About a year ago, I wrote about our decision to end our subscription to cable after 20 years, and rely on off-air DTV and online sources for our viewing. (It was the subject of a piece that ran on CNN Money in February, 2009)

This decision was driven by a couple factors. First, I got tired of paying around $70 a month for access to video content I never watched. I can afford it; I make a lot of money. But what’s the “Pleasure ROI” on about $850/year spent on cable? Well, it’s unbelievably low, even when compared to something as fleeting as two $200 a plate meals. So, what’s the point?

Second, our decision was driven by the vast amount of content now available online, legally: iTunes, Hulu, etc.

In May 2008, we ended our cable TV subscription. We kept the cable Internet service because, at 20 MBps, it’s the fastest service available in our area. (Unbundling cable from Internet costs an extra $10 a month where we live.)

We connected an Eye TV USB HD receiver to an unused Mac G5, connected a small antenna to it, and connected the computer to our 32-inch Samsung HD set.

The end result: the EyeTV’s included software turned the computer into a DVR for viewing/recording/timeshifting over-the-air (OTA) content. The computer’s internet connection delivered all Internet video. Our DVD player connected us to our Netflix habit.

An important caveat, which I noted a year ago: we’re not big fans of live sports, and we don’t watch a lot of live news on TV. If you fall into either category, you probably won’t be happy with the results.

So, in the past year, what have we watched? Nearly everything we wanted to, with a few exceptions, which I’ll note below.

Over-the-air: Despite having all the local channels available to us through our little antenna, we’ve watched only public TV, and our OTA consumption is has been almost exclusively how-to shows: Lidia Bastianich, Rick Steves. The computer records them, and we watch them later.

DVD player: we watched our weird assortment of Netflix videos – travel shows, documentaries, horror movies.

Online: everything else. We watched some episodes of 30 Rock, Family Guy, and a couple vintage shows on Hulu. We subscribed to Top Chef and Project Runway on iTunes (after NBC Universal returned). We bought single episodes of cable series like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. We subscribed to video podcasts and watched them full-screen on the TV, from Deutsche Welle to TVO to WineLibraryTV to TED to The Cook and The Chef on Australia’s ABC. We watched tons of streaming video full-screen, ranging from Frontline and NOVA at PBS.org, to live CBC News from Toronto, Montreal, and PEI, BBC World News, Radio-Canada’s 24 hour news network RDI, to live coverage of the Mumbai attacks on Indian TV. And specialty sites delivered a lot of good stuff to us – from the aforementioned TED to Fora.tv, among others.

What have we missed? On election night, I wanted to watch live returns from every possible source all at the same time. With cable, this absurd desire is basically achievable. Without it, you’re left with ABC/NBC/CBS/PBS and a few online sources. We listened to NPR and watched a variety of video with the sound down.

That’s the only time, thus far, where I truly wanted cable. That said, I miss indulging my Barefoot Contessa habit on Food Network, but I had already grown bored of channel-flipping so I was weaned off it long before we got rid of cable.

Now, long-term? This is where it gets interesting. I’m not a big believer that all video is going to go online for free, or even in some advertiser-supported manner. I think a fair amount of stuff will stream free with ads, and I think the iTunes subscription model for series is reasonably viable.

What about the rest? I think cable companies will swallow the online distribution model through new set-top boxes that make watching TV and the Internet a near-seamless experience; and second, they’ll develop content deals with networks and producers to offer a huge array of stuff either through their own on-demand libraries (disastrous) or perhaps more likely, through Internet delivery platforms that are available only to cable subscribers.

This will add the magic element of Actual Revenue You Can See On A Balance Sheet to the online video equation, and most content of consequence will shift here. And again, the new set-tops will make the transition between traditional cable channels and Hulu-style internet delivery basically seamless.

Which means in 5 years, maybe I’ll be back on cable again. This has been my theory for the past two months. Two months from now, I might have a different theory. But that’s why this is fun, right?

Between now and then, we’ll be transitioning to a Mac Mini to reduce the electronic footprint in the living room.

My e-reader arrived on Wednesday, so my experience so far is limited, but I have a few observations. First, a long setup.

