I still have a shortlist of extensions that won’t work with FF3, but this was the big one; for a while now, I’ve been working with FF2 and FF3, reserving FF2 for travel so I could use the offline functionality of Gears. Now, I can “offline” using FF3.

I’ve written more about my LIKE for Gears here.

Thanks to Sally Church! Her tweet about Gears reminded me…

A few caveats: we’re not a household that spends 4 hours a day in front of the TV. We’re not big consumers of the current hit series, with a couple exceptions. We don’t watch much live sports or live news. So keeping that in mind, let’s look at what’s available.

TV… Meet the Mouse

This little saga began with a new house, a difficult satellite install that led us to settle for cable, and our general dissatisfaction with the results. In March, we hauled Chuck’s old Mac G5 out of the closet and hooked it up to the TV. Yes, we can now write emails in a font large enough that passersby can read. We don’t do that, though. We watch the web. Most of that stuff out there in the cloud scales nicely to full-screen with a click of the mouse and a lot of it looks great. And connecting the computer to the TV opens up a whole range of viewing possibilities. So much so, that cable and satellite are superfluous.

Local Digital Television

We plugged in the Eye TV Hybrid USB tuner I bought last year, installed the software, hooked up a small indoor antenna (we live near the tall towers), and we have access to our local SD and HD signals. Elgato’s software uses your computer as a PVR, so I set up a few shows for the software to capture (Charlie Rose, NOVA). Done.

I want to stop for a minute and think about the enormity of this single change. It’s big for me, at least, because, since 1980 (the year my parents got cable), I’ve lived in a world where video was delivered over coax and not over-the-air. There are still large numbers of viewers who watch OTA TV, but if you had told me 5 years ago that I’d be buying an antenna for broadcast TV, I would have thought you were crazy. What changed all that? Digital encoding, first of all: as long as you can get a usable signal, it looks great; there’s no in-between. Second, cable’s truly awful compression of of video, including HD, as companies have tried to add more and more channels on finite bandwidth. (I think satellite-delivered HD – also compressed – looks better, but I couldn’t care less about that debate.)

OK, so now we have the networks, as well as the local PBS multicast (four channels in Kentucky.)

Hulu.com

The content platform from NBCU and Fox now includes lots of other providers, and as much as I didn’t want to like it at first, we spend a couple hours a week now, watching current and archive episodes of The Simpsons, Arrested Development, Top Chef and some classic TV shows on Hulu. It’s a go-to place for currently available network content. So are ABC, CBS, CW etc., all of which offer some full-length episodes. Hulu (and most other network platforms) insert commercials, which you can’t easily avoid, but in the case of Hulu, each break generally lasts 30-seconds or less. I think I’ll survive. The streaming service is reliable, and looks great when it’s fullscreen on a 32-inch LCD.

iTunes Music Store: TV Shows

There’s a lot of stuff here from a variety of networks – shows that might be harder to find elsewhere, at least before they reach DVD – from sources like History Channel and BBC America. One Saturday night a few weeks ago, we bought a couple episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations series from the Travel Channel. For $4, we got 90 minutes of entertainment. We thought it was a good exchange. You can also subscribe to a season from many series and get automatic delivery of new episodes. (Hulu has just added this feature, although it’s an addition of the episodes to a queue, not delivery, since Hulu is a streaming service.)

iTunes Music Store + The Internets: Video Podcasts

Video podcasts are taking off, but file size and download speeds, as well as viewing habits, generally dictate that these podcasts are on the short side. Still there’s great stuff to match your interests. We watch Winelibrary TV nearly every day, for instance. Automatically downloaded (like any other podcast), the video looks just fine on a 32 inch LCD. I subscribe to ScobelizerTV and a few other techie podcasts, too. I used to watch on my notebook or iPhone, but I’ve transferred these subscriptions to the TV. More video podcasts are also switching to HD.

Joost

I use this platform sometimes on my notebook, but the Mac version is limited to Intel Macs – our TV-connected G5 is a PowerPC model. Were it not for that, we’d watch more video on Joost.

Netflix

Whether you’re streaming movies and docs from Netflix or getting them in the mail, I count them as networked video because of their speedy delivery and large selection.

Personal Public Television

I named this category for what I think would be the perfect Me-PBS. Of course, no one would ever watch it but me, but you can make you own personal PBS or CSPAN, too, with stuff you find fascinating.

• Fora.tv, which features all kinds of smart television, from seminars at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to the Long Now Foundation. I import feeds from some providers directly into iTunes, and I’ve created some custom feeds for specific topics.
• iTunesU, part of the Music Store, has a wealth of lectures and college courses from around the country. There’s a lot of audio, but you’ll find a growing library of video, too, produced by universities, KQED, LinkTV and the New York Public Library, among others.
• Google Tech Talks. Google brings some of the smartest people around to its campuses to speak to staff, and Google shares nearly all of it free. The tech talks are probably the most well known, but if you search, you’ll find a range of guest speakers. I’ve grabbed the Tech Talks feed and iTunes takes care of the rest.
• Beet.tv. I wouldn’t call myself a heavy viewer of Beet.tv, but I have the feed in iTunes, and regularly find interesting short-form, technology-related content there.
• CBC and Radio-Canada: We watch The National from CBC occasionally, as well as CBC Montreal’s evening news. We’re glad to have it, but CBC doesn’t offer a full-screen viewing option. Such an omission was acceptable in 2005. It isn’t now. Radio-Canada’s 24-hour French news network, RDI, streams most of the time and we watch that, too.
• ABC Australia: a few shows are available for download, including The Cook and the Chef – personal favorite. (ABC has a history of good cooking shows – Kylie Kwong and Surfing the Menu among them. Kwong made it to the US on Discovery Home; I don’t think Surfing has.)
• One of the best sites to discover new content for your Me-PBS channel is Open Culture.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re still going around telling that old joke that the only video on the Internet is stupid cat tricks, you should really have a look around.

