Felger Sounds Off on Internet Insanity

It doesn't matter who Michael Felger is except that he's a sportsradio talkshow guy, if you care look him up, but today he sounded off about webcasts in a way that reflects how I bet a lot of people feel. This Sunday's NFL game from London between Buffalo and Jacksonville will be broadcast only on the web. Here's the exchange between host Felger and guest Greg Bedard (sportswriter for Sports Illustrated):

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Felger: What's the end game of putting the London game this week just on line. Again, nine thirty window [eastern time US], glorious, glorious window, we get a football game Sunday morning, but you can't watch it on TV. You gotta turn on your computer.

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Bedard: Yeah, good luck with that, Felger.

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Felger: Exactly, right, which rules me out. Why? Why we doing this?

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Bedard: It has nothing to do with London. It has to do with...they've been talking about perhaps selling...and some of Google and Yahoo have gotten in on this...the bidding for Sunday Ticket [lineup of all Sunday games, currently owned by DirecTV] and stuff like that. And the NFL hasn't been ready to take the leap. If this goes well, they're in the mix for the next Sunday Ticket package.

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Felger: Wait. Meaning so it won't be on DirecTV anymore, it's only on your computer?

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Bedard: Correct.

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Felger: Oh, F-off with that!

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Mazz (Felger's sidekick): They'll figure it out all over the globe.

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Felger: Shut up. Screw you. Seriously. I feel like swearing. What are you doing? What? Why? Because I'm not like you people. I can't hook up my Internet to my TV. F-off with that, with your cords and your downloads and your stupid crap. I'm not hooking up my computer to my TV, my Internet to my TV. Seriously, kiss the underside of my ass with that. Seriously, I'm out, if they pull that crap. What are you doing? What are you doing? Seriously? God, that pisses me off. Take your app and shove it up your ass.

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I'm with Felger. If you're willing to play around with all the crappy hardware and software that the computer and Internet moguls make us stumble around with, and all the incredibly clumsy connections between them, then have fun. You're just empowering them and making a bad thing worse. Until we start punishing the people who sell this crap by not buying it, we're just going to get more of it. I have no smart phone. I have an iPad that I don't often use it's so braindead. Computers I can put up with.One big downside is that in this era where a smart phone is really a dumb phone, a dumb phone is a really, really dumb phone. Want to know how I have to transfer pictures from my dumb phone to my computer? I have to make a backup on my phone, download the backup to my computer (no WiFi, just a USB cable), then unpack the backup.As soon as smart devices start doing things for me that I already do, like just helping me live a normal, everyday life (I don't care about games and apps and Facebook and Words with Friends and all that crap), when smart devices actually become smart, then I will get a smart device. How about listening to my conversation with my wife, remembering what I'm supposed to buy at the supermarket, then reminding me to stop at the supermarket before I drive by, then telling me what to buy and what aisle to find it in.In the name of accuracy I should say a little bit more about my iPad that I earlier called braindead. It does make a pretty good Internet Radio, and a pretty good TiVo player, and a pretty good book reader as long as you're not outside. What it can do with apps and games is very amazing, but they're not anything I ever wanted to do. I did try some of them, like Angry Birds, Cat Physics, a couple others - computer games aren't my thing. So until they actually get smart and automatic and actually interconnected, I'm with Felger and you can screw your smart devices.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Fix incorrect team.

Pfft. I copy the pictures to the phone's microSD card, take the card out of the phone and put it into an SD card adapter, put that into my laptop, copy the pictures to a USB flash drive and then copy from the flash drive to my desktop.Don't even ask me how I transfer files to my old computer, which has no USB drivers.

