The Most Roundabout Post On The Information Age Ever

Digital cable is a buggy invention. This is, of course, the "upgraded" version of cable. It's more channels, better picture, better sound, more features. Most people don't realize they have digital cable in their home. It's piggybacked on the basic cable signal. But you can't watch unless you have the cable box that decodes the signal. The problem with that box is that the decompression of the video signal causes a lot of glitches: video artifacts, missing sound, loss of signal altogether. Adding TiVo to the mess compounds the problem. The signal runs through TiVo, and it controls your cable box. Any problems the cable signal might have with the cable box are amplified by TiVo. If your cable box loses the signal for a couple of seconds (a common occurrence), TiVo will just lose it altogether. And this is how my TiVo ended up only taping the first 15 minutes of Wednesday's episode of Lost before recording 50 minutes of blackness. (The Girl watched the episode live, and saw the whole thing, no blackout. Fucking TiVo.)

Now, normally, when I miss an episode of something, I'd wait for the reruns, or procure it in some "other" manner. And then I remembered something...

Remember like 10 years ago, when all these media companies started merging? AOL bought TimeWarner, Disney bought ABC, Viacom bought Paramount and CBS. Back then, the buzzwords were "synergy" and "multimedia." They all wanted to come up with new means to offer their content to people (and make shitloads of money); they wanted to put content on the internet. It was all pretty much big talk, until a month ago, when ABC announced it was going to offer episodes of its most popular shows for free over the internet. (It already offers these shows for $1.99 a pop on iTunes, but this is FREE, with limited commercial interruptions.) And this is how I ended up watching the last 50 minutes of Lost over the internet on ABC.com. It's pretty fucking slick if you have a broadband connection fast enough to run it. Check it out.

Oh, BTW, happy Cinco de Mayo.