I haven’t read printed books in some time. Aside from a few keepsake books that have special personal value, or copies that get a fresh reading regularly, I’ve largely divested my book collection, giving hundreds of volumes to charity and the public library. I don’t feel comfortable with the resources required to create a physical book, and I’ve downsized my stuff and my personal space to support a more compact, (hopefully) environmentally friendly lifestyle. While the creation and consumption of digital content also has an environmental impact, I feel marginally more comfortable with that, and I purchase carbon offsets.

My reading, up to now, has been listening, mainly: audiobooks. I have a monthly subscription with Audible.com, and I’ve listened to dozens of audiobooks while in the gym or out walking. (Disclosure: I have a relationship with Audible, as a contract narrator.)

Audiobooks have a number of advantages, but there are some genres that don’t work for me in the audiobook format. Intricate histories are hard for me to follow, probably because I listen to audiobooks while doing other activities, like working out. And Audible’s library currently offers around 50,000 products. The bestsellers are there, and so are the classics, but the catalog isn’t deep, and I’ve been adding more books to my Amazon wishlist in the past two years, reluctantly conceding that I’d need to buy them in book form.

So, enough scene-setting. A few observations about the Kindle 2:

• * Amazon’s store currently offers about 250,000 titles. The first thing I noticed was that every book I’ve dumped into my wishlist is available for the Kindle. It’s surprising how deep a 250,000 volume “library” can be.
• * The buy-and-download-instantly model is almost an exact replica of the iTunes experience, by which I mean, it’s perfect. Buying books is so simple, delivery is effortless, and the result is: I spent $50 on books in the first 20 minutes of Kindle ownership; that makes it dangerous, too, for people like me who like to consume books.
• * To think of the Kindle as simply an e-book reader is to misunderstand the power of the device and its capabilities. Andy Ihnatko still has the best piece on the Kindle, and its true killer app: the Sprint EVDO connection, coupled with a (simple) web browser. This is a simple Internet device, and there’s a lot of power in that.
• * The new design is sleeker, cooler, still not perfect. The five-way toggle switch is annoying from an ergonomic standpoint, the “next page” buttons closer to the bottom of the device than I’d like (I hold it closer to the top, for some reason.) E-ink has to flash the page to display it, and that, combined with the delay is bothersome, but not greatly so. After reading for several minutes, you kind of forget about it.
• The experience of reading on a Kindle is immersive, more so than I expected. It takes some time but the device does seem to melt into the background, in the way that a physical book does. The interface doesn’t strain my eyes, and the reader is light enough to hold and substantial enough to feel like a small book.

I like physical books, but I’m not interested in turning them into a fetish. They aren’t inherently better or more pure than any other kind of book; that’s entirely a matter of personal preference, and I refuse to debate anyone over their personal choice in this matter.

For me, the Kindle is a new way to transport and enjoy books and it has a lot of potential as an always connected Internet device (within Sprint territory).

Note: I bought the Kindle 2 with my own money. I don’t accept review copies of items; actually, I’m not an A-list blogger, so I never get offered review copies of anything.

Which reminds me that it’s not a bad idea to revisit that post and offer some impressions after 9 months without cable. (Has it been that long?)

In the last (almost) 5 years I’ve been using Gmail, I’ve used a variety of email software to access it, from Outlook to Thunderbird, Apple Mail to Entourage. And while I’ve never had major issues with how Gmail’s IMAP works, there have been a few annoyances and a variety of tweaks have cleared some of them. but not others.

So, inevitably, I return to the web interface, and that’s why extending the capabilities of desktop software to Gmail in the browser has been at the top of my wishlist.

It’s a beta product and I’ve encountered some minor problems with it, but I’ve not lost any email, and frankly, I’m used to a few quirks with Gears on Google Reader and Docs, so I don’t get too ruffled by it.

I’m about 28,000 feet over eastern Washington state as I write this, and my core tools are open and working: Gmail, Google Docs and Google Reader… all of them running on Gears. It won’t be long before Internet access is available on most domestic mainline aircraft, so we’ll have reached the final frontier. But even then there will always be slow or flaky connections that we encounter – times when it’s easier to “work local” rather than fight the net. The real power of Gears is how it creates a seamless experience, bridging online and offline.

