Andy Rankin

We don’t watch tons of TV in our family, but we don’t totally avoid it either.  As a technology guy I probably have more TV related toys than I can justify considering the amount of TV we watch.

My daughter, who is three years old, gets to watch a couple of shows here or there.  In fact, there are only 4 different shows in her regular rotation.  But it’s the Christmas season and my wife noticed the other day that our TiVo recorded Frosty the Snowman for us based on its psychic abilities.  Of course, after telling our daughter she could watch it we discovered that TiVo had moved on and recorded other shows on top of Frosty.

I was thinking, hey no problem - there must be a solution to this.  I have so many options at my disposal.  First, I tried Amazon’ Unbox because I can pipe that directly into my previously mentioned TiVo.  No luck - not available.

So I go to Plan B: iTunes.  I’m a sucker and I picked up a used AppleTV on eBay a while back and in the past I have purchased (for $1.99 each) some episodes of The Backyardigans (one of the 4 shows mentioned above) from iTunes.  It’s kind of a round about process - I but the show on iTunes and pull it down to my machine and then wait for the AppleTV to sync it over (why won’t Apple let me shop iTunes directly from my AppleTV?).  Again, no luck - Frosty is not in the iTunes library.

I was starting to get nervous but I figured I had a couple of other options.  My Verizon FiOS TV service has a pretty good On Demand selection.  Of course, they don’t support the new CableCARD standard so I can’t get On Demand via my TiVo - but I still have my Verizon cable box around so I figured I could plug it in if I had to.  But I wasn’t going to plug it in just to see if Frosty was available.  I had low expectations but I poked around some to see if Verizon would let me search the On Demand titles via the web.  Of course not.  This is, of course, really dumb since it can’t possibly be that hard to make the info available.

Then I had what I thought was a brilliant idea - NetFlix.  We actually use the Blockbuster equivalent in our house (which is about to change since they just added $2/month to our service plan).  I had been reading about NetFlix providing downloadable movies so I checked it out.  Of course there wouldn’t be any (easy) way for my kid to watch this on our TV instead of the computer but I figured it was better than nothing.  No luck here either - Frosty is not offered by NetFlix and their Watch Instantly service - and get this, from what I could tell there was no way to search which movies are available.  I had to use an alphabetical list and jump down to the Fs.

So that was it - I was tapped out.  Okay, I did spend a few minutes trying to figure out BitTorrent but I haven’t done anything with the peer-to-peer stuff since the original Napster days so I was out of my element and gave up quickly.

The whole thing seemed dump to me.  I wanted to watch a show.  I was willing to pay for it.  I have several gadgets that are supposed to let me do this.  Unfortunately, I don’t see a great solution any time soon.  There are too many moving parts and different groups involved.  I’d love to be able to sit at my computer, find a show or movie, pay for it, and then walk into my living room and watch it on my TV.