Originally Posted By: Dignan
iTunes/AppleTV does solve one problem that I don't believe Hulu or other services do, and that's keeping up to date. Does Hulu have a no-effort way of telling you when there's a new episode of a show you like available? If not, that means that you have to keep track of when all your various shows have new episodes, and that just sounds like a chore that I got rid of when I got my first Tivo. Again, we're going backwards.

It all depends on how far away from the initial schedule you move as to if it's a backwards or forwards movement. For the DVR method, you still somewhat care about the base schedule for setting up what to record to avoid conflicts. And long term you care due to possible space constraints. For my method with Netflix, I just don't care at all. I don't track new shows in the fall, and I don't track when a season ends. I just look for shows that might interest me and start watching. Sometimes it's a show that is only a few years old, and sometimes it's one that is now decades old that I never saw.

The issue this brings up though is possibly being exposed to spoilers if a show is popular and talked about at the workplace. And of course sports and news are time sensitive, so this solution doesn't work for those. Thats why I have the blended approach pulling some from iTunes, and others I just wait. I still haven't watched Lost, but it's on my list. Now that the entire series is out, I can consume it at my own pace, avoiding cliffhanger delays. When I initially cut the cord, the streaming solution wasn't really there. I was forced into at least waiting a season to watch something when the show came out on DVD.

There are of course very specific examples of shows/networks that just aren't internet friendly. Over the 6 years of being a cord cutter, I've watched that list shrink dramatically, and expect it to continue on. I've also watched online only content grow more and more, mostly indy stuff like TwiT.tv. Netflix and Hulu are making steps now to have original content, and I'm betting more companies start doing this in the future (Amazon is another one I'm figuring will try this).

Essentially, I see the current internet cord cutters as the ones willing to live on the bleeding edge. The industry as a whole appears to be moving forward to making it more mainstream though. The lineup of TVs this year pretty much all feature internet connectivity as standard, even down to the lower end units like Visio. Sure, a lot of it is crap currently, but it will improve and grow. You have Internet companies like Netflix pushing hard, TV manufacturers also pushing hard, it's only a matter of time before the big content creators are forced to be on both sides more then they are today.