It’s a good deal, and users seem to think so, too. In an email to participants last week, Product Manager Demain Perry said that Mobile pageviews grew 20% from July to August, reaching 1 million pageviews for the month. NPR’s latest deal is with AT&T and it puts them front and center on the internet homepage of several of the company’s phones.

Stations – it takes a little work to get the pieces in place for NPR Mobile, but the payoff is another avenue of service to listeners.

I feel a little awkward because APM announced this last Thursday and I’m blogging about it a week later. But I was busy at the programming conference. That’s why this is a blog and not the news, right?

The app has a lot going for it: it will feature audio streams from any public radio station that submits its stream (today is the deadline to be included in the first release, with weekly updates to deliver new streams), and stations get the nice extra of having their logo displayed.

You can get a sneak preview by checking out the MPR Tuner (shown here), released a few days ago. It features Minnesota Public Radio’s three streams; simple and effective. (Search for it on iTunes)

NPR Mobile’s service offers lots functionality to participating stations and end-users – access to updated newscasts, text stories, a link to donate – but it doesn’t include access to station live audio streams.

Streaming audio (and video) is becoming more important than ever in the mobile space, thanks to the explosion in mobile internet use, driven largely by the iPhone but also by other phones and PDA’s. And for the iPhone, apps and services like Public Radio Tuner and NPR Mobile are vital because they enable the iPhone to access streaming content.

If you’re a listener, check to see if your station is partnering with NPR Mobile and watch for the new Public Radio Tuner on the iTunes Store. If you’re a public radio station, you should be partnering with NPR Mobile and with APM.

Broadcasters face an expected 9% loss in revenue next year, and after February 17th, 2009, every confused consumer will represent lost viewing, lower ratings, and potentially lower ad revenue. Broadcasters could fill some of this gap with revenue from new interactive services that take advantage of the opportunities afforded by digital transmission, but Mermigas writes that this isn’t happening. Many stations and group owners have no clear strategy for how to use the spectrum or how to make money from it.

What strategies are public TV stations pursuing? Public TV’s older demographic is most likely to be confused by the switch, and more likely to be cut off from viewing when analog goes dark. Beyond that difficult problem is how public broadcasters plan to achieve the revenues necessary to support 2-5 channels. And Mermigas’ post implies a bigger question: what new services can you develop that will utilize the capabilities of digital broadcasting to further your mission, while building a stronger financial future for public TV?

I watched this moment live today, just because it felt kind of important. Analog television broadcasts ended in Wilmington, NC today. At noon, they flipped the switch, and that was the end, after almost 70 years (counting from the granting of the first commercial television license on 7/1/1941 to NBC New York).

This was the dry run for the transition that the rest of the US will make on February 17, 2009… now about 160 days away. The photograph makes the ceremony appear ridiculous, but I saw the live coverage, and it was clear everyone was having a good time. (Who wouldn’t, with a big switch?)

This is the one of the few major broadcasting milestones I’ve experienced. There was the transition of the radio networks to satellites in 1980 – the Mutual Broadcasting System and NPR were first out of the gate; and I remember the end of the NBC Radio Network in 1987. I’ve probably skipped over a moment or two (the end of the cart machine, god be praised), but these two examples didn’t involve the obsolescence of an entire class of consumer equipment. Even color television was designed to be backward compatible.

Wilmington NC has a lower-than-average percentage of OTA viewers, so it was a good candidate to be the first, if you were looking for as smooth a transition as possible.

How many markets will have their own version of that big switch on February 17th? I’ll make a conservative guess and say ALL of them.

photo from Wilmington Star News Online

I have my own list of favorite things about Chrome, and they range from the complete redesign of the browser architecture, the new ultra-fast V8 Javascript engine, and the sandboxing of individual tabs – with the resulting improvements in memory management, stability and malware prevention – to Scott McCloud’s brilliant comic book announcing the release.

That’s an impressive meal for your left brain; what about the other half?