Most of the content I’ve listed above downloads to your computer; having a fast connection isn’t required. But for Hulu and other streaming services like ABC.com and Joost, you’ll need a decent broadband service. (We have 20Mbps at home, but even a basic 1.5Mbps DSL or cable modem service should work well, depending on what else you’re doing online.)

What will we miss by cutting the coax? A few things, I suppose. A number of shows aren’t available online. I like a few Food network shows, but Food is pretty much a non-player online, unless you count the small video effort on its own site. I’d like to see all of the Scripps networks get on board with iTunes, Hulu or Joost. There’s also very little HD online yet; programs like Discovery Atlas look good on iTunes but they’re breathtaking on DiscoveryHD.

But, after years of paying more and more to get access to hundreds of channels that I don’t watch, plus the small number that I do, I think we’re just about at the point where we can let it go, and in return, discover a wealth of stuff we can enjoy.

UPDATE: Lest, I create confusion, I’m canceling my cable subscription, but not my cable broadband service. So I’ll still have a black cable coming out of the wall. Where I live, cable provides the fastest Internet service and I want speed. For the bean-counters, my monthly Internet charge will rise (because of the cable company bundling strategy), but I’ll still be paying around $50/month less without cable.

There aren’t many places in the urban sphere anymore where we can’t get a speedy, reliable connection to the Internet. There’s just one big exception: airplanes. We’ve seen a few baby steps toward in-flight Internet, but for most of us, the metal tube is an network-free zone.

Yes, there are benefits to this – no loud phone conversations, no new mail dribbling in while you’re pursuing Inbox Zero. But, many of us have shifted our email, task lists, and other key operations to web apps; five hours on a transcontinental flight without those apps is a long time to be deprived of your tools, and improvising with text files and sticky notes just means more work once you’re online again.

Google Gears has been around for awhile now, but I’m only writing about it now because it’s just now having a real impact on how I work when I’m not connected to the tubes.

Google Reader

When Google launched Gears, Reader was the first Google tool to sport the functionality. (That was the case till just a few days ago.) I track all my feeds in Reader, so the ability to download up to 2000 articles, read offline, share and star them, and sync up later, gave me reams of reading material and ended in-flight purgatory.

Remember the Milk

I love this task management system: it integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar, Quicksilver, Twitter, mobile, etc., etc., which means you have all kinds of ways to get stuff into the Trusted System and track it. RTM was also an early adopter of Gears, enabling full offline access and syncing.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

As I write this, Google is progressively rolling out offline functionality to Docs users. The Docs implementation is somewhat more sophisticated: it syncs and then responds automatically, going local when you’re offline, reconnecting and syncing when you’ve acquired a connection again.

I’m highlighting these three services because there the ones that matter most to me. Other webapps also use Gears – a list is here.

Pre-Board Workflow

Now, when I’m about to pull the plug on the Internet, I open three tabs in Firefox, one each for Google Reader, Google Docs and Remember the Milk. Docs auto-syncs, and for the other two applications, I press the button to go offline. The switch to offline is nearly immediate, except for Reader, which downloads articles. This generally takes less than a minute.

When I open my laptop after take-off, I have access to these apps in an environment which mimics almost exactly the experience of being connected.

Almost. You can write and edit documents, create, tag, modify and delete tasks in RTM, and highlight blog posts to share on Google Reader. You can’t make changes to application settings, and in Docs, you can’t create a new document while offline. (This is also the case, at last check, with Zoho Writer’s offline functionality.)

In fact, this thing with creating a new document is the only thing that regularly annoys me about offline Docs. But I created a simple workaround: an empty document called “offline notes.” Any new document I want to create while offline goes on this empty page. Once I’m online, I copy it to another new document or rename the existing file and make a new “offline notes” file.

What if something goes wrong with sync and all your offline work disappears, never to be seen again? I take an extra precaution and copy the text into TextEdit, Word or Pages, so I have a local backup just in case.

Offline Wishlist

Every geek has their own version of this list. Mine includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook, Google Wiki, Backpack, Buzzword and WordPress software. I don’t doubt for a second that developers of these webapps are working on it, whether they’re building it on Gears, or Adobe’s offline platform or whatever.

But web-to-local software integration also helps bridge the gap. Gmail POP3 and IMAP means I can write email in Mail.app or any other traditional email program and send it when I’m back online, and Spanning Sync (or similar programs) seamlessly keeps iCal and Gcal in lock-step, making iCal my offline Gcal.

There are a few keys to making this functionality successful – and the centerpiece is a seam-free blurring of boundaries between online and offline. Ubiquitous wifi is reducing the white space in between our internet connections; technology like Gears helps to make the white space somewhat irrelevant.

UPDATE 6/10/08: Gears now works with Firefox 3!