Penny Arcade hums a few bars of refrain I often sing:
There are many things I find unacceptable in this universe, I won’t provide an exhaustive list, but watching full television programs on my monitor has a…”texture” I don’t like. […] I don’t want to hook my PC into a television, and I shouldn’t have to. All these machines are wired into a hundred megabit switch, and when they don’t talk to one another, I feel like I’m mediating some Goddamned playground dispute.
I was wondering last night as the Olympics closed how home entertainment might have changed by 2012 when the next summer games come along. I hesitate to get too optimistic. The AppleTV already technically does everything I want from a TV set top box type thing. The idea of being able to pick any TV show or movie off a menu and watch it soon thereafter is right there, waiting in the Apple Store for me to buy it, but pricing structures don’t make sense yet and media conglomerates stand in the way of, well, me being able to actually give them money to watch their stuff.