It’s fast, fast, FAST. On some pages, it loads at basically the same speed as the latest nightly builds of Webkit, the open source code upon which it and Safari are based. But when it comes to Javascript, the beast that slows down so many browsers, Chrome screams, thanks to V8. This one attribute deserves its own level of hotness. As Steven Levy has written in the new issue of Wired: Speed may be Chrome’s most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven’t made something better — you’ve made something new.

Some of the cool features exist in one form or another on other browsers, often with the help of plugins – yanking on a tab to make it its own window (Safari), unobtrusive handling of downloads, private browsing, and keyword searching (plugins for Firefox). But the integration of these features is, by definition, tighter because they aren’t extensions. Gears, the important goo-gah that hardly anyone pays attention to, is baked in. The new tab page that highlights recent places you’ve been; the location bar that finally acts like the “everything” bar that it should be; and did I mention it’s FAST? And assigning each tab its own memory and process is one of those major advances that us heavy browser users crave. Scott McCloud’s hand-drawn depictions of how browsers eat up memory and how sandboxing slows this down and also throws up a big roadblock to malware is particularly good.

If you take a step back, the release of Chrome ranks next to the development and release of Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox in 2004. These are browser milestones, like Mosaic, Netscape, and perhaps Internet Explorer 3.0.

And even if Chrome never gets large market share, the innovations of Chrome will fly to other browsers because Chrome is open source.

It’s been a pretty good week, I’d say.

• A couple smarter people on Chrome:
• * Niall Kennedy
• * Om Malik
• * Netscape founder Marc Andreessen
• * Jim Courtney
• * James Fallows

Web 1.0 was about web pages; Web 2.0 was, among other things, about the rise of web services; and what you can here are potentially the next few steps for the browser, from a piece of software that displays pages, to an environment where sites you’ve visited, clippings you’ve accumulated, pieces of data you’re monitoring, auctions you’re following, the people you chat with, the credit card you use to buy stuff, exist as objects, which you can manipulate easily, and which can be recognized and understood across sites as you use them.

You’re seeing one view of something people have been talking about for awhile now – the power of metadata to extract information from static web pages and deliver it in a variety of forms, as needed. We can already do this, with RSS, with API’s, etc., but these are still islands in the sea of data. The next steps will be to turn these islands into continents of data, and then to tie that data together in meaningful ways.

Yes, your web site becomes a lot less important than the data you’re moving through it and transmitting through RSS and API’s to other users and services, but this is already happening and has been happening for some time and it’s the tip of the iceberg. Your data becomes more valuable than ever, to users and other services, and also to you.

There are four videos; you can watch them all, but the first one will give you enough information to see the potential of this possible future.

• * Unprecedented flexibility for anyone, from a blogger in Pittsburgh to KQED in San Francisco, to generate highly specific content searches of the NPR archive (going back to 1995) and port the results to a webpage or an application.
• * A number of stations also have their archives inside the system, too. So queries can also include (or not) results from those stations.
• * If more stations are allowed to contribute their content metadata to the API, the search query delivers better and more complete results, encompassing more of the output of the entire public radio system.
• * NPR content (and our content, when we join the API) begins appearing all over the web, and yes, this doesn’t diminish the value of our work or our web sites; it INCREASES its value as more people encounter and discover it, and click on the links to read more.

Those points are big but that last point is BIG.

The average public radio listener visits her public radio station web site twice a MONTH.

Yes, we’re all working to add value to our sites and increase visits; we must continue to do this. (We’re busting ass on this at Louisville Public Media’s three stations and we’re seeing some great results – details to be revealed in a few months.) But when that content appears on other platforms, that’s when we’ll have a much bigger audience for what we do.

Back to that average public radio listener: she may visit publicstation.org only twice a month, but she reads a set a 10 favorite blogs twice a day. If even one of those blogs uses the API to “curate” a selection of your stories, or installs a widget like this one, guess how much you’ve increased the potential of listeners discovering your content? And clicking over to your web site to read more?

There’s more to be said about other benefits of this… but this is what makes me very excited about what NPR’s Digital team has done… what NPR management has approved.

A technical fog can descend over stories like this, but it shouldn’t. This is a BIG deal.

10am UPDATE: It’s now live. Here’s Daniel Jacobson’s post.

