Recent stu­pid­ity with Com­cast (their ever-​​incrementing “local fran­chise fees” and “taxes”; that annoy­ing stalker “dude” that “man­ages their rep­u­ta­tion” on Twit­ter; gen­er­ally degraded sub­jec­tive qual­ity of ser­vice here in the house­hold; daily excur­sions into Noth­ing on the Pre-​​paid Tele­vi­sion Again™) leads me to once again exam­ine alter­na­tives to monop­oly cable franchises.

AppleTV: Is appeal­ing in many ways—not least because given Comcast’s pric­ing scheme we would have to watch three movies every day to exceed Comcast’s annual fees—but there’s one prob­lem. My Mom (85 years old) is the main TV-​​watcher these days, and has adopted a very 20^th-​​Century modal­ity for view­ing, viz: Click the “chan­nel up” but­ton over and over until some­thing catches your eye, and watch that until you get bored, and then go look at the “most likely” chan­nels, and… repeat until bed­time. AppleTV, on the other hand, enforces with its egre­gious Mac­Book Wheel™ inter­face, a “tra­verse a hier­ar­chy of use­lessly out­moded and mis­lead­ing tax­o­nomic crap, until you get stuck in a dead end and acci­den­tally push the unla­beled but­ton mean­ing ‘exit’ instead of the other unla­beled one mean­ing ‘back’, and give up in a fit of pique” inter­face, aka Visual Phone­mail.

FTL, Apple.

Net­Flix seems fine as a sup­ple­ment to some broad­cast out­let, but there’s no spon­tane­ity. And no local tele­vi­sion. And no imme­di­acy. Net­Flix is a planner’s game, and one can­not plan everything.

Broad­cast TV? In this mar­ket? Shyeah, right.

And that leaves the dishes and the tele­phone plays. AT&T U-​​verse, some kind of torrent-​​driven com­puter thing… the usual cruft.

Why, with­out laps­ing too far towards antipan­glos­sian­ism, does this worst of all pos­si­ble worlds exist? Or, per­haps: what might one do to fix it?

So I find myself mus­ing about “set­ting up our own Cable com­pany”. Even @comcastcares said, when he cropped up other day in my Twit­ter feed to ame­lio­rate my loss and man­age his employ­ers’ brand: Any­body can lay their own wires.

Well, no; tech­ni­cally, no. Not every­body can lay their own wires. That would involve doing impact stud­ies (did Com­cast do eco­log­i­cal impact stud­ies before dig­ging and string­ing up all that cop­per and glass? I don’t recall see­ing them), and get­ting licens­ing on many lev­els, and slot­ting said super­nu­mer­ary cables into the already-​​crowded util­ity ease­ments out there in the world, and not get­ting your wires clipped by other people’s ser­vice tech­ni­cians, and so forth.

So, yeah, any­body can lay their own wires about the same way any­body can have their own grav­ity. Just expend a lot of time and resources and energy pil­ing a bunch of ran­dom shit together in one place, and it will hap­pen spontaneously.

So what other ways might there be to dis­in­ter­me­di­ate our way out of this stran­gle­hold I’m feel­ing just now? Yes, sure, it’s a moment in his­tory where the for­tunes of broad­cast­ers and cable com­pa­nies and satel­lite fran­chises may be chang­ing, since they’re all strug­gling to keep our dis­tracted atten­tion. maybe some­body could lever­age their dilu­tion into some kind of break-​​up of their hege­monic strength.

Let’s be spe­cific. How might any one of us—or even a com­mit­ted minority—take a slab of that rich pie and share it amongst our­selves? I have, for instance, a more-​​than-​​sneaking sus­pi­cion that delays in WiMAX roll­out might have some­thing to do with the cable com­pa­nies’ busi­ness mod­els. And that FCC over-​​regulation of emer­gent P2P broad­band wifi net­works sti­fles com­pe­ti­tion with estab­lished play­ers. And that, oh, I don’t know, actual phys­i­cal wires are not taxed at a rate com­men­su­rate with their real value to the com­pa­nies that own them.

So what’s possible?

Tan­gen­tially: If some­body would just fuck the freakin’ AppleTV inter­face with tag­ging or some kind of sen­si­ble “chan­nel clicker” inter­face, it would be a win. But noooooo.…