From Christian:

find /home/backup/ -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +7 -exec rm -r {} \;

From Michael:

find /home/backup/ -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +7 -exec echo “Removing Directory => {}” \; -exec rm -rf “{}” \;

The first one works quietly, while the second one will display what is being deleted. These are probably faster than putting it into a for loop, so feel free to use whatever works best in your particular situation!

Good:

• The platform is open. This is the way to go, and will allow developers to go hog wild and develop things that even the Google engineers couldn’t envision.
• TV/Web Integration. The Google TV platform appears to have great web and video integration, including live TV. The overlays look beautiful and web/TV switches effortlessly. But that basically makes it WebTV.
• Working with hardware partners. This gives the platform a much better chance of seeing the light of day. It appears they are working with Sony, Dish, Logitech and other hardware companies.
• The Android market. Integration with this means you already have tons of apps at your disposal on your system.
• Search integration. Will make it easy to find both local and online content.

Bad:

• Needing an existing cablebox to bring in live TV. This is an uncessessary step – you should be able to bring in Live TV streams using a CableCard. Could support for this be forthcoming?
• Uses existing TV infrastructure. The future is in IP TV.

Questions:

• How expensive will the box be and will it be available from cable/satellite providers? If available from television providers (at least Dish) then it will be available for a monthly ‘rental’ fee. If Google tries to sell this as a stand-alone product, ala Tivo, it will be a bigger up-front cost that many consumers are not used to paying. However, Google may be able to make this cheaper than we think, because they subsidize services from ad revenue. Advertisers are willing to pay for information such as what viewers are watching. Google will be sitting on a goldmine of data.
• How will this impact other “Television” set tops such as Tivo, BeyondTV, Boxee, MythTV? It greatly depends on adoption rates, cost and utility.

Regarding the issue with the existing TV infrastructure, this product could be revolutionary. I’m not sure if this is because they are trying to avoid stepping on the big cable providers toes but with a device like this the existing cable network is unnecessary. Google owns a lot of fiber, and therefore a lot of bandwidth. They could offer their own live IPTV offering, and it could be available directly on the Google TV platform. This is probably where they are aiming to go in 2 or more years. Its prohibitive to many companies at a reasonable rate because the cost to stream high definition television to many homes is great.

YouTube essentially already has the infrastructure in place for IPTV. They already have the ability to stream any live video stream in fairly decent quality. I imagine what is holding them back if the agreements with the content providers (channels) like Discovery, MTV, NBC Universal, etc. If the old don’t get on board soon, they will be in 5-10 years where the newspaper industry is now.

I am looking forward to what the Google TV platform is going to offer. A bonus would be if you could run it on additional hardware other than hardware offered by Sony or other companies. Since it is open source, this is a distinct possibility and we could see a lot come from this, even if the hardware itself proves unsuccessful. There is one thing Google has a lot of — vision — and it would be great to see that on your television.

ls -R | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' \
-e 's/^/ /' -e 's/-/|/'

What’s going on here?

• ls -R — list files and directories recursively
• grep ":$" — find lines with : at the end (so only the directories)
• sed -e — evaluate expressions on the lines
• s/:$// — remove ‘:’ at the end of the line
• s/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g — replaces text between / / lines (parent directories) with — , globally on each line
• s/^/ / — add space at the beginning of the lines
• s/-/|/ — replace first – of the line with |

I reduced this using the following command. The most notable difference is that I use find instead of ls, which results in also viewing .hidden directories. I’m not sure which command is faster.

find ./ -type d | sed -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g;s/--/ |-/'

Both commands result in a formatted directory listing, demonstrated below:

|-sitetransfer
 |---redacteddomain.com
 |-----cache
 |-----templates
 |-------skidoo_too
 |---------images
 |-----------_vti_cnf
 |---------css
 |-----------_vti_cnf
 |---------js
 |-----------scriptaculous
 |-------------src
 |-------------lib
 |---------admin_templates

I recently got rid of my cable box and implemented a do-it-yourself solution. Since HBO is a premium channel and encrypted, they force you to either buy a cable box via subscription or also a cable-card (which they also charge for). This actually gives me a unique perspective on the service: would I pay for HBO to receive the HBO GO online only offering?

