dollhouse we missed Friday night because the old DishPVR keeps having internal conflicts with it’s own programming.

Boxee on our AppleTV remains an awesome way to watch television, even without Hulu (which amounts to even without some networks).

A word of advice to big media conglomerates: we will watch the television we like to watch on any damn screen we want to, you simply have no control over that. Your futile attempts to block that activity will fail, and only make the piracy option (commercial free) more and more attractive by comparison.

The irony is, that via ordinary feed and PVR/DVR I can watch my shows without commercials on any TV I like. But when the PVR fails, and I go to your website to watch the show – I see commercials. If you make it hard to do that I’ll be forced to use pirated copies to catch the few shows I miss on PVR; but those will also be without commercials. Seems to me that if you want us to watch your damned annoying ads, you’ll make it trivially easy to watch your shows with embedded ads – as we are too damned lazy to pirate when the show is available.

Put your feeds back on Boxee or something else that makes this easy.

Oh – a little gem was on the PVR last night, Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations show had a very funny episode on Food Porn!

At first I went to reduce redundancy; but my partner and I each like having our own mobile phone, and the Vonage is very useful for keeping daytime minutes on the mobiles down when we are working from home and on long-running conference calls. We were able to reduce Vonage to minimal bill by dropping the all-you-can-talk plan and going with metered minutes that we rarely exceed.

The second redundancy is getting TV from both DISH and Comcast. Our Comcast is the cheapest cable plan we can get because it gets us a discount on our broadband bill and gets us News8 (all local news all the time); it’s an analog cable plan that only costs us $19/month and gives us $15 off our broadband internet bill. So for $4 we get News8 and the same channels (mostly) we get from DISH.

With DISH we get those channels through our old DishPVR so we can time shift our shows and dodge commercials. Once you use a PVR or DVR (some simply call it a Tivo even when it’s not Tivo branded) you will never want to go back to live feeds off the air. They are that useful. So DISH has us because we want the DVR features only at this point.

We also have an AppleTV and we have rented a movie from iTunes occasionally, but they are rather expensive. I would not even consider renting Pay-Per-View from Comcast or DISH because the prices are… well, insultingly high. So we have Netflix, which is a pretty good deal. I use and recommend the AppleTV for taking internet content and putting it on our big screen TV.

The AppleTV just became vastly more useful for us because of some free software we added to it. In fact, the new software on the AppleTV (or a Ubuntu, Mac OS, or Windows media server) is so amazing we may not need DISH or Cable at all going forward.

The new software is Boxee used in conjunction with Hulu. Boxee is both a web site and free software you download to your computer or set top box. Hulu is a website. Both are free, and thrive on commercial advertising. Both use feeds of television content from nearly all the networks; the feeds have commercials built into them.

With Boxee on my laptop, I can watch all my favorite TV shows on demand, for free, in high definition when it’s available. With Boxee on my AppleTV I can watch those same shows on the big screen TV.

Imagine having a library of nearly every TV show ever made, available on demand to you after a few keyboard strokes or mouse clicks. Hawaii Five-O is just as readily available as last night’s episode of Fringe or Battlestar Galactica. Miss an episode? It’s trivial to watch one from last week, or last year. Nostalgic for that old episode of Babylon5 you like to watch over and over? Pull it up and watch it.

Boxee and Hula make it possible for me to consider ditching both DISH and Comcast cable (though I’d need to keep my broadband internet access).

There are still small issues to work through:

• pause and resume playing your show is not always reliable
• rewinding or fast forwarding through the show is not always reliable
• occasionally the stream pauses for a minute
• the embedded commercials are really LOUD on the WB channel/network feeds, and you cannot skip them like on a DVR
• AppleTV does not allow output to standard definition TVs (this is a pain)
• AppleTV is limited to 720p or 1080i HD output (this is no big deal today, but a year from now will be important)
• I could not find “Relativity” shows on any network Boxee can search

Overall I am very impressed though.

Boxee is working towards putting their software on other set top boxes soon, so AppleTV will not be the only hardware it works on…

I tried it briefly tonight on my Intel based Mac laptop running Leopard (10.5.5) and it played “The Daily Show” and a trailer for some action movie gorgeously, but then I heard my Adium chime and tried to switch out of full screen Boxee mode to see who had sent me an instant message and there did not really appear to be a way to switch out of Boxee. In fact, trying to quit Boxee caused it to hang/freeze and I no longer could use my laptop for anything!

I got around this by closing the lid, which put it to sleep, then when I opened it it asked for my password and I switched to the administrative user and killed Boxee via commands.

So I am concerned about stability, but it looks like it might give those with broadband internet access an alternative to satellite and cable subscriptions; as they could grab their favorite shows (with commercials) to Boxee and watch them on whatever screen they can attach to a Mac/AppleTV/Linux box… Could be very interesting.

In other news, I saw Alan Tudyk in a new commercial the other day.

Makes me want to re-watch Firefly.

Oh who cares, it’s pretty darned funny.

Friends turned us onto Fringe, which is vaguely reminiscent of X-Files. The jury is still out, but it has promise as a series and the weird science is fun.

Of course we still regularly watch Firefly on DVD, as it is the best television ever. I listen to The Signal and Firefly Talk regularly on podcast because Firefly is just that good.

We are catching some Dr Who, sporadically, though sometimes I feel it has jumped the shark, always has very witty dialogue and I still recall the original Dr Who series from childhood with fondness. Likewise, we sometimes catch Torchwood for it’s amazing dialogue (same team as Dr Who and Coupling, which I still miss deeply and profoundly) and the eye candy of John Barrowman as Captain Jack!

Our background noise when we are doing other things are all the syndicated reruns of:
CSI Miami, Angel, Charmed, CSI New York, CSI (Vegas), and sometimes Law and Order. We do not go out of our way to watch them, but if they are on when we are working they entertain but do not distract from homework or work at home. It’s also how we compromise between Erci’s taste for icky pseudo-science and super-natural documentaries and my taste for silly romantic comedy movies.

We are looking forward to another season of So You Think You Can Dance; I hate reality shows, and the silly contest rules means you cannot take the competition seriously, but the dancing is fantastic. Absolutely stunningly fantastic.

I can’t wait for Dollhouse, another Joss Whedon creation starring Eliza Dushku of Tru Calling and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame.

We’ll probably give Battlestar Galactica a watch when it comes back on, though I have mixed feelings about it, my partner is enthusiastic about it. It will be fun to watch them reveal my friend Johnny Hunter as the 12th cylon (ok, so that’s just a joke folks).

We just finished first season of True Blood on HBO, which justified a subscription to HBO this Fall all by itself. It is a vampire/lycanthrope/genre series based on the books by Charlaine Harris. It is raw and gripping the way several of HBO’s television series have been (Carnivale, Rome, Sopranos, the film series John Adams) and it has Anna Paquin in all her gorgeous glory and amazing acting by Rutina Wesley (Tara), Sam Trammell (Sam), and Ryan Kwanten (Jason). True Blood on DVD will hit the streets on May 12th, 2009.