Tv advice!?

[Grieve]

You do realize there are lots of us who live in the boonies and will likely not see 1 gigabit broadband any time soon, if ever? I am personally not a fan of the 'cloud'. The idea is neat and I kind of like the idea for a completely local computer system, ie, one that covers just my house. But it sucks for internet for those of us who do not live in locations with large pipes for bandwidth.

Yeah, I've spent plenty of timesin the boonies myself. Until recently we lived in the wilds of West Virginia, and even now, while living in Maryland only about 40 miles from DC, we're still out in farm country. Luckily cable (Comcast) is pretty fast here.

I've ripped almost all our DVDs and blurays onto several big (2-3TB) external drives, so our "cloud" is mostly inside the house, like you said. But the kids also watch a lot of netflix, and we occasionally buy or rent movies from iTunes. Once we've bought it, we can watch in any room in the house, or on any of the iPads/iPhones/Ipod touches in the house, streaming directly from Apple, so it's very convenient. Can even stream Dora The Explorer over 3G onto my iPhone for my 2 year old to watch when she's getting restless in a restaurant.

DVDs are a pain in the arse - you have to move them physically around, they get grubby fingerprints on them, they get scratched, etc. I really want to be able to rig up an AppleTV in the car so we don't need them any more. The best part of streaming movies and TV shows is that you can do everything via remote - you don't have to screw around with a DVD player. When the kids are watching in the media room in the basement, I can even check how much of the movie is left from my phone upstairs, then pause it and put a message on the screen telling them to come up for dinnner.

Anyway, eventually fast internet will be everywhere, just like phone and electrical service is. It will just take time.