Felger Sounds Off on Internet Insanity

Stile has somewhat already responded to this, but my suspicion is this is also another attempt to finally force the cable companies and providers into having 'a la carte' programming instead of charging everyone for ten trillion useless channels they will never watch. The cable companies have been using that model for decades. They offer new channels, which are often just replicas of existing channels (MTV2 anyone?) and then are justified into charging more for their services.The consumer has been wanting a la carte programming for decades now, but the cable companies have been fighting that tooth and nail because they know it will cut into their bottom line. As always, a few stubborn executives would rather hold onto old business models because they are either too lazy or too stupid to adopt new ones.I personally have cable AND streaming capabilities. But I certainly would prefer a subset cable set of channels to choose from. When it all comes down to it, I pretty much only navigate to about a dozen or so channels regularly.

Gotcha. And I see your point of view. To be fair and to play a little devil's advocate, this technology is still somewhat in its infancy, which is why we are seeing less than stellar performance with the new 'apps' in SMART TVs.I myself also have both a 'smart' TV and Blu Ray player. But as you are alluding to, they are somewhat clunky in their implementation. I wonder how much of this has to do with them attempting to support so many platforms with a common set of technologies and libraries. That will invariably cause apps to behave oddly depending on which platform they run on.The other thing I noticed is the variance between the apps depending on which mechanism I am using to interact. I also have Netflix for example. When I access it via my computer, it has a specific look and feel. On my tablet, it behaves somewhat differently. Somewhat understandable given the different interface types, but I have seen odd behavior and discrepancies that don't seem justified given the capabilities of the technologies.The funniest example though is how my Netflix behaves on my Smart TV vs my Smart Blu Ray player. Both of these are Samsung devices. They even have a common interface widget that is 'supposed' to be able to have them operate more effectively with each other. Yet ironically, the app for Netflix on the smart TV looks and operates completely differently from the Netflix app on the Blu Ray player. And there is really no accounting for 'why'. I've updated both to their most current version, yet they have totally different looks and feels. Makes no sense to me. Ultimately, it gives me the impression of what I have seen often at software companies: teams operating in silos and not collaborating effectively.