In August of this year I joined the ranks of people “cutting the cord”. I was moving, and when we set up Verizon FiOS at the new house we left off video. Three months later, I’d like to fill you in on how it has gone and what I see in the future of consumer video delivery.

I dropped FiOS television for two reasons: price and customer service. As for the price, paying more than $50 per month for cable television has always seemed excessive to me. Verizon kept edging up the costs, to something like $65 for fairly-basic service. “Fairly basic” is where customer service comes in, it was always difficult to navigate the different offerings, promotional rates, and timeouts.

In comparison, Verizon FiOS internet service is easy to buy, transparently priced, and has had fabulous technical support the few times I have had to use them (they have never asked me to reboot anything). I highly recommend FiOS internet service if it is available to you.

But back to television. Having decided to drop cable but not to suspend all consumption of video media, we replaced it with a few a la carte offerings:

1. Netflix Streaming ($16.99 $9.99) – This works great. We’ve been long time Netflix customers. The number of movies and especially television available streaming keeps going up. We’ve hardly used the shipped-DVDs part of our Netflix subscription in months. They just changed around the plans, so we dropped to $10/month which only allows one DVD at a time, but unlimited streaming.
2. Hulu Plus ($7.99/month) – We’ve been using Hulu for a long time. The “plus” mostly means you have access to current shows (e.g. Glee) without them aging out. Otherwise you can only play the most recent handful of episodes. Hulu Plus also includes lots of rerun-grade television from the 80s and 90s.
3. Amazon Unbox ($2/episode) Some premium shows aren’t on Netflix or Hulu, like Mad Men, but they are available pay-per-episode on Amazon.
4. Apple iTunes ($3/episode) Other premium shows (True Blood) are only on iTunes.

All this runs into a Mac Mini we bought a few years ago. I like the Mac because it is an open enough platform to run all the various media services I might want, while not having the maintenance headaches a Windows Media Center or Linux machine would have (I used to run MythTV before I switch to the Mac). There are many other ways to do it, like single purpose set top boxes (Netflix, Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee, etc) or game consoles or TVs with built in streaming media functionality. But I like the lack of lock-in that comes from having a general purpose computer attached to the television.

The total cost of this kind of setup is thus $600 for the hardware (not counting the actual television), under $20 of fixed costs per month, and another $15 of premium content purchases per month. That’s about $30 per month cheaper than the FiOS television I was getting.

What’s the downside? I have missed out on some content. The two things I wanted to watch but could not find online were the Emmy Awards (I could get red carpet and backstage feeds, but not the actual event) and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (nice website but no streaming). I also no longer have access to Red Sox games, or other Boston sports. Given the tough season the Red Sox were having, I didn’t really miss it, but that might be a problem next year. MLB.com will sell you video feeds of games, but only outside the home market for the team. I could get around that restriction, but paying $200 for content only to have to violate the license terms seems abusive.

The Future of Television

I’m liking my new media lifestyle, it’s hard to imagine going back. If anything, it seems like more content is coming to me. The question for the content-producers is how are they going to get it to me. There are fortunes to be made in correctly predicting the new media distribution landscape.

One big opening I see is around children’s television. There isn’t a clear leader in this space. Netflix has a lot of children’s content, but doesn’t really offer the Saturday Morning Cartoons experience. Of course, maybe children will be looking for a more interactive media experience on their Saturday mornings. Media companies are still producing a lot of children’s television, and kids consume it. I predict a $10/month service focused on content for children, with optimized catalog and playback.

Another obvious opportunity is in sports. This is likely to be dominated by incumbents. I would happily pay per-game, or buy a reasonably priced subscription. $200 for the season from MLB is kind of high since I don’t come close to watching every game.

Finally, the big question is whether consumers in general will want this kind of a la carte experience, buying a $10 subscription here, a $2 video there, or if they would really rather have the bundled experience that cable offers. Even if someone does put together a bundled service, it’s hard for me to imagine people paying $60-100/month for internet-delivered television. Not with Netflix and Hulu setting price expectations so low.

In laptops and desktops, Apple is unassailed as the luxury brand. Whenever I talk to non-engineers about buying laptops or desktops, this is clear. If I suggest they get a Mac, the response is never “I don’t know if it will run my software” or “I prefer Windows”, but rather “I can’t afford one” or “it feels unnecessary.” Rather like if someone asked me what car to buy and I suggested a BMW. As far as I can tell, non-geeks would all buy Macs if money were no object. And there is a strong correlation between people who display what computer they use socially (geeks, coffee-shop denizens) and Mac users (gamers have their own tastes and displays). Thanks to the fact that the OS no longer matters, consumers are free to select either a utilitarian lowest-bidder machine, or a Mac.

