When I was a young boy, I enjoyed reading the articles in Popular Mechanics Magazine. The articles usually involved an electronics kit or some similar "do it yourself" project. Whatever they were suggesting in the magazine was always a few years ahead of a product in the consumer market. That meant no one else had it, and that was a good thing to me. I was a geek and so were my friends.
Today at 46 years old, I am something of a magazine addict. I know that is a very "low tech" thing, but I still like turning printed pages in a magazine. Best of all today, the marketplace for magazines is so weak that a subscription to the typical magazine is less than $10 for a year of issues delivered to the house. It's a bargain by any standard. This interest and economic condition led me to a subscription to my boyhood magazine, Popular Mechanics.
Popular Mechanics has changed significantly since I was a young, but one thing is the same, the magazine is still trying to present imaginative ways for the reader to get ahead of the consumer product market with some wit and elbow grease. You can still find a current version of those "how to..." articles of my youth in the magazine. You can get tips on soldering a circuit board or cooling a computer processor. If you follow their instructions and use some imagination, you can have something cool (by teenage geek standards) that no one else you know will have.
I have been writing regularly here and elsewhere about the challenges that cable television companies are facing from video streamed over broadband internet and the adaption of your television to receive that streaming video. I have concluded that cable television companies are facing a serious challenge to their existence from video streamed over broadband internet.
An article entitled, Ditch Cable, Save Cash in the May 2009 Popular Mechanics magazine confirmed everything I had been thinking. Popular Mechanics was suggesting that their reader, the electronics hobbyist, could save, on average, over $700 per year by canceling their subscription to the local cable television service and replacing it with a combination of an old fashion television antenna and video streamed through broadband internet access.
Of course, this approach is not yet as user friendly as a remote control on a digital cable box, but nothing presented in Popular Mechanics ever was. If, however, the past is any indicator of the future, the subject of this article will be the basis of many consumer products in the years head. In fact, the idea will be widely available in the large stores selling televisions by Christmas 2009 in the form of HDTV's that will stream video over broadband internet using a "widget engine" as an internet channel controller.
Cable television companies are riding a gravy train of profit today. Video streamed over the internet has done almost nothing yet to damage them, but their business model is in serious trouble in the years ahead. They know it.
Can Louisiana play an important economic role in this evolution. If the Louisiana legislature and the Governor enact Senate Bill 277. this spring, Louisiana will see a river of new digital interactive media business flow into this state including potentially the replacement of the current business model for cable television, and Louisiana will become a leader in this digital interactive media industry. Senate Bill 277 is a business incentives program for bringing digital interactive businesses to Louisiana.
Erich P Rapp.