This is a pretty big deal… a signal of openness from NPR, a willingness to let developers have access to NPR’s content, and the beginning of what could be some really cool stuff.

What is an API? Here’s a definition only a developer could love. Here’s my somewhat mangled definition: API is an Application Programming Interface. It’s a set of tools developers can use to access parts of one web site and integrate it with another site or application. Examples? Those applications you add to your Facebook page, those cool applications that plot everything from crime data to photos on Google Maps.

NPR promises a gallery to showcase widgets when the API launches; the blog includes a link to Reverbiage, which plots NPR stories on a world map. That’s a widget I’d love to display on one of WFPL‘s News pages. There’s also a nice iPhone app from Axiom Stack. Probably the best thing about an API is that developers anywhere with good ideas can build applications that can organize and present NPR’s content in all kinds of interesting ways.

An API was one of the least sexy recommendations of the Digital Distribution Consortium – remember that? The group was hard at work two years ago at this time, trying to find ways to present a more coherent way to present public radio online.

Some of the DDC recommendations were fought over, some ignored. But, hey, NPR is about to give us, and developers everywhere, the opportunity to create new tools that add value to NPR’s (and our own) content.

The App Store will be revolutionary, and I’ve already and installed and started playing with about a dozen of them.

The one thing that does get my heart pumping is the 16GB hard drive. I bought my first phone on 6.29.07 with 4GB, an exercise in planned obsolescence: I figured I’ve save $100 and buy a phone with more capacity in ’08.

But I ran into trouble immediately. I loved the phone so much, used it so much, that 4GB wasn’t enough. I was constantly managing scarcity… juggling small chunks of my music, along with podcasts and audiobooks. I hope that with four times the capacity, I’ll spend one quarter of the time managing it.

We’ll see.

And hey, Chuck gets a (nearly) new phone tomorrow, too. So drinks all around.

FRIDAY UPDATE: A lengthy wait led to a speedy activation (4 minutes, vs. 7 hours for iPhone1 last year) and seamless transition to the new phone.

• I hate my phone call making device because it doesn’t work
• I hate my phone call making device because it works

I’m a victim of both. Why #1? Because my Treo 700P is driving me up the wall. It locks up constantly, and many days, I find myself rebooting it 7, 8, 9 times. I’m about to make demands that involve getting a new Treo, so that takes care (we hope) of that.

Why#2? Partly because I’ve never enjoyed phone conversations. Oh, I have my chatty moments, but most of the time, the phone is an intrusion that can’t be controlled except in two rather unsubtle ways – ignoring calls or turning the phone off. (My unreliable Treo offers a third way, completely out of my control.)

Is it good for messages? Voicemail is at the chimp level of message transmission. It can’t be scanned or organized. The new iPhone will display a list of voicemail messages and that will be a giant leap for humankind. In my last job, I was able to configure the system to email me my voicemail messages – an email with a tiny wav file. That was great because I could get around the archaic commands of voicemail that I could never remember. At my new job, we’re back to the world of *6, etc.

With the exception of perhaps three uses, the phone – for me – is an outdated, unhelpful tool. It’s good for meetings, and this was something I didn’t discover until about 3 years ago when I started participating in lots of conference calls. I don’t know what it is about a conference call – maybe it’s the voice pumped directly into my ears – but I often concentrate better during a call, and remember more afterward, than during a face-to-face meeting. There are also those times when email and IM simply can’t cut it – the wider bandwidth of a phone call saves about a dozen back-and-forth emails. Phone calls are good for interview situations – the high volume Q&A is more efficient over phone.

I’m a big fan of IM and I’ve used it for 10 years, at times intermittently, at times constantly. I think if there’s one drawback to it, it’s that it’s harder to control the intrusion. But when I’m in thinking or writing mode, I’ve learned to set the “away” to hold off the intrusion. To that end, the “leave a message” function in both GTalk and AIM is a nice thing.

Yes, so what have we learned? I’m a control freak. I do like to have a measure of control over the interruptions to my workflow. But I’m not so crazy as to assume I can hermetically seal myself off. What I have been reasonably successful at doing is getting people to email me rather than call. And I try to reward the email sender by being as prompt with my reply as I can be.