Starting with the online interface, I was actually very impressed with it. It is done entirely in flash and is simple to use. To receive access to HBO GO at this point, you must be a Verizon FiOS TV subscriber and also be signed up to receive HBO. HBO will eventually be offering this to other cable providers in the future as part of the TV Anywhere initiative. Once you log in you are presented with an image-rich user interface. You filter by TV show, movies and categories and everything was very intuitive. Information is available on shows and movies, including any extra available content. There is a ‘watchlist’ where you can add your content into a queue which will play through automatically.

By default, video will play in “SD” or Standard Definition. The quality is what you would expect, some graininess and compression is visible. However, there is a small switch named “Watch in HD”. The video looks simply spectacular in HD. If I had to guess I would say that it is in 720p resolution, which isn’t too bad for streaming video which has a very small buffer time.

The main drawback I saw was that the selection isn’t great, but it does give you a sample of the premium content available on HBO. It does offer HBO-only shows such as True Blood, The Sopranos, The Wire and a few more. Each category holds a dozen or so shows, and not the entire HBO library. However next to Netflix the movie selection is extremely sparse. As the service stands, I would not see it being valuable as a movie-streaming service. HBO really needs to up the ante and offer the majority of their content on their website if subscribers are paying for it. Curb Your Enthusiasm is a notable missing series.

Another technical detail I wish to touch on is how they chose to use Adobe Flash for the technology for streaming video. I have a somewhat older CPU and Machine (Athlon X2 4200 CPU) and on Adobe 10.0 I did see some significant frame dropping, especially in HD mode. Having learned about Flash 10.1 beta coming out of Adobe Labs, and knowing that it is optimized to use your GPU to play flash video, I tried upgrading and it significantly improved the video performance. Windowed performance was a little shaky but Full-Screen framerate was great. If you are running an older system, consider upgrading to the latest Flash versions for the best video performance.

There has been some talk about HBO possibly offering the HBO GO site to non-cable subscribers for a monthly fee. If they are going to be successful at offering an online-only offering, they will need to offer ALL, or at least a majority, of their shows and a larger movie library which equals their cable offerings. Without that, they are offering a restricted service which is basically just placating the growing demand for on-demand video from content providers and not setting the proper tone as a premium content provider.

The images below are screenshots from the service, to give you an idea as to how beautiful the interface is:

In summary, the HBO GO online on-demand video streaming service from HBO is a delight to use and the quality and performance is spectacular. However, the lack of content is obvious and if they wish to really attract subscribers they are going to have to offer much more. Otherwise it is just one of those extra services that might gain a few followers but isn’t going to drive users to the service in droves. I applaud HBO for dipping their toes into the online video streaming world – now they need to embrace it and lead us into the future of premium video content online.

Seinfeld-(The Wig Master)-2003-09-26-0(1).avi
Seinfeld-(The Wink)-2004-01-03-0.avi
Seinfeld-(The Wizard)-2004-02-26-0.avi
Seinfeld-(The Yada Yada)-2003-06-04-0.avi
Seinfeld-(The Pen)-2004-06-22-0.avi

I created a CSV file, and from the powers of the Amazon Mechanical Turk services, generated an entire list of the correct filenames, in the format:

Seinfeld.7x19.The.Wig.Master.avi
Seinfeld.7x04.The.Wink.avi
Seinfeld.9x15.The.Wizard.avi
Seinfeld.8x19.The.Yada.Yada.avi
Seinfeld.3x03.The.Pen.avi

Now I just needed a way to actually do the rename.

The final CSV file I generated is in the format:

Seinfeld-(The Wig Master)-2003-09-26-0(1).avi,Seinfeld.7x19.The.Wig.Master.avi
Seinfeld-(The Wink)-2004-01-03-0.avi,Seinfeld.7x04.The.Wink.avi
Seinfeld-(The Wizard)-2004-02-26-0.avi,Seinfeld.9x15.The.Wizard.avi
Seinfeld-(The Yada Yada)-2003-06-04-0.avi,Seinfeld.8x19.The.Yada.Yada.avi
Seinfeld-(The Pen)-2004-06-22-0.avi,Seinfeld.3x03.The.Pen.avi

Note that in my format, there could be no commas in the file names; but you can use any other delimiter such as = or ;, it would work equally as well with a character change in the script.