Apple doesn’t really have any competition in this market. Sony has tried several times, and makes some really nice (and really expensive) machines. But because the Sony brand still doesn’t mean luxury to the man on the street, it doesn’t give people the opportunity to show off that they require from their luxury goods. And so Apple has a near-monopoly on expensive computers. In June 2009, Apple had 90% market share for non-business computers costing more than $1000. Their consumers are not price sensitive, and so Apple gets correspondingly high margins, creating a lucrative and stable business.

The iPod is also a luxury good, albeit a luxury that nearly everyone can afford. I think it is a fluke that Apple dominates the portable music player market. I think the iPod is the Coach purse of the Apple lineup: It’s a luxury good, but one that nearly anyone can afford and is easy to justify. And with those ubiquitous white earbuds, you can show off your good taste even when the player is in your pocket.

Speaking of the iPod, some people think that Apple is becoming a media company, leveraging their control of the player into domination of the music business. Far from it, I would say. Apple is happily participating in the demise of the music industry, carrying the record labels in a hand basket towards the free or nearly-free distribution of recorded music that is the obvious conclusion of technological improvements. If you told Steve Jobs that all music is going to be free tomorrow, the logical response would be “great, people are going to need new iPods with more storage.”

The iPad is clearly a luxury good. Early adopters proudly show off their iPad. It’s very expensive and has little competition. There is a big question as to how the market for tablets will develop. It may go the way of MP3 players, an expensive but pleasant toy where everyone buys the nice one from Apple. Or it may look more like the modern PC world, where anyone can get a decent table from Acer/Dell/HP/etc for $200. A lot depends on how broad the demand is for tablets.

The iPhone initially headed in the direction of the iPod, looking like mainstream consumers were choosing between an iPhone and no smartphone at all. But Android has created a credible option, in fact a wealth of credible option, that more practical consumers see as the better option when it comes to price, service availability, etc. But Apple still sells plenty of phones to people who want the new iPhone, even if the antenna is broken, the service is terrible, and their preferred carrier doesn’t have it.

Expect Apple to maintain a high price point and air of exclusivity around the iPad and iPhone. In the face of dozens of perfectly adequate Android competitors, Apple may well cede the low end of the market. Their branding, integration, and user experience will allow them to capture a premium price at the high end. Their product line will stay simple; customer’s aren’t interested in the optimal price/performance or choosing features. Customers just want the new Apple device, and will not be especially conscious about the price or comparisons to third party products.

Much has been written about developers fleeing iOS for Android. It’s true that Apple has been difficult to do business with. I expect mobile app developers to realize that Apple has the customers they want. Years ago, Apple was able to keep developers on the Mac platform when their market share was in the low single digits, because the average Apple user bought a lot more third party software than the average Windows user. Similarly, by hanging on to the high-end, $4-latte-drinking customer, Apple will be the place to go for developers selling $4 apps. Expect comparisons of per-user app spend to be forthcoming, and the numbers to be in Apple’s favor.

Apple has figured out how to be the only mass market luxury vendor in desktops, laptops, and MP3 players. By applying the same techniques to tablet computers and mobile phones, they might not maintain raw market share, but they can hang on to the most profitable customers, which is more important. They will do it not by offering the best products on some absolute scale understood only by geeks, but by offering a user experience that starts in the store, a brand which is increasingly well recognized, and a set of stories that tell people they are buying something more than just luxury.

But (if there wasn’t a but there wouldn’t be much of a post here) the Sony eBook store is painfully terrible. Titles are expensive, hard to search for, and often not available. The result is that my book buying on the Sony gradually trailed off. On my last two business trips I haven’t bothered to bring the Reader, and it sits on a shelf right now, probably running out of battery.

Last week Aletta wanted a book which was available from Amazon, and didn’t want to wait for it. She downloaded the iPhone Kindle app, bought the book, and was pleasantly surprised. Reading on a small screen is more pleasant than either of us expected, and the Kindle app is quite well designed.

I carry an iPod Touch with me basically everywhere. Switching to Kindle means I can have my books with me even when I don’t want to carry a dedicated eink-reader. I have the option of buying a dedicated reader if I want one.

The only downside is that book ownership is still restricted to a single account, from what I can tell. Aletta and I solve this by keeping all our ebooks on a single account, and that’s no worse than Sony. But there is definitely room for improvement in managing household book collections and book sharing. Hopefully between Sony, Amazon, Apple, and Google we have enough competition to find a good set of structures.

In summary, on Kindle:

• Books are easy to buy
• Books availability is superior
• Books are available across multiple devices
• Books are available on devices I already own
• Book access feels a little more future proof against DRM fail. Or at least if there is fail, there will be a critical mass of people building cracking tools.

