These are the haps of Nick Piepmeier
The ownership of content, something I’ve been railing on for a while, is something I hold pretty dearly. If I pay money for a piece of content, I’d sure as hell better be able to access it at any time and in any way I want. This is why I tend to avoid content services like the plague; by registering for those services, you’re just renting the content - at the end of the day, you don’t own anything. Maybe I’m just sentimental, but the idea of having a personal library really appeals to me. I also don’t like other people dictating the terms of my experiences [typical anti-DRM rant goes here].
Anyway, today I finally caved and signed up for Neflix. I guess it’s partially because I realized that George Hotz may never release his custom firmware for the PS3 (allowing me to retain the ability to turn it into a media center), and partially because there’s so much content that I want to experience that $9 a month no longer sounds like a huge deal. Either way, I feel like I’ve sold out to The Man just a little bit. (On the other hand, I’m currently watching 12 Monkeys for the first time ever, since I was too lazy/stubborn to rent it before.)
That said, I finally pulled the trigger on the base hardware for my NAS today, and I discovered that there’s a version of MythTV for FreeBSD. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to set up my NAS as a MythTV backend, and record things directly from my cable box. And if that’s the case, then maybe I won’t need this Netflix shenanigans after all…