Not me. I want it all online!I don't pay for cable TV anymore. Too expensive ($60 to $80 to even over $100 per month??)
I pay for Netflix only. ($12 per month). And it has way more TV shows and movies than I will ever watch, and they're constantly updating and changing. And... that's the "crappy" Canadian version, too
No commercials. No need to worry about recording or remembering a show's time or anything. Everything instant, on demand.The downside? I don't get no sports.
But... if they move them online... then I'll see them just fine! And, without paying the stupid TV bill!Sounds wonderful to me. My TV came with Netflix installed on it.
I just bought my TV, pugged an Ethernet cable into it to connect it to my wifi modem (probably didn't even need the cable, if I wanted to go over the wifi) and that's it.Instead of connecting the TV to my cable-TV box with one cable (HDMI)... I connected the TV to my internet-box with one cable (Ethernet).Sounds exactly as complicated or "easy" to me. Ha ha, you're a fossil Face it. "The internet" is not a fad that's going to go away. Either move towards it, or get forced out.
TV didn't move towards it. They will soon be forced out by things like Netflix and such (pretty much already happening in Canada).
If sports doesn't move towards it, they will soon be forced out by other new online-sport-watching things.They make them easy on purpose... 'cause the masses use them, and the masses need it to be easy. This battle was already fought and lost.
The smart devices won.
People who use smart devices won.
They are so popular now, and so ingrained in "mass society" that the idea that you think you can impact "the market" by not buying one... is ludicrous.It's like you're complaining about not buying a car with power steering today. You'll show those manufacturers! They'll all bow down 'cause Percy isn't going to buy one of them new power-steering motor-cars!! Then they'll all go back to the good-old days!! Sorry guy, the battle's over already... smart phones and internet connectivity won.
It's only going to move forward (getting into wireless and more connectivity with more things) not backward.Next on the chopping block -> home computers.
Soon, we'll be "renting" our computers by buying a "virtual PC" from Rogers/Bell/Comcast/whoever-your-provider-is
...you get to choose the package you want (storage space, speed, number of accounts) and that's it... no more hardware in your house other than a generic box from the provider for connecting. You'll be able to access "your computer" from any internet connection anywhere... while paying the monthly fee, of course.Get on the wagon or get left behind!

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.

I think some may be misreading what I said and missing my point. I don't want to go back to the past or dump the Internet (which would make no sense since I'm a web programmer). What I want is to skip past the current crappy present as managed by the current set of crappy tech "leaders" where we're being sold a load of crap and told it's smart when it's not. A lot of people really believe this stuff is smart - it isn't.Stile mentioned that his TV has Netflix installed, which is really neat and a step in the right direction, but I bet he also has to occasionally reboot his TV and download updates, which is just more crap.The technology we have is amazing. What's being done with it is a giant kluge.--Percy

Hi, Percy. I agree with this part. For some reason, planning and organizing a schedule are two skills that have always been the most difficult for me to master. I'd love to have a little robot secretary that did all that crap for me.But, having a smart phone has improved things to some extent. For example, my wife sends grocery requests via text message. There are "to-do list" apps that let you link text messages to them and set reminders. And, some grocery stores (like Hy-Vee) even have apps that can plot a route through the store based on your shopping list.I'd say that what you want from a smart device is probably doable, but it my organizational skills are still strained a bit by it.

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.

I just use my windows phone that automatically goes to Onedrive. My windows laptop and surface are also connected to Onedrive. I can access and archive them from my laptop, phone or tablet. They load to Onedrive automatically when I have a wifi connection. No app needed, no muss no fuss. The windows ecosystem is truly easy to work with.

You are suffering from a classic case of future envy.Remember 2400 baud modem connections to bulletin boards? Serial port dongles? DOS function calls from Windows? Memory managers (ah, QEMM, we knew ye well)?They sucked, too.Tomorrow's tech will be better. And we'll all be slim. And have hair.But you're right. Consumer tech has never measured up to state of the art tech, and they don't really even try to get close.On the one hand, capitalism spurs innovation; on the other, it encourages the marketing of crap. It seems they won't put anything better in the grinder as long as we buy the sausage du jour. So the stage is set for someone to introduce something dramatically smarter.Maybe we just need another couple of clever guys in a garage, though Theodoric is right: the Windows platform is maturing in surprising ways. I can't remember the last time I saw a blue window of death. Edited by Omnivorous, : I and i

For many people, no strange hookups are needed to view internet stuff on their TVs. If you are getting cable, internet, and telephone from the same player, and have a modern digital TV, then it is likely that your TV is by default connected to the internet. I use my TV to play music from You tube quite often although I don't generally surf the web from my TV. In fact, I don't have any stereo equipment hooked up in my house other than my TV/computer set up anymore.I doubt that I'll bother with the game from London, but if a funky set up were required for me to view some astronomy related program on my TV set was required, I'd certainly figure out how to do it.I suppose I can understand the reluctance of the ordinary citizen to figure this stuff out. But the truth is that viewing internet content on your TV isn't all that hard for many cable subscribers.

