Quick post: We are receiving very heavy traffic this morning, mostly from people typing in our URL directly. This usually happens when we are featured in a newspaper article or radio show, but we aren’t aware of any new ones. If you have a moment, can you please let us know how you heard about our site? Thanks!
Update: Thank you all for your helpful comments! Looks like we were mentioned this morning on the nationally syndicated consumer advocate program The Clark Howard Show.
CH listeners: If this is your first time on our site, welcome! If you are interested in learning about free digital broadcast tv, start here. Or visit our Showfinder tool to see what shows you can watch without cable TV. And if you have canceled cable or are about to, please consider sharing your story.
Just checked our logs and noticed that our traffic is through the roof. Turns out we were just written up in a Washington Post article titled ‘TV Breaks Out of the Box‘.
The article mentions our Showfinder tool and talks about how canceling cable is becoming a viable alternative for some broadband users. My favorite was the anecdote about how Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer watches his favorite show (Lost) online for free as opposed to paying a dollar for it on Itunes. I think Post’s author Mike Musgrove summed it up best when he said “Ever have a billionaire make your feel dumb for leading an overly extravagant lifestyle?”
Netflix streaming movies will soon be available on Tivo and Xbox Experience. Previously, Netflix’s Instant Watch content could only be viewed on a computer or using a $99 set top box called a Roku. Since Roku, Tivo and Xbox will pull all the content off of a standard broadband connection, cable TV service is not required.
We’ve been using Netflix’s Instant Watch service since it first launched in 2007. At first the content was very minimal - mostly pretty unknown “straight to video” movies. This has changed quite a bit in the last year. Netflix has recently partnered with the STARZ movie channel and now offers more than 12,000 shows and movies which can all be watched for free.
Here’s a video demo of the Xbox Netflix interface:
Any downsides to Netflix Instant Watch? A good amount of brand new first run movies are not on it yet, so you may have to wait a day or two to get those in the mail on DVD. The fast forward and rewind controls are slightly clunky, although they do work pretty well once you get used to them. Also it appears that only the new Tivos (Series III and HD) and latest Xbox (Xbox Experience) will support Netflix.
Just read a great post by Seth Godin called Hungry, which explains how marketers are great at teaching well-fed consumers to want to eat more than they need. He mentions canceling cable as a prime example. Cable TV used to fill a unique need. Twenty years ago, it was the only way to get first run movies and was an exciting alternative to the content available on the three networks. Cable was introduced at a reasonable price and it’s adoption soared.
Things have changed. We now have free digital broadcast tv, DVDs, Hulu.com, Netflix and fixed price set top boxes like Roku. In spite of this competition, cable prices have only gone up. Yet it’s still hard for most of us to make the phone call and cancel cable TV. Why? Because we still want our snack despite being full.
