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I'll Take Two Terminators With a Side of Stallone

© Chris Brown

I thought I would take a short break from our series on the upcoming video game wars and take a look at an exciting new technology that may change the way we view movies in the near future... If you're lucky enough to have a broadband connection. (Count me out then)

In light of the recent economic hardships, one might make the assumption that the electronics industry is in for a tumble. Of course one would be wrong, but we won't be too hard on them for making this honest mistake. Here I'd like to take a look at why we needn't worry about how we'll get our electronic kicks in the near future.

We recently canceled our Satellite Television subscription, not because of any problems with the company or the content. It was more of a family decision. It was decided that we would simply record a lot of our favorite shows and then we could watch those at any time and spend more time as a family, instead of watching the endless stream of nothing being piped into our house. I know, it sounds a bit cynical, but honestly there were over 100 channels, and I could name only a handful of shows in all of that airspace that were worth watching.

Of course the biggest problem isn't not having anything to watch, but trying to weed through the things you don't want to see to try and find the things you do. Electronic appliances such as TiVo and the like, have given us one option in allowing us to simply tell it the shows we like to watch, and it will grab those throughout a day or week, and then we can watch them at our leisure. We can even pause live TV and do our own little instant replay, and then continue watching the program as if nothing had happened. All of this is accomplished most often by a high speed hard drive at the heart of the unit which digitally records our shows and then plays them back at our wish and whim. With a little ingenuity you can even record the shows to videocassette to play back again and again, without having to use your TiVo's hard drive up.

The problem with these devices is that you are still limited in the amount you can store, and still locked into the network's broadcasting schedule.

How would you like to be able to search for a movie you'd like to watch, pay a small fee, and watch the movie for a certain amount of time without having to go to a video rental store, or waiting for the movie you want to see to come on Pay-Per-View? Some enterprising Internet companies are hoping to take advantage of the widening access to broadband Internet connections to offer just this service. At this time the movie selection is limited to some of the lower budget movies and independent films out there, and the video size and quality is not DVD quality by any means, but the idea is in place and will be built upon. In my imagination major studios and networks will soon get on the bandwagon, providing pay-for-play access to movies and TV shows from their immense vaults. The three things that need to be improved in order to do this are as follows:

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