Hi, Theodoric. I kind of want to slap you for using the word "ecosystem" like that.

I was expecting comments on that when I typed it.

Chromecast... thank you very much.

Percy writes:

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How about listening to my conversation with my wife, remembering what I'm supposed to buy at the supermarket, then reminding me to stop at the supermarket before I drive by, then telling me what to buy and what aisle to find it in.

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No device that exists can listen in on your conversation and pick out the "important bits." Even if there were a way to be always on and not drain your battery, have good enough microphones to listen to multiple people, have intelligent enough voice recognition to be able to distinguish voices (especially when talking at the same time), there's no way for it to know what is "important" to create a reminder.You're going to have to do that for yourself.That said, most of the rest is already available. Both Windows Phone and Android have the ability to set up reminders based upon your location. That's one of the big selling points of Cortana on Windows Phone: You can tell it, "Remind me to X when I'm near Y," where "Y" is something vague like "A grocery store." I think iOS can do this, too. The system monitors your GPS location and if you are near a location that fits what you specified, it will remind you to do whatever it is you said.As for what aisle to find it, you'll need an app for that. The problem is that every store is different. There's no singular way to tell you that the sun-dried tomatoes are in Aisle 17. It requires the store to publish that information. They could develop an app for that if that's what you want. Talk to your store.Of course, then you have regional problems. Is it "soda"? "Pop"? "Coke"? When I ask for "popcorn salt," is that what the store calls it or do they call it "pickling salt"? But, that's for the app-makers to figure out. That was the point behind Alpha Beta which was long before the internet: The store was laid out alphabetically (thus the name) so it was supposed to be easier to find what you were looking for.But to your larger point, that's already happening. Many television shows are online only. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and Yahoo all have programs that aren't available on TV. Various sports things are already there, too. Want to watch all of the Majors in tennis? You're gonna have to go online. The broadcast only goes for certain hours and only shows certain matches.So why not the NFL? Technologies change. We had this discussion when we shifted from SD to HD signal. If you have an old TV, it won't work anymore for over-the-air broadcast since those signals aren't being sent anymore. If the technology is moving away from cable/satellite to the internet, we won't be able to stop it. If we could come up with a good standard (there is DLNA, but I'm not sure how robust it is), then it shouldn't be too difficult to tie it all together based upon whatever device you have: TV, computer, mobile.

I have no tech in this fight.I get my interlubes connection via wi-fi laptop from a nice old lady across the street who knows about it--we're both disabled, and I change her lighbulbs.Only one of my house's windows passes wi-fi under my steel roof--with a router that lets me splice in a 10-year-old, 2T XP desktop I use for a media and print server, preserving my CDs, making MP3s for my old iPhone, etc.I have a 48" inch, high refresh rate Chinese HDTV (@$400 Amazon Cyber Monday 2 yrs. ago!) hooked up by VGA cable and microstereo jack. I don't do cable; I have excellent digital broadcast and FM antennas. Yes, I have to hook-up my cameras by wire. After bitter corporate experience, I've come to prefer trailing edge technology to bleeding edge technology.I know it isn't Bill Gates' mansion. But it ain't AOL, either.One of the most intriguing people I ever met on the web was a disabled lady in California who depended on library computers. She was unhappy there, and I sent her $ to take the bus to North Carolina, where she had friends. She remains happy, ten years later.Truly, this is a time of miracles and wonders. Maybe the human interleaving is more important than the seamlessness of the interface.Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given.