A few weeks ago, I got my husband to agree to cutting off our cable television service. See ya, Time Warner Cable. See ya, Time Warner Cable bill.

Reading about Fred Wilson’s thoughts on the subject (wow, that link is old and yet still valid), and hearing from @lieblink, it has long been obvious to me that the future of television-watching is digital and on-demand. Watching our household’s video viewing habits — a lot of Amazon On-Demand, some Netflix Instant Queue, a great deal of TiVo-ed kids’ programming, and some live TV here and there — I realized that, with just a few slight modifications, we could ditch the cable boxes and save $71/month.

The person for whom this poses the most difficulty (and he’s already asked me to call TWC a couple of times) is my husband. He’s fond of live sports and live sports news — some of which are actually available online, but he’s not accustomed to using these sources yet. For the kids and me, it hasn’t been a difficult adjustment, as there is still plenty of programming available with our new configuration.

Here’s our set up:

• Analog TV set (vintage 2004 or so).
  
• Digital to analog converter box
  
• Amplified indoor antenna (“rabbit ears”)
  
• Roku box for Netflix and Amazon On-Demand
  
• TiVo for recording broadcast TV and a little on-demand (Series 2)
  

I’d love to have Apple TV or some other way to watch YouTube, Hulu, etc. on our TV, but we are getting along pretty well just now. The most challenging part, thus far, is when we hear about some kind of news event — a plane and helicopter colliding over the Hudson, for example — and want to turn on CNN or NY1 for the on-the-scene coverage. We’re trying to train ourselves to find something acceptable online. Wish us luck.

Battelle in AdAge on CrowdFire:

“We want to get a cloud of media to become something fungible that people can see and work with to create new things,” he said. “I want the performance to go from one-to-many to many-to-many.”

Very cool.

Reading one of my colleague’s blogs today (FM is rife with bloggers, wouldn’t you know it?), I got interested in checking out a podcast he mentioned: a lecture by Michael Pollan, of The Omnivore’s Dilemma fame. But, that’s as far as I could get.

To actually listen to this podcast, I have to remember — when I get home, after a busy day at work — to fire up iTunes, search for this podcast, and subscribe. Yeah, that’ll happen. Not.

One thing I love about my TiVo service is that I can go to the Web interface (still not as good as the ReplayTV service was, but pretty decent), and subscribe to a season pass of a new show that I recently heard about. On Netflix, I can go over and queue up the newest, hottest independent film reviewed in the NYT, months before it’s actually released on DVD. On Amazon, I can impulsively start a TiVo download of a movie or TV show that I suddenly remember I’d like to see.

In all these case, my entertainment is basically sent to me, after a few keystrokes, and it’s ready for me to enjoy whenever I find the time. Why can’t I do this on iTunes? Am I missing something?

I’ve been so wrapped up in the latest project I’ve been involved with at FM that I haven’t had time to post about it: the FM Holiday Gadget Guide.

Though it’s sponsored solely by Best Buy, the FM authors involved — some of the Web’s most well-known gadget aficionados — have complete free range, editorially. I’ve gotten a real kick out of reading their posts, and have developed a hankering for a couple of things featured. Anyway, it’s been fun, and it’ll be up and running through the end of the year.

So, researchers at University College, London, have come up with geographical classifications of the various levels of e- (as in electronic) awareness, and are allowing people to put in their postcodes to see how their area ranks.

I entered in my husband’s old postcode in Scotland and, och, the results were depressing:

The ‘E – unengaged’ are typically groups that do not have access to electronic communications or technologies. Most are too old, too poor or too poorly educated to be able to access them, and instead traditionally rely upon personal contacts they trust for advice. Within this Group there are low levels of literacy and many people do not feel that their life outcomes are much subject to their own decisions. Within this group there is a very low level of ownership of personal computers, very little access to them at work and little ambition to master the skills necessary to take advantage of information technologies. Unsurprisingly, these people have a very low level of using email at any location (home, work and other locations) or participating in other on-line activities.

Members of this Group tend to live in the poorer areas of traditional mining and manufacturing towns and to have conservative social attitudes. A high proportion of the Group is made up of elderly people, many of whom live in social housing or sheltered accommodation.

Type A04 : Mobile’s the limit

This Type has particularly low levels of use of computers and the Internet, knows next to nothing about the technology and has no motivation to do so. They enjoy more traditional modes of communication, but the mobile phone represents the limit of their technical ambition. Many of this Type are female and elderly.

No digital savvy, and no motivation to learn. It probably says more about me that I’m horrified at this. They may be perfectly satisfied with their lot in life.

Here’s the BBCi write-up.

[via PaidContent.org]

I’ve been checking out a couple new travel search engines that add the element of time to the equation. First is FareCast, which John Battelle blogged about recently. Second is FareCompare.com, which was written up in the WSJ yesterday (free link for 7 days).

To be honest, until I have a real trip to plan, and until these sites get a little further developed, it’s hard for me to offer an opinion. But I wanted to highlight them here in case you’re interested in taking a look yourself. I’ve got 23 invitations for the FareCast beta left, so e-mail me at theriver *at* mcnigel.com if you want one.

UPDATE: Gary Price shares why FareCast was formerly called Hamlet. In keeping with the idea that a fare forecast can tell you whether to purchase now or wait for a better deal, their motto was “to buy, or not to buy….”

Mark Cuban hits the nail on the head with a post titled “The end of boredom”. His point? In this technology/media-fueled modern world, one need never stare into space. One need never spend a few moments inside one’s head, just thinking. One need never look around at other people who may be sharing one’s space — at the gym, on the train, on the street. Instead, we’re listening to music, watching TV, and otherwise keeping ourselves entertained during those little pauses in our lives. Is this a good thing for society? (It may be a great thing for media makers and advertisers….)

Everybody‘s talking about Yahoo! Mail’s integration of RSS, but — despite the fact that I use Yahoo! as my primary e-mail client for all non-work mail — I can’t use it. Why? Because I’m a Yahoo! SBC (soon to be AT&T?) customer and I have a different (read:lame and behind-the-times) interface. It’s so pathetic that those of us paying Yahoo! (and SBC) for access get these little bells-and-whistles rolled out so much later than everyone else. Also still waiting for the Yahoo! Photos feature that lets you attach a bunch of pictures to an e-mail. What’s the deal, Yahoo!? *Sigh*

The product for the next great wave of spam (if it hasn’t already happened already): Tamiflu. Or Tamiflu-copycats.

UPDATE: Yup.

“Spammers are registering hundreds of domain names to market and sell bird flu medication,” said Mark Adams, Technical Support Director for SpamStopsHere. “At one point we were blocking over 150,000 bird flu related spam emails per day. We expect that as media coverage and public concern increases, the bird flu spam problem will get much worse before it gets better.”

I’m going to be at the Web 2.0 Conference later this week, and am really looking forward to it. It looks to be a little more technology-centric than marketing-centric, but somewhere in all these new gee-whiz gadgets there’ve got to be some ad-supported business models or ad-enabling technologies. Look forward to meeting people, etc. It’s my first conference post birth-of-baby, so I might force folks I know to look at pictures or videos of the little one on my camera phone. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Drop me a line and let me know to look out for you if you’ll be there.