Using awk, you can get a correct command line output from this file:

awk -F',' '{print("mv \"" $1 "\" \"" $2 "\"")}' input.txt

Results in a preview of your commands, like so:

mv "Seinfeld-(The Wig Master)-2003-09-26-0(1).avi" "Seinfeld.7x19.The.Wig.Master.avi"
mv "Seinfeld-(The Wink)-2004-01-03-0.avi" "Seinfeld.7x04.The.Wink.avi"
mv "Seinfeld-(The Wizard)-2004-02-26-0.avi" "Seinfeld.9x15.The.Wizard.avi"
mv "Seinfeld-(The Yada Yada)-2003-06-04-0.avi" "Seinfeld.8x19.The.Yada.Yada.avi"
mv "Seinfeld-(The Pen)-2004-06-22-0.avi" "Seinfeld.3x03.The.Pen.avi"

Note that we put the file names in quotes because they contain spaces, and linux won’t recognize the filenames if you don’t include that. The -F command in awk is where you specify your delimiter, so feel free to use another character. Once you have ‘proofed’ the script to make sure it is doing what you expect it to, you execute it by adding |/bin/sh to the end, to pipe it directly to bash.

awk -F',' '{print("mv \"" $1 "\" \"" $2 "\"")}' input.txt | /bin/sh

This won’t result in any output, but you will see that it changed the names of your files, just as if you would have typed in the commands (proofed above) yourself.

If you don’t want to go through the bother of generating a CSV file, but you still want to use bash to rename files using awk, you can use a similar command which I found over at Snipplr.

ls foo*.jpg | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/foo/bar/2'

As with the other one, this will output the command to move the file but instead uses sed to do a search/replace of the string in the filename. Append |/bin/sh to execute the commands on your system.

The TinyOS source code is available for free online for many operating systems, however it takes a long time to get the environment set up and it is not portable at all. I came across XubunTOS but it did not seem to be in active development anymore, so I endeavored to install TinyOS 2.1 and 2.x from source into a regular Ubuntu image. The most help came from Matt Keally’s Blog. While doing this, I thought it might be useful to many others who wish to develop in the TinyOS framework but might not have the skills necessary to install it. Therefore, I developed this VirtualBox image so that you can install it on any system for which VirtualBox is available and supports USB passthrough for the programming of the motes. I’ve tested on Windows 7, Windows XP and it should work on any other host OS, but I would love to hear your feedback. All funny business aside, I present to the world UbunTOS:

Features

• Ubuntu 9.10 OS (patched through 2/5/2010)
• Complete TinyOS development environment
• TinyOS 2.1 Installed
• TinyOS 2.x CVS Installed (default environment)
• Portable for development in a variety of host environments
• Patched motelist for MIB520 programming board

Directions

1. Unzip the file and import into VirtualBox. I recommend at least 768M RAM
2. Boot system
3. Enable USB passthrough for the programming board. Check off the USB device in the menu as shown:
   
4. Check ‘motelist’ to see which port it has been assigned to (motelist has been patched to see MIB520 programming board)
5. Program away! TinyOS resides in /opt/

Download

MD5 sum:    9a27ba7902337139c2eae0121ec6ca4e

Download UbuntuTOS_Ubuntu-9.10_TinyOS-2.x.zip [2/8/2010]:    [ torrent | http ]

If you happen to have spare bandwidth, please send me a note and I will link to the file via http or ftp.

Notes

• The default username is wcu and password is nosecurity
• The hostname is wcu-desktop, in honor of West Chester University which is sponsoring my research into Wireless Sensor Networks.
• To switch between the TinyOS 2.x and 2.1 environment, run the shell script /opt/tinyos-2.1.0/tinyos.sh or /opt/tinyos-2.x/tinyos-2.x.sh. By default the 2.x environment is loaded via ~/.bashrc/.
• To update TinyOS 2.x with latest CVS Code:
  cd /opt; cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tinyos.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tinyos co -P tinyos-2.x
• I’ve testing this using Mica2 and Micaz. Let me know if you have success with other combinations as I just do not have the hardware to test.
• Usually the programming port and the data port are on consecutive ports. In the example above, the programming device is /dev/ttyUSB0 and the data port, for serialforwarder, is /dev/ttyUSB1

Known Bugs?

If you have issues while enabling USB Passthrough, such as an error like:

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000105 EndHTML:0000001970 StartFragment:0000000127 EndFragment:0000001952

Reboot your host system. I believe this happens while reinstalling the passthrough driver for the USB device for the first time. Rebooting seems to fix this problem, and after the initial setup this problem seems to disappear.

If you have any other problems (or compliments!) please leave a message via the form below.

