A Path to Success

The Future TV is most definitely apps - content apps

Our family cancelled our Netflix account today. We've cut the (TV) cord after we moved into our house and decided against spending $100 per month on cable TV services. It just wasn't in the budget and seemed like an easy luxury to cut along with a newspaper subscription. The digital world is most definitely changing the way we consume content, step by step, value proposition by value proposition.

Instead, we installed a cheap $25 antenna to local channels that are within 20 miles of our house. We can't pickup the US stations in Buffalo, but that would require a multi hundred dollar installation as well. Do we miss those stations? Not really.

Instead what we've decided to do is shape our habits and become selective about what we consume. Just like a food diet, a TV/News/Media consumption diet is good for the soul. You spend less time on the couch. You are more selective about what you choose -- you listen to advice, curation and your gut feel about putting less junk into your diet.

The result is fantastic. With our AppleTV (we'll soon have 2), a Synology Diskstation and an OTA antenna we get the best entertainment money can buy. We rent videos only when they make sense and are compelling on Bluray, we only watch TV shows we can easily buy on iTunes.

With HBO Go recently launching on Xbox 360, it seems that the likely way consumers like us will be appeased is with apps that live stream content and make archives available for a monthly or yearly fee. Each app will feature a show or a network of shows. Anything less is unacceptable in this age, so it's just a matter of figuring out a transition path in terms of pricing and packaging.

How Mr. Blanzy and Mrs. Miller Helped me Learn Computer Science in 5th Grade

This is near and dear to my heart. In 1981, while I attended 5th grade at Avery Public School in Oak Park, Michigan, Mr. Blanzy introduced me and a few other bright math students to an Apple ][+. It sat behind the classroom, with it's green screen monitor, waiting to be discovered. 

The next year Mrs. Miller started an after school computer club where a small group of kids worked on programs and displayed them on a big projector screen hooked up via a funky video out interface on our Apple //e. We wrote BASIC and launched space shuttles (remember NASA launched Columbia, the first space shuttle recently) on screen. We watched the booster rocket parts descendto a "splashdown". The program all used ASCII and we marvelled at the beauty of how building something, piece by piece could accomplish something that to us looked like art. For the next 5 years until the end of high school, I studied programming with my Nibble magazine and did machine language entry of cool games, modified existing LONG BASIC programs, cracked games, got my first 300 bps modem and occupied my parents phone lines for hours on end. I eventually upgraded to a 2400bps Practical Peripherals external modem, and I thought that speed was unlimited then. Today, the slowest high speed Internet connection at 1Mbps is literally 500 times faster than this "speedy" modem. The 25Mbps connection then is over 12,000 times faster. Regular phone lines were used, and we didn't have call waiting whose clicks would interrupt my BBSing. Only picking up the phone caused my line to drop. Mom and Dad never bothered me and never told me to "get off the phone". They knew something amazing was happening. My mind was opening up.

These days, kids Hoogle, copy stuff of Wikipedia and rarely actually LEARN how computers work. Most kids take these gadgets for granted. But it does seem like the UK is doing something about it. I love the arduino, netduino and sites like instructables.com -- but parents are now engaging their kids it seems, rather than schools. So I ask is there a place for computer science in schools like in the 80s? Even a better version?