I don’t pay for TV. Right now I pay for a cable connection to the internet which I really have no reason to complain about. It goes down sometimes, but for the most part Cablevision provides me with a fairly decent (speedy) connection, and they offer pretty good service to boot when things go belly up. That said, I don’t pay for their television service, because like the TV service from any provider, they only offer bundles of channels and not ala carte. So be it, you can still get DTV if you live close to the city, or receive those same over the air signals right over the cable if you have a TV with a QAM antenna. In fact, if I couldn’t get local PBS over my cable connection free then sending them cash every once in a while woudn’t make much sense after the transition to DTV since we can no longer receive them over the air (too far away).

For folks like me, an application like minitube is a special gift. I’ve had many a “Youtube night” where a bunch of us sat huddled around the big LCD screen and played one…video…at…a…time as each took turns searching for their favorite videos. minitube is just what I was looking for, a way to kick off a series of related youtube videos without additional user input. While it isn’t what I was looking for exactly when I told the high pressure salesman in the “disconnect” office that I wanted to just pay for the channels I wanted to watch, its a way to watch a sort of customized TV channel (without having to get up *every* couple minutes) with minimal effort. The only thing that’s missing should be obvious – commercials. Which is sort of the reason why I was a little hesitant to even mention this program since YouTube will certainly decide they need to monetize this somehow if and when they determine a lot of people are using YouTube in this, the clearly coolest way.

Wired has as story running about AT&T’s decision to institute a bandwidth cap for its broadband customers and what that might mean for you even if you don’t use AT&T. The move follows a similar action by Comcast which placed a 250GB cap on downloads (with a $10 per 50GB over) ostensibly designed to reduce network congestion. The problem is that ISPs (internet service providers) aren’t just providing “internet” anymore. Earlier this year, Comcast merged with NBC in a consolidation that spells disaster for competition in media and seriously limits the number of opinions you, as a consumer will have access to.
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