FourSquare is a growing service that allows you to “Check in” to restaurants, grocery stores, museums and just about any place you can imagine. However, I have seen several of my friends checking in to locations which, I must say as a security research student, set off warning bells. Although I am calling out FourSquare specifically, these also apply to just about any other location based software where you broadcast your location to other folks, whether they are your friends or the general public. GoWalla and BrightKite are in the same boat.

As with any list, there are exceptions to the rule. So although I would say that you should generally avoid checking in at these locations and you can use it as a rough guide, things might be different for you personally.

Without further ado… here is my list of top FourSquare Check-in Locations To Avoid:

1. Checking In At Home

This one would seem to be obvious a few years ago. Remember the “old rules” when you got on the internet – don’t give anyone your real name, address, phone number or other personally identifiable information? It seems like this one went out the door when social media came into the picture. I’ve seen many folks posting the exact coordinates of their home, as well as when they are home. Between that and the fact that many users have their real names associated with their user ids, this becomes a huge security problem. Stalkers would love to get their hands on this information.

2. Checking In At Your Significant Other’s Home

Similarly to checking in at home, does someone need to know the location of your boyfriend’s, girlfriend’s or fiance’s residence? This information should be public knowledge.

Photo by epicharmus

3. Checking In At Your Bank

One thing you should never, ever let scammers, con artists, and identity thieves know is where you do your banking. Checking in even once at this location gives them not only an idea of the company where you bank at, but which branch you go to and the time of day you typically visit. This should definitely be a no-no. It’s like wearing an “I’m carrying cash” sign on your back.

4. Checking In While On Vacation

“I’m in Florida for the next 7 days with my whole family” is just begging for a burglar to come ransack your house. Maybe you have someone house sitting for you, or have some sort of security system in place, but I suspect many do not.

This is a tough one to follow. When you are on vacation in some interesting place, you want to tell your friends about it. What I tend to do is to check in, but not mention that my family is with me. This obfuscates some of the information and would hopefully give enough doubt to any would-be intruders to actually trying to break into your home.

5. Checking In At Your Doctor’s Office

In addition to calls of “TMI” this is another one that you should keep to yourself for privacy purposes. Someone could in theory call or visit your doctor’s office and get your personal medical information.

Photo courtesy of tidewatermuse

6. Checking In At Work, Depending on Your Job

This one depends highly on your job. If you are a security guard, you probably don’t want anyone knowing when you are on or off the job. However if you are a desk worker, you won’t mind if your friends, or anyone knows that you are indeed at work as this can be assumed.  If you are in the military and are deployed on a secret assignment in a foreign city, don’t think it is proper to check in anywhere in that city. (In fact, you might want to check in at a false location for misdirection, but that topic is for another day.)

Alternatively, if you are supposed to be at work but have called in sick, don’t check in at your favorite bar that night. It will reveal your ruse in an instant to anyone who is in-the-know enough to follow you on 4square.

7. Checking in at Your Child’s School

This is an addition from a friend, he mentioned that he makes sure that he never checks in at his children’s school. You don’t want to give someone a direct map and time table for when your kid is at school. This is another check in place that should be strictly off limits.

In conclusion, when checking into a location, be aware of what someone would do with that information if they had a malicious purposes. Maybe it is a bit paranoid, but I try to think of the above reasons before I check in at locations which could divulge sensitive information to unknown parties.

Sure you can restrict who you friend on these networks, but increasingly it has become obvious that criminals are using fake accounts to friend folks and “grow” their network. Be careful with who you friend and send all of your location information to. In addition to the above specific locations which can reveal sensitive information about you, any 4square user checking in at restaurants or other places divulge a pattern of travel that could be used against them.

dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.filename bs=1024 count=1000

You do the same using /dev/urandom:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=random.filename bs=1024 count=1000

Resulting in a 1MB file:

1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1024000 bytes (1.0 MB) copied, 0.0294247 s, 34.8 MB/s

This is transferring random data from the virtual device urandom to the output file. We use /dev/urandom instead of /dev/random because the /dev/random source generates random data very slowly. urandom is much faster at this but remains very random, if not quite a random as /dev/random. This should work with any system with dd and /dev/urandom.

However what I recently found out is that many LCD and Plasma televisions do not broadcast the correct 16:9 resolution via EDID, and therefore the computer doesn’t know what resolution to display and you have a stretched image.

