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Evan Linden — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 03:59:23 GMT

Over the last few months I have been looking for opportunities to reduce the overall cost of receiving television in the home. Several factors got me thinking seriously about this:

1) I actually looked at my cable bill..- by the time I paid for internet service, basic cable, extended cable premium cable, HD signal digital signal set top boxes, digital boxes, and DVRs I could have gone to the movies every night and still had money left over.

2) Advances in internet speed continue to leapfrog 10-20 MG broadband speeds are no longer uncommon as standard offerings

3) Streaming technology have grown a booming industry in cheap and/or freely available next day media content. Sites like Hulu.com and Crackel.com provide aggregation services. CBS, NBC, ScFy, HG TV and others provide content

4) Continued price drops in Gaming systems such as the XBox360 , PS3 , and Wii that are becoming common place in the home and their DLNA compliance makes the opportunity to stream live media from a home computer directly to your television a reality.

5) The introduction of several varieties of media server/services that aggregate that include services like Play On

The convergence of these four key technical innovations along with the general overall costs rising from Cable and Satellite provides has produced a unique situation where centralization of your video feed and aggregation on a ”Media Server” is not only possible but has now become a profitable proposition. In my next few posts I will discuss the process and final configuration along with the costs to build out my centralized media home server/service along with my expected break even point. As a teaser I will tell you now that I achieved amore than 70% reduction in monthly costs for services provided by my cable provider and expect to see an return on investment (ROI) in less than 3 months essentially on quarter. I do not expect that these savings can be achieved by everyone it is simply my personal experience.

There is no doubt that this technical approach to media consumption is still in its infancy and may very well evolve in an entirely different direction that the one I have taken it to. Are there problems you bet. Occasional lag time, bandwidth constraints, quality of service(QOS) contention for CPU and port access. Is it worth the occasional wait , lag or load time ??? Well let me just say that when it happens I take a breath and start counting the money I am saving . the answer – Defiantly yes a little patience for a savings of almost $200 a month I am on board.

In my next post I will elaborate on my design and equipment in use to deliver media to my home on demand without the Cable Company’s media signal.. yes I still need them for broadband but even that could change someday.

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