I hope Amazon gets an Android port out soon, and starts encouraging other companies to make eink-readers that support Kindle. It could be a great ecosystem.

Sony, it’s time to realize that user experience is about a lot more than just the industrial design of the physical product.

Thanks to two friends, I have SunSpider JavaScript benchmark results for the G1 and for the Palm Pre. Based on the graphs here, it’s clear that the G1 and the Pre are both considerably better than the BlackBerry Bold. Specifically, the G1 is 9.6 times faster than the Bold, and the Pre is 15 times faster.

On the other hand, the G1 and the Pre both compare unfavorably to the iPhone 3GS. The G1 is 6 times slower, as can be seen from the graph that excludes the BlackBerry. The Pre is 3.7 times slower. Neither the Pre nor the G1 achieve the performance of the first-gen iPhone.

Knowing the Android/G1 performance also helps to answer if this is a Java versus Objective C issue. Both the BlackBerry and Android are Java-based phone systems. Java puts a bigger burden on the virtual machine implementor to be responsible for performance, and has a reputation for overall worse performance than more native languages like Objective C. The G1 demonstrates that RIM could be doing a lot better with the BlackBerry.

it is also worth noting that the SunSpider benchmark was developed by the WebKit development team, and WebKit is the basis for the iPhone browser. It is unsurprising that the iPhone does well on this benchmark, it is likely used as part of the development process. However, it is still the best general JavaScript benchmark available.

The main conclusion to be drawn here is that if you want a web browser in your pocket, the BlackBerry is right out. When it comes to deciding between iPhone, Android, and Pre, it is likely that things other than JavaScript performance will drive your decision.

As far as that goal goes, I think the switch has been a rousing success. In non-development activities (eg, web, email, calendar, documents) it has been a significant improvement. The tools I’m finding myself using include:

• Firefox – Safari just isn’t good enough, and on the Intel processor Firefox is plenty fast
• Terminal.app – In preference to X11.app and xterm, because it is better integrated with everything else
• Mail.app (aka Apple Mail) – Because as part of the switch I’m going to stop hacking my mail client and see how the other 90% of the population lives. Thus far, using a less featureful mail client has been a success for spending less time with email thanks to unsubscribing from things.
• Adium – This is the best graphical IM client I’ve ever seen.
• iCal – The Apple calendaring tool is adequate, though I think I may end up switching to something with Exchange support, as work moves in that direction.
• iTunes – Of course, this is a huge improvement over anything on Linux, particularly for synching with my iPod.
• Microsoft Office – I’d considered other alternatives, but the MacBook came with office preinstalled, and once I had it easily available (instead of in VMware) I couldn’t say no.
• NetNewsWire Lite - A feed reader that is much better than bloglines. I haven’t done much with the NewsGator integration, which might be interesting. And I haven’t seen a reason to buy the non-lite version.
• OmniGraffle – This is the best diagramming program I’ve ever used. Vastly better than anything on Linux, and much better than Visio.
• Parallels Desktop – Much nicer than VMware workstation on Linux. Well polished, and the Coherence feature is pretty hot.
• Desktop Manager - Free tool to implement virtual desktops. Does everything I want in this space.
• Quicksilver – This is basically a graphical commandl ine for the mac, accessible from anywhere. It’s very nice. Like screen, you have to try it to learn how much it will change your life.
• Visor – This is a cute hack that makes a Terminal only a keystroke away at any time. It’s a good complement to Quicksilver.
• MailActOn – This is a little tool that lets you define keybindings in Mail.app, mostly to refile mail into folders with a few keystrokes.
• TextMate – This is trying to replace emacs in my life. It’s a more mac-oriented text editor, with a pretty good feature set and good support for my emacs finger macros. But I may end up going back to emacs.
• Ecto – This is my latest addition. It’s a blogging client that I’m using to write this post. I’m not sure I’m in love with it enough to pay for it, though it is a bit nicer than Performancing, the Firefox plugin I had been using.

That’s about it for productivity tools. On development tools, I haven’t had to install very much:

• Apple developer tools – This comes on the standard install media, and gets you gcc, autoconf, and all the other things you would expect.
• SSH Agent – This is a version of the standard ssh-agent which integrates with the account management on OSX, so that you can use the agent from any application/shell in your login.
• SVK and Subversion – These are special builds for OSX, they seem to work well.
• Eclipse – Standard Eclipse is available for OSX
• MacPorts – This is a package system for getting various free tools. I currently only use it to get Cocoa Emacs.

So, that’s the enumeration of tools that I am using. Hopefully this is helpful to people. I may follow up on this with other posts about my experiences on OSX.

I will also shortly make a non-tools post.