I have an LG DU-37LZ30 which according to its specs at least has a 1366×768 native resolution (It is a 720p/1080i set). However its EDID system broadcasts a resolution of 1024×768, resulting in the signal looking stretched. Some programs, like Boxee for example, can correct this by forcing an aspect ratio while outputting the video and the result looks fine. However in many situations this doesn’t work.

On Windows XP, this was a pain but buying a program like PowerStrip by EnTech was able to correct the problem as you can force a resolution even if it is a “non-supported” one. However on Windows 7, and with nVidia graphics cards/drivers at least, it apparently ‘enforces’ the resolution which is broadcast via the EDID. Which means you are stuck with your weird resolution.

There are some hacks for overriding EDID info, but none of them seem to work on Windows 7. For example:

Thread over at AVS Forum on overrided EDID
Modifying your VGA cable to disable EDID broadcast (this nuked my VGA cable! Do not recommend!)
Forcing 1366×768 on Windows 7 forums

None of these solutions worked for me. Windows 7 even allows you to add a “custom” resolution but it still reads from the EDID to see if it is compatible and it has rejected my attempts at this.

Although I appreciate the “ease” that reading the EDID provides for general users, I wish there was an “advanced” section so that us users can force a resolution on a monitor. Maybe this is disabled because people were breaking their monitors, but it puts others like us in a lurch.  Has anyone seen this issue and/or have a resolution? Or do I just have a great reason to get a new TV?

Let’s face it, you don’t want all of the content that your cable provider offers. Cable providers have fought a-la-carte programming tooth and nail for this very reason. Much of it is specialty programming, and though I admit it is nice to know it was there, my family and I rarely watched any of it. My new setup brings many new sources as well as a CHOICE to what you want to view. I am very happy with the results so far.

My Requirements

There are a few requirements I had made for myself when deciding to go this route:

• Live Broadcast TV in HD must still be possible. Bonus for being able to DVR television shows.
• Ease of Use – must be usable by my family. I don’t expect it to be as ‘simple’ as a vanilla cable box, but I want it to be close
• Access to Local Media – I want to be able to stream my backed-up movies, photos, and music

Backend Systems

I have an existing network infrastructure in my house, which I admit most non-geeks would not have set up. This is necessary for the “Live TV” portion of my setup as it includes the HD Tuner cards which do not fit into my new system as well as the muscle to compress these recordings. My current setup includes:

• 10/100/1000 Gigbit router with Wireless-N
• File server with 1.5TB of RAID storage space to store movies, music and other files
• External “Computer” acting as a server for BeyondTV. This computer includes a tuner card which handles unencrypted QAM streams

The Hardware

The system is actually very simple on the hardware side. Besides the TV, only 2 pieces of hardware are needed.

Acer Aspire Revo Computer (3610)

This is a dual-core Intel Atom computer running at 1.6Ghz. My specific system included 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. It has built in Wifi-N network connectivity, a card reader, multiple USB ports, optical audio, HDMI port, VGA port and analog audio jacks.

I picked this system not only because of its low cost (~$300) but because of the Nvidia ION chipset running under it’s hood. This chipset is optimized to handle 1080p HDTV video along with high def audio. In includes the Nvidia CUDA accellerations and is optimized to work with Windows 7. This chipset is also capable of handing HD video using Flash 10.1 (currently in open beta). This means that it can handle the HD Flash video since the main Intel Atom CPU is not doing the heavy lifting on the decoding of this content.

Snapstream Firefly Remote

This is a RF Remote which is customizable via XML configuration profiles. There is a profile available for both Boxee and Snapstream BeyondTV.

The Software

I decided to run Windows 7 for the OS. Windows 7 Home Premium runs great on this system and the drivers that are currently published work very well on it. It includes Windows Media for as a possible frontend but I have decided to use Boxee due to the plethora of content available and the active development of the platform.

BeyondTV Link

This software connects via the wireless wired network to the BeyondTV server in my house which actually has the tuner cards. This offsets some tasks handled by the server such as heavy disk I/O required for recording HD video streams and compressing them into smaller video files.

I did have some problem with High Definition video at first. When I used wireless-N, which should have plenty of bandwidth to handle even HD video, I had very stuttery playback. After going through a lot of testing, it seems that even though the bandwidth is plenty, the BeyondTV software suffers from a lack of flexibility when it comes to any sort of network latency. Therefore any sort of wireless connection does not appear to support streaming HD video. 100/1000 seems to be the only way to go if you are going to view live HD video on this machine.

