My wife and I sold our house this past week. We're building a new house close buy in a slightly more expensive neighborhood that I am hoping will deliver a better ROI this time around. The theory goes that the subdivision is new and when it is complete, everyone's homes will be worth more......
I like it. Let's get that out of the way because it hasn't been as smooth sailing as I would have hoped. For instance, a week after I installed the computer, it froze up on me during recorded TV playback on the Xbox 360 in our living room. It did this just as I was getting the wife acceptance...
Insight Communications came to my house this morning and I have to say that the appointment went better than I had originally thought it would. The guy who visited my house was easy to work with and polite. I'm not sure that he knew that he was installing a CableCARD based on his surprise when I explained what I thought the visit was supposed to be about. I believe he thought it was a repair appointment as per the conversation I had with Insight Communications' support desk late last week.. Anyway, turns out that the fitting on my cable amplifier's power cable was bad. Since this is a manufacturer made part, I can only assume that the recent heat in our area cause the cable to expand and come lose causing the power to the amplifier to cut out; boom no cable service.
The signal issue was fixed in short order and he went to his car to get 3 - 4 CableCARDs. I've heard that they are flaky devices so I was glad that he brought a few of them with him so that we could get it right in one visit. His first question was if I was going to install this into a Tivo to which I replied nope and thought to myself that I was in for an eventful install. I told him that I was putting the card into the back of a PC and he replied that he had never heard nor seen this done before. In fact, I was the first person he's seen do this so he was going into the setup process blind. So much so, that the tech responisble for activating the CableCARD was trying to tell him that the configuration was not legal. I might be the first CableCARD in a Ceton tuner in Louisville based on these guys' reaction to my install. Doubt it, but it might be true.
First thing we do is pull the computer out of the shelf and insert the CableCARD. Small word about this process for Ceton:
It's been an interesting journey to setup my media center PC. First thing that happened to me was, I realized that the motherboard I ordered did not have an HDMI output. Oops. One NewEgg RMA later, a $25 restock fee, a $12 shipping label and I was set to order the correct motherboard. Had it overnighted to me so that I could put the PC together this weekend.
I get the motherboard and head to the office to carefully put the parts together and luck would have it, my OS hard drive was delivered to me DOA. One more NewEgg RMA and a $9 restock + label fee for a $49 refund. In the interest of time, I decided to simply partition one of the 2TB drives with the understanding that I would probably image the partition to a new HDD at some point. I had to get the setup working this weekend. The Cable installation guy is coming Monday morning. More on this in a minute.
Install sails along from there. Windows 7 is truly an amazing operating system. I remember when OS installs were a big pain in the ass. These days, Windows 7 simply loads and is up and running in no time. I added the machine to the domain, partitioned and mirrored the other two drives and was off and running with a new home for my personal media.
It was then that I realized three issues with my setup.
Thursday, I took the next step in my Windows Media Center project and purchased the media center PC. Here's what I bought, though keep in mind that I have a good power supply, case and case fans. I have a UPS and a Harmony 890 remote so those costs are not reflected in this project. I now have a modern PC that can be a true Windows 7 machine. Moment of silence here for the impending death of my first and only dual CPU workstation. It's been faithfully doing whatever I asked it to do for 9 years. I've isntalled Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 Ultimate on this box with nary a driver issue in sight. The Xeon processors still garner a 5.3 Windows Performance score under Windows 7. This machine is a testament to how PCs should work. I hope this machine has the same results. I'm only replacing the machine because Ceton requires PCIe and because I feel like I am tempting fate by keeping my pictures and home movies on a 9 year old PC.
This morning, I jumped on to Michael's Insight blog as I do about once a month to find an article pointing to some news about Netflix that pertains to my earlier post about Netflix's poor family support for streaming. The GigaOM article mentions family plans and Michael's Insight simply reported that as the truth but if you read the Investor FAQ, it isn't quite that clear.
More recently, as streaming has become central to our business, we believe there may be an opportunity to change our focus from a household relationship to an individual relationship, since streaming is viewed on personal devices, such as phones, tablets, and laptops, as well as on shared large screen televisions. As we think about this shift from a household to a personal relationship, we are starting to think internally that our opportunity could be viewed as the number of mobile phone subscribers, a group that both invests in electronic content and can afford $7.99 for home entertainment. Needless to say, that is a large opportunity.
I can see how this could be interpreted to mean "Family Plans" but what it seems to mean is that Netflix is looking to make individual plans cost competitive for families. The drive seems to be coming from the cell phone industry and the recent announcement of Facebook integration. The idea is that while DVD's are sent to a household, streams are sent to individual devices which in the case of computers, netbooks, tablets and cell phones are person devices. TVs are the only truly shared devices that streaming services can be sent to so maintaining the "household" distinction in its business model prevents them from evolving the service and making more money. That said, I hope the GigaOM interpretation is correct.
Netflix delivered another blow to its competitors yesterday in signing its first piece of original programming, "House of Cards". The signing is significant for a couple of reasons. First let me outline the industry as it stands today.
Last Saturday morning, the following exchange happened in my house:
When my wife told me that she was going to buy my kids a couple of 22" HDTV's for Christmas, I casually brushed it off and thought nothing of it. If that's what they wanted, then great, let em have em for the holidays. The next couple of days were filled with what do you think of this TV and that TV before she settled on a Vizio HDTV in a Target ad for $199 each. Still, I thought it to be a good idea and certainly didn't expect the purchase to turn into a three and a half day project.
After she buys the TV's she tells me that she thinks it would be best if they were hung on the wall. A pair of $40 mounts later and the 22" TV's are now $239 each. Then it hit me. Hanging these things on the walls in their bedrooms was no small project. Every house has plugs and cable jacks about 18" off the floor. None that I have been in have been prewired with power, cable, Ethernet and media jacks to the middle of the wall. Looks like I had a project on my hands so I needed to plan.
How was I going to get cable television to the TVs? That's when my Windows Media Center plan was given birth. Set-top boxes from the cable company was out of the question. With 5 HDTVs in the house now, I needed a better way than shelling out $79.75 in set-top box fees every month. Unfortunately, the department of budgeting and planning didn't like my $2,000 Windows Media Center proposal. It was Christmas after all, and we needed to spend money elsewhere she told me.
In this first installment, I talk about the current situation I am in with all of the TV's in my home being HDTVs. With the shift to HDTV, it has become more and more expensive to get this content to your televisions. HD is barely free for the channels that are important to my family. If all we watched...
