[AT] A wasteland on TV

[Dean Vinson]

I'll join the chorus as to the huge amount of worthless and downright 
bad content.  But I'm glad there's no government attempt at controlling 
quality or value of the content, other than the decency "standards" if 
you can call them that.  I expect it'd just be another worthless 
bureaucracy and waste of my tax money.

One thing I like about our local cable service is the on-demand movie 
rental option:  You scroll through an on-screen menu, select what you 
want, and it's instantly available.  You can stop, pause, rewind, fast 
forward, etc, and play it as many times as you want for 24 hours.  Costs 
about $4 per movie, and it shows up on your monthly bill.  No trip to 
the rental place, no forgetting to take the movie back.

I also like it for its potential--I hope that as the digital libraries 
grow over the years, more and more stuff will become available.  The 
marginal cost to the cable service of storing and providing each program 
has got to be pretty small, so it hopefully wouldn't take too many 
buyers to make it worthwhile to offer the narrow-market things that 
don't generate enough ad revenue to succeed on regular TV.  Maybe 
Spencer will diversify into making old-tractor movies...

Dean Vinson  --  Dayton Ohio
<http://my.voyager.net/~vinsond/>