Allow me to set the stage for this post with a metaphor: I have a closet that is teeming with old shoes. Around 25 pairs, which is quite a lot, especially for a guy. I don’t buy a lot of shoes, I just have a lot of shoes, some of which are as old as nine years (my basketball Nikes) or even a decade (my Gore-Tex hiking boots, which saved my live during those Finnish winters on the Arctic Circle).
Every year or so I tell myself I’m going to consolidate my shoe collection: I’ll buy two good pairs to replace 10 old pairs. I buy the two new pairs of shoes, but then I start to think about all the specific usage scenarios I have for those old pairs. In the end, new and old shoes are forced to fitfully coexist in my small closet.
For instance, two years ago I was all set to throw away my favorite pair of shoes ever, a pair of brown Onitsuka Tigers. I bought some replacements, and wore my Tigers on a rafting trip as a final hurrah before I chucked them. But after an afternoon in the river, the shoes looked good again, and I decided it was important to have a pair of “kick-around” shoes. I’ve continued wearing them regularly for the two years since, and now they finally have a hole in the fabric. I’ll probably still keep them around for mud football or some such occasion.
Now, on to the point of this post. Technology is very much like my shoes, and it’s driving me crazy. Case in point: My DVD player. It’s a nice DVD player, but I almost never use it. I subscribe to NetFlix and have a TiVo, so I very much prefer to stream movies on my TiVo using NetFlix Watch Now. It’s free, it’s immediate, and there are no red envelopes to return; no waiting for new discs to arrive.
But only maybe 10 or 15 percent of Netflix’s catalog is available for streaming–the vast majority require getting a physical disc in the mail from NetFlix. Some of those I can download to my TiVo through Amazon’s Unbox on-demand service, others I can buy through iTunes. All of them are available through BitTorrent, but I usually feel guilty doing that and it’s a bit of a hassle.
There are plenty of NetFlix/Amazon/iTunes movies to keep me occupied for the rest of my life, if I didn’t ever care about watching specific films. But I do. So the DVD player stays.
There’s also a VCR hiding in a dark corner of some closet, but we won’t even mention that, except to say that I never need it, until I do.
Just like with the shoes, I’m surrounded by AV clutter, but I don’t want to get rid of it because I really do use it all. Physical and digital media don’t coexist nicely together, and yet they have to because of the stupid digital holdouts that are only available in physical form. If EVERY movie were available through NetFlix Watch Now, I’d be a happy man, and I would pay extra to be able to throw out my DVD player and still have access to a complete movie catalog. Do you hear me, movie studios? I will pay extra.
My wife and I recently got hooked on a TV series that had the first two seasons available on TiVo Watch Now. We devoured those, and were hungry for more, but guess what? The more recent seasons weren’t available for streaming. So I got them off BitTorrent, loaded them on to my iPhone, and hooked my iPhone up to my TV. And I didn’t even feel guilty about it!
The Kindle is the same way. We’re literally drowning in books in my apartment–I’m trying to cough a paperback out of my lungs as I type this. We could box most of them up and donate them to a library, if the Kindle could replace them. But it can’t, because the catalog of available books is incomplete. Not only that, but the catalogs are disparate across various e-reader services. So I’ve got my favorite e-reader on my iPhone, Eucalyptus, but there aren’t anywhere near enough books available for it, so I also have Kindle on my iPhone. And the catalog for that is woefully incomplete as well.
I know we’re experiencing the natural pangs of new industries being born, and I’m sure in five years these issues will mostly be resolved. But I’m impatient. I want to be able to stream every movie, download every book, and have two pairs of shoes that fit every occasion. Surely that’s not too much to ask?