After a show is recorded, is is re-encoded (they call it “ShowSqueeze”) using the H.264 codec. You save about 80% of the space of a normal HD TV show and the quality if very good. The default decoder that BeyondTV uses seemed to do fine, but I also installed CoreAVC codec which is CUDA optimized for handling H.264 video decoding. CoreAVC uses nVidia CUDA optimization which the system supports.

Boxee

Boxee handles everything from internet streamed video content to local content playback. The full capabilities of the Boxee interface is beyond the scope of this post, but it has numerous features:

• Streams Hulu, Fancast, Netflix and Pandora (to mention just the big players)
• Custom “Apps” to handle many other video sources
• Local Media handles streaming from a mapped network drive. Plays many codecs and containers including: MKV, AVI, DivX, Xvid, WMV, MP3, etc.
• Social Media Connectivity
• Refined ’10 foot’ UI

Boxee is slick. Using it with the remote is a joy and you can really stream a LOT of video and audio from MANY different sources. This also might be its downfall. Along with the big name streams there are 100s of other ones available that would not be suitable for someone used to cable TV content. Also it seems to require a lot of clicking. Television is a different beast – you set a channel and can leave it on 24/7. With Boxee you need to select your content – which is both good and bad. It is good in that you get to watch what content you want, but bad in that you are not introduced to new content in a way a television station will.

Boxee Beta works well for most content but I did find issues with online content from several different sources such as ABC and the WB. The software is in active development so if you find this issues make sure to report them to the developers.

Here is a gallery of shots of the Acer Revo 3610, BeyondTV and Boxee Beta

The Initial Results

All being said and done, some not-too-obvious strengths and weaknesses appeared from using this setup. Media companies – please pay attention to these so you can improve your offerings!

Strengths

All Boxee content is on demand. All of your media is now available on your television and in your living room. LiveTV via this method retains the all-important DVR but is a fraction of the cost, which is the real monetary benefit to moving to this system from a proprietary cable system solution.

Running BeyondTV not only gives you the ability to watch TV on any PC throughout the home (with BeyondTV Link), but allows you to stream it online – so for example if you are at work you can watch any recorded shows or live TV.

You no longer live on the timetable of the major television stations but can feel free to view content when you are ready. Content on Boxee usually appears the day after it is on live TV, but I find more and more this is how I prefer to watch TV anyway.

Weaknesses

BeyondTV development seems to have been all but abandonded by the Snapstream team, who are now focused on enterprise markets. Although it is a capable system (still) it has not been in active development for 2 or more years. The age is starting to show, and I hope Snapstream comes around and continues development. As far as alternatives go, MythTV and SageTV are both out there but I was never a fan of either. I am investigating switching to the Windows Media Center platform for television but don’t have any results of that so far.

Boxee is still in Beta status and does have some bugs. Some random crashing and the inability to stream some content it told me was available is frustrating. The wide variety of content available via a ’10-foot’ interface more than makes up for this drawback.

The lack of premium television stations is also notable. The whole Cablecard debacle of the past 8 years shows the resistance from the industry to modernize our television systems. With more premium content available on Amazon Video on Demand and iTunes, this becomes less of an issue. Since this is actually a PC, you can play this content albeit not via the Boxee interface.

The Future

So what will the future bring? The market is prime for a Boxee app which is basically a streaming television provider. Like a traditional cable company (or FiOS), you will install this app and pay a monthly fee for television program which is streamed over the internet. Premium channels are available a-la-cart finally as well as the traditional packages. Although due to licensing restrictions it won’t be free, you will be able to save 20-30% over traditional cable provider’s television programming. It may be offered for about $40-50 a month.

Paid, on-demand video is also lacking. If Boxee got on board with Amazon Video on Demand, it would be a powerful combination. This would allow you to both “rent” and “own” movies and television from Amazon’s streaming service. Boxee recently announced that it is developing Boxee Payments which will allow payments from the content consumers, to the content providers. I am looking forward to what this will bring the platform.

I may have jumped the gun a bit since the Boxee Box is soon to be available but my system does handle a few tasks that would not be possible on a streaming media box, namely live TV with DVR. If you are happy with you current cable situation, you would not likely see a lot of benefit moving to my setup. However if you want control of your media and are tired of the big named cable companies dictating how and when you get your entertainment, then you would definitely enjoy the